The Future is Interactive, The Future is Mobile

Mobile and Interactive content to shape future marketing spend

Forrester, the respected forward-thinking business and technology research company has revealed in a recent survey that social and mobile will have the biggest compound annual growth rates (CAGR) - 34% and 27% repectively through 2014.

Social media has grown phenomenally over the past few years (as we all know). Social networking in particular has seen a massive growth in numbers of users in the past year. Brian Solis has estimated that for August 2009, Facebook recorded 370m unique visitors globally. Similarly, Twitter registered 66m unique visitors worldwide.

This has created the special opportunity to marketers for engaging customers through social media channels to build trust and brand loyalty. Activity otherwise known as 'Social CRM' (Customer Relationship Management).

Marketing is gaining more power in corporations because of its connection to consumers. Forrester says 40% of marketers said that marketing is the strategic leader of their organisation.
60% of respondents said they are boosting their interactive budget by shifting money from othe media - print will really suffer. Direct mail, newspaper media and magazines are expected to get the axe to feed interactive.

Mobile in particular is expected to really become massive in the not so distant future. New innovative technology is the reason for this. Last year we saw the rise of the iPhone app with great new devices bought out every second it seemed like! My favorite is the Barclaycard Waterslide app as shown below.


Augmented reality is really expected to take off hugely in 2010. Check out this video to see some of the latest augmented reality work!


Location sharing has also been highlighted as a future trend to rise in 2010. GPS-aware mobile devices became user friendly in 2009 and social networks Facebook and Twitter have taken interest (link).

Foursquare in particular has been highlighted as an exciting prospect for a location based social network. As a member of Foursquare you are encouraged to document places you visit in order to receive points. Also by documenting your location friends (who are also on Foursquare) can give you a 'shout out' to let you know they are nearby if you wanted to meet up. There are rumours that Facebook is looking to use Foursquare (or a similar location sharing tool) - see below - to encourage users to be more open.

(Image via Mashable)

Ultimately the rise of real-time communication seems to be the biggest thing to come out of social media from 2009. In any case, with more marketing budgets shifting towards digital and mobile the future looks very bright with much more exciting online and mobile content being created for us all to enjoy!

Lets hope we can all be as happy as this guy!