Smartphone penetration in the United States has reached 55% of the general population* and and the number of email opens on smartphones and tablets have increased 80% of the last six months**. These two facts have serious consequences for companies and organizations, and their communication platforms. Beyond the obvious need to build email to appear well-formed and structured for viewing on smaller screens, consumers are viewing thier email devices in a much wider variety of environments than just five years ago, so email needs to be responsive to get our clients messages opened and read wherever they are when they are scrolling through their inboxes, and the design itself needs to be simple and direct.
The first step is to consider the user flow, and the content structure in particular. On a mobile phone, the first piece of information that they will see is the From Name. From there, they will see the Subject Line, the Pre-header – a small snippet of text from the top of the email as a preview – and then once opened, the first few inches of the full email (AKA the viewport). So, step one is to plan the content flow to start with the most captivating and enticing headlines possible, and summarize the body content to draw the reader to open the full email. The time-honored principals of Journalism (and perhaps Tabloid Journalism in particular) will serve you well as you construct an inverted pyramid of messaging.
Once you have the content that you’re sure will draw the reader into the body of the message, it’s time to work on the design. A full technical discussion on how to build a responsive email is a subject for another time, but the primary considerations to keep in mind are as follows:

1. Contrast. As the creative needs to shrink to smaller screen, those elements need to be clear and stand out. So maintaining a good contrast is important.
2. Text size. The general consensus is that 13px is the minimum size to be easily readable on a phone. It’s recommended that you start larger, around 15-16px and find a nice balance between text and whitespace.
3. Imagery. Big, bold, beautiful and immersive will garner the most attention.
4. Layout. Through a web browser or a desktop email client multicolumn is a good way to go, but keep in mind in a responsive design when the email is viewed on a phone, the content needs to flow into a longer single column. Think though the hierarchy of information and plan how the content will stack.

The last point is about the context of the environment in which the user will open the email. If they are in line at the ATM or sitting quietly in a meeting there will be distractions competing for their attention. Therefore you have to keep everything simple and direct, be very clear with the call to action (big, bold buttons) and assume that there is no time for reading long paragraphs of information, so cut down the copy to the bare minimum.
* Exact Target, “Designing for the Mobile Inbox”
**Litmus, “Email Client Market Share Stats“

SXSW is a great place to be exposed to new ideas, but perhaps even more valuable are the sessions where you reconsider ideas you’ve grown accustomed to, and seeing them from a brand new perspective.
One session in particular this year that has resonated with me for the week and a half since leaving Austin was entitled “A Robot in Your Pocket” with Amit Kapur, formerly of MySpace, and currently the CEO of Gravity, and Jeff Bonforte, the CEO of Xobni.
In their session they discussed the advancements of Artificial Intelligence in our quest as humans to create digital personal assistants, or in otherwords, technical entities which can work on our behalf.
At the heart of the matter is the idea that we should be able to leverage digital tools to improve our lives, in either small but noticeable ways, or in innovative and revolutionary ways. Kapur and Bonforte made a very clever distinction in the kind of data sites and devices are collecting to try and improve our lives, AKA our experiences, and they defined a split in data collection into two main categories: explicit and implicit.
Explicit data is the settings that we manually set, or the customizations that we explicitly make to change an experience for the better. I remember the original customizable homepage on the web, which Yahoo introduced with My Yahoo in the mid-to-late 90s. It was a lot of work to set up, but once you did the experience was definitely improved.
Implicit data is the data that is collected without our having to put any effort into triggering or managing the experience manually. It’s a “robot” working in the background, to collect user data, and then offer changes to the experience based on conclusions made from the data itself.
As is so often the case, the speakers used an iPhone in their example. Explicitly we (currently) customize the iPhone with our email login, calendar events, and contact information. We also manually login to sites, or we change the background either by selecting from a default list of files, or uploading our own. These are all explicit acts that change things for the better.
However, the power is much more in the implicit side of the split. The iPhone 4 comes with five on-board sensors to track and collect data behind the scenes, making adjustments without us having to do anything. The iPhone has a proximity sensor that knows when the phone is on our ear, and it pro-actively disables the buttons on the screens so we don’t interrupt our call. The iPhone also comes with an ambient light sensor, so the screen brightness can adjust depending on the level of lighting in an environment. So we can clearly see how, without really even realizing it, “robots” are hard at work improving our lives without any extra effort on our part.
In the brave new world of our future, implicit data collection should evolve to be even more predictive, or as they the speakers were concluding, pro-actively making all of our experiences suit our unique requirements. And that’s all good for those of us who expect technology to improve, rather than distract us from, our lives.
Explicit data allows us to work less, and it incrementally improves our lives by saving time and effort. In the future, implicit data should be able to skip the work of entering our preferences and pro-actively work on our behalf.
I, for one, welcome our implicit robot sensor overlords.

The history of the next big thing in digital goes back to the earliest days of the consumer Internet and probably started with the denizens of South Park in San Francisco. In the early to mid-90s a discussion thread on The Well, an underground BBS located on a houseboat in Sausalito, gave rise to Wired Magazine, which in turn lead to amongst other things, Hotwired, the Banner ad, the search engine, and an innumerable number of waiters and waitresses finally getting the chance to use their Liberal Arts degree professionally.
Nowadays the next big thing tends to rise up from a well executed startup, by capturing the attention of a few hundred thousand digerati, and then going mainstream via a round of ostentatious funding or a high profile acquisition.
Case in point the darlings of 2012 were Instagram and Pintrest, both of whom started small and caught fire rather quickly. Instagram, of course, made headlines for being, what, at the time was thought to be a billion dollar acquisition by Facebook — prior to the company having made a single cent. Of course, big companies buy hot little start ups for more than just revenue. They want the team, the developers, and the cachè that sparked the digerati interest in the first place.
This year the first candidate seems to have bubbled up to the front of the NBT class, although it isn’t a start up anymore, having been quickly snapped up by Twitter while still in relative infancy. That said, it’s still an interesting social newcomer in it’s own right, and as more people catch on, it may well be as influential as the Twitter folks predicted. The app in question here is called Vine, and yes, it is kinda awesome.
Where Instagram was a feed of pictures, and its uniqueness was in the variety of filters, Vine is a feed of looping six second videos. There have been other apps that have wanted to rise to rise out of the social video clip battle royal, but Vine just might leave them all behind because, simply put, Vine is really clever.
Having played with it for about a week there are three smart elements that I think set it apart from its competition. Firstly, the videos are only six seconds long by rule. That may seem short, but as our national attention span continues to dwindle, and we all grow impatient with pre-roll ads and intro bumpers, somehow, by itself, six seconds feels just right. Secondly, the video loops. This extends that six second video to infinity, therefore makes the poster have to think through their composition much more than just a quick clip alone. Lastly, the third piece of genius that comes with Vine is the fact that the six seconds do not have to be filmed all at once. Pressing and holding anywhere on the screen begins recording, and lifting your finger pauses. So, you can change the angle, change the scene, or even compose everything as a stop motion animation. Your only cap is the six second limit.
If you have an iPhone you should try it for yourself. It’s about to be the next big thing.

Making an experience engaging is the key to everything we do as digital designers and builders. As digital platforms multiply and bandwidth speed grows, the ability for digital designers to draw in users and keep both their attention in the moment, and have them retain the information in memory long after the initial experience ends, is to design beyond just text and images, and engage a wider sensory set.

As I mentioned previously in my post about Picture Superiority, images stick in the mind much more strongly than text. In a multimedia experience like a portal or mobile app, designers must go beyond images, and work into richer territory such as animation, video, audio, and whenever possible, the clever use of gestures in navigation. Engaging experiences go well beyond just the visual, they are aural and tactile experiences as well.

First impressions matter. Human beings react to new experiences viscerally, and they decide within microseconds if they want to stay or leave. So we have to make the most of the first 5 seconds with eye-catching visuals and intuitive design.

Physically immersion draws people into your experience. The market has caught up with touchscreen devices, and so gestures will be expected to be part of all implementation in the future – even if only on the extended platforms and browsers that allow more interesting animations and motion graphics.

The point of all this is to leave a lasting impression. And just like the notion that images are retained in the brain as both a visual and keyword-based (text) memory, robust experiences stay with the user for much longer than the mundane.

For more on Emotional Experience Design, please follow Ron Rogowski (@ronrogowski) of Forrester Research, has a number of reports and presentations on the subject, that will go into much greater detail.

Here is a bold statement: I bet everyone reading this post has had a client, a colleague, or a line of business say to them in the last 10 days that they wanted this or that initiative to be more “Social”. They probably said something along the lines of “I like that idea, but how can we make it more social?” or “I would love to be able to add in some social elements to this,” or perhaps it was as simple as the last line of an email that read, “and make it social.” Sound familiar? I thought so.
I bring this up not to cause a wince or nod of commiseration, but because I have some great advice to give you as you follow up on that email: ask for the stakeholder to declare an objective. Simply put, social for social’s sake is a waste of time and money. Just because something has social links, or a bright red “share” button, doesn’t make it social. Everything that’s truly social has to have a reason for being, a quantifiable result. Yes, it needs to be clever and engaging, but at the end of the campaign, or once the project launches and is live for a few weeks, there is going to be a need to produce some numbers to show that whatever effort and budget was put into the initiative, something productive or measurable has to come out of it.
Therefore, the effort is going to need an objective, so you can track the effect of the effort and improve upon it over time.
There are four primary objectives which I believe are natural in the social space, each one with their own unique qualities – and all of them dependent on strong creative direction, design, and execution. Here are the four, with some examples of brands or organizations who’ve used them to great effect.

Objective #1: Awareness

Everyone and their mother (literally) is on social media now. It’s 20% of everyone’s time on the web, and as Facebook, and Twitter, and Google+ (yes, really) are growing and expanding their user-base, traditional websites, portals, and content channels are competing for attention – and losing. If you or your clients are launching a product, spreading the word about a worthy cause, or just trying to remind the world that the brand is still going strong, unleashing a campaign that spreads through social media and word of mouth like wildfire, is exactly what most brands are hoping for from their latest social media efforts.

A great example of turning something most everyone would have little or no interest in hearing more about – like, let’s say, prostrate cancer – into a hip social champion is Movember. It’s catchy, it’s cool, it’s incredibly social and it worked to the tune of $130 million dollars raised in 2012.

Objective #2: Engagement

A couple of years ago Philadelphia Cream Cheese had published just about every recipe that they could develop to include cream cheese, in an effort to break out of the bagel and cheesecake categories that they owned. The brand needed to move into other meals and usage occasions to grow their business, but the average consumer could see through any effort to expand beyond the core as coming straight from the brand’s own self interest. Based on the insight that women take most of their recommendation and advice from other women – friends and family – more than any other source, Philadelphia created a video contest called The Real Women of Philadelphia and invited, you guessed it, real women to submit. The signed on with Paula Deen to be the resident tutor, cheerleader, and judge, leveraged Deen’s existing web-based community, and solicited submissions in multiple non-breakfast recipe categories. Long story short, they expected to get about 100 videos and they got over 5,000. In the two quarters after the campaign launched across all their social media channels, their national sales totals rose by 5%.

Objective #3: Acquisition

The reason what everyone is asking for social to be part of every initiative is because of the amount of time web and mobile users are spending in all of the various channels. The idea is to “fish where the fish are” and create attractive experiences in each of these channels, drawing users into the brand. The trick is to avoid being the noisy fisherman with the outboard motor screaming into the bay. Brands that can create experiences that work with the channel, have the best opportunities to thrive. A great example of a fairly staid brand working within an emerging channel is GE and their GE Inspired ME content on Instagram and Pintrest. It’s a fairly simple contest, collecting images of GE-like Innovation with tags like #moving, #building, #curing and #powering, and awarding prizes for the best photos. The lesson here is to figure out the essence of the channel (photography), and craft your channel experience to work like a fish-whisperer.

Objective #4: Retention

Having a baby is a life changing event, obviously. New parents are in need of information on every detail of the experience, and increasingly they are turning online for support, resources and advice. For a brand like Johnson & Johnson, a editorial community like BabyCenter is the perfect fit. One of the best features on BabyCenter is their subscription emails, which when tied to the projected due-date of the oncoming baby, allows BabyCenter to send out weekly informational emails that are extremely valuable, and tailored to the exact stage of development of your child. A second theme, that is a whole post in and of itself, is the savvy use of the soft-sell. While BabyCenter is owned by Johnson & Johnson, which has products for all stages of childbirth and early childhood, J&J maintains very high editorial standards, and the brand lift of the association (and the loyalty and retention that results) comes far more from the sites ability to address parental needs, rather than a constant stream of brand messaging. They strike a great balance to the benefit of both parents and brands.

One of the primary principles in designing forms for the web is to keep them as simple and easy as possible. You can generally expect about a 15% drop off for every step in the process – literally every field in the form – as each discrete step is  an opportunity for the user to reconsider continuing through the form. Easing the flow through something like a shopping cart, or registration form, is one of the primary objectives in great UI design. If we can reduce the resistance to the activity on the part of the user, the benefit is an increase is sales, more leads, or more users – all very good things.
The same principle in the mobile app world is doubly important when you consider that the screens and keyboards are considerably smaller, and the users could very well be filling out their information while in line for an ATM or while they’re running between meetings. The chances of losing them halfway through the process is much, much greater, so how we construct the user-flow through forms is critical.
I recently came upon an example of a four-step process for new user registrations in an iPhone app that I think is a model for reducing the resistance to sign-up to the absolute bare minimum. So, I’d like to highlight the four essential steps as a case study in mobile registration.
Meet Polar, a polling app that’s currently live in iTunes store.

Step One: Present only the minimum number of fields, and leave all the rest of the information for later. It’s a dwindling few of us who are willing to fill out a form that has any more than four fields. Often, these forms will be reduced down to just an email, a password, and a password confirmation. In the case of Polar they have features which rely on usernames, and sharing amongst friends, but they still strive to keep the fields to a minimum. The one subtlety here is that instead of the default keyboard, which usually has “previous/next” buttons above the letter keys, in Polar these are removed. The next button in the lower right will move you from field to field, but the intention is to render the previous button moot but have the full experience in a single screen.
The instructional copy is also shown within the field itself, saving space to reduce the entirety of the form to a single screen without any scrolling.

Step Two: Validation happens in every field, as the user is completing the form. In order to keep the process as neat as possible, the error messages are viewed as overlays, so that the user can immediately correct the input before moving on.

Step Three: As each field is validated and complete, check marks appear to feedback to the user that each form is good to go. The call to action button in the lower right changes from “Next” to “Go,” signaling that the form is complete and triggering submission.

Step Four: One last little element, the ability to show or hide the password, is a small way to keep things moving and confirm that everything is just right. Push Go, and the form is submitted and the user is sent back into the app to continue.
Obviously there are more elements that happen before encountering this form, including the ability to register via Twitter or Facebook – other options to speed the user through the process. But when a unique registration form is required, following these few steps can make for a much better user experience.

As stated previously, I’m a big fan of focusing on the persuasive aspects of your presentations and reports. After all, the power of data is to trigger an improvement or optimization to the benefit of a client or business. A significant portion of a persuasive argument is backing up your recommendations with solid insights drawn from the relevant data for the specific project or client to whom you are presenting.
The world is awash in information, data in particular, and it’s a hugely valuable skill to be able distill down all the relevant client data into concise, digestible and actionable insights. Part of that skill is presenting that data in a way that clients across multiple departments can understand quickly, and ideally, in the age of social, share those insights across an organization or department.
As my colleague Abbey recently pointed out, storytelling in presentations is a very effective way to get your point across. Data can also tell a story, if presented clearly and with some visual flair and style.
Two great examples I’ve come across recently were produced by startups MailChimp and Shopify. Both brands are fairly new to the world, and both want to show significant market share and year-over-year growth, both to their investors, and to their users. So they both present data on the volume of activity flowing through their services, demonstrate their significant growth, while also showcasing their brand through arresting visuals.

MailChimp, an affordable bulk email service, developed an HTML5 microsite that scrolls through the various elements of their services, and highlights the most significant areas of growth. You’ll quickly notice the use of huge numbers to call out the most relevant data in each chapter – not the whole table of data, but just the choice few data point that tell the most impressive story. They couple that information with bright colors that change in each chapter, and each section has visual elements so step you through their 2012 storyline, keeps your attention on the overall experience, and draws you down the site from chapter to chapter.

Shopify takes a similar approach, but presents their information in a single infographic posted to their website (and shared through visual.ly). They divide the image into a primary column with large numbers and supporting images of the most compelling data, and a thinner right hand column with the timeline of activity over the course of the year. Scrolling down the page they highlight even more significant data with basic visuals to contrast the previous year’s data, with the significantly larger current year data, to great effect.

In my last post I introduced the subject of 10/20/30 Rules for Presentations from Guy Kawasaki. The theme was to avoid text heavy slides, and simplify everything down to make comprehension easier for the audience. It’s a fairly simple set of rules: 10 pages, 20 minutes, and no font smaller than 30 points. But it’s a pretty stiff challenge to try and reform the way in which we create presentations, and edit down 40 words into 10, that’s for sure.  I do argue that the benefit for the audience of this reduction is substantial, and well worth the struggle.
Now, what if I were to tell you that there was a silver bullet to short cut the work of boiling down all those pages and copy into their elemental themes and messages AND raise the effectiveness of the presentation by 600%? Great, right? Well, there IS a silver bullet, and it’s called pictures.
Pictures. It’s that simple. We’ve all heard the cliche “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Well as far as memory is concerned, it’s true. For presenters trying to cut words from their presentations, pictures give you the best of both worlds: more words per page (1,000 for one image) and far better recall by the audience.
Pictures are much more effective in getting your point across, and having that point stick with the audience for days after the presentation. Science explains it through to a concept called the “picture superiority effect.” As the theory goes, a concept is far more likely to be remembered experientially within the brain when presented as pictures rather than as words. And it has to do with how the brian stores memories.
Concepts and ideas are stored in the brain either verbally or as an image – ideally, as both. Concrete concepts, ideas that exist in time and space – like a server farm, or a network hub, or a home page design – that are presented to the brain as pictures are stored both verbally and as an image. Abstract ideas, which need description or user imagination, usually presented as text, are only stored verbally.
Pictures are retained and recalled far more effectively than words. Whatever information is in your deck, if it’s presented orally, will degrade quickly. At best, only 10% of the information will be retained 72 hours later. If you communicate in pictures, then that retention after 72 hours goes up to 65%. That’s better than a 600% increase. Not too shabby.
Hopefully that will help clean up your presentations, get to your points faster and more clearly, and keep the audience more engaged.

How many of you have been in a presentation this month that has included a slide so packed with information, that you either tuned it out entirely, or weren’t able to finish reading it before the page was flipped? I’m referencing, of course, the all-too-common slide with 100+ words, some bullets, footnotes and sources, all set to 10 pt fonts. They are incredibly common because as presenters we want to convey authority on the subject, and show that we have access to a ton of information about whatever we are talking about. Unfortunately for the presenter in question here, more often than not, the audience isn’t listening or, if they are, they won’t remember a single thing shown on the slide five minutes later.
As it turns out our brains, however advanced we are above our animal cohorts, can only handle so much information before we start to tune out, doze off, or reach for our smartphones. Fortunately for us, science does know the limits of our brains, so we can make adjustments to our PowerPoints to maximize our persuasive power, and limit the number of emails being sent while we are talking.

Here is what we know: the average powerpoint slide has about 40 words on it. If there are words on a slide, and the slide is being shown to an audience, that audience will try to read all words on the slide. It’s what we college educated chair sitters do. However, the average reading speed for words on a screen is around 100 words a minute, which means that if you have 40 words on a slide it will take the audience about 24 seconds to make their way through the copy – all while the presenter is talking. Humans can read much faster than they can talk, so no matter how quickly the presenter is talking, there will be 24 seconds of two things happening at once, at two different speeds, followed by a period of waiting while the speaker catches up to the audience. Consider that all lost time and very poor persuasion.
Add to that the fact that human being’s attention span is limited to about 10 minutes of passive concentration. If the presentation is scheduled to run for 45 minutes or an hour, and if there is nothing to engage the audience directly – a story, an applause line, a joke – then their smartphone starts to look pretty attractive around minute 9.
Guy Kawasaki, a onetime evangelist for Apple, an investor, and the author of a number of books on presenting, has a very quick guide to making presentations more memorable, more focussed, and therefore more effective. It’s something he calls the 10/20/30 Rule. And it is an excellent baseline for creating your presentations going forward.
It goes like this: 10 pages, 20 minutes, and no copy in anything smaller than 30 point type.
The secret to effective presentations is to maximize the persuasive effect on your audience, and minimize the boredom and dread. The best techniques in the industry, as displayed by icons like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Marisa Mayer, depend not simply on their cult of personality (and professional power) but in their solid understanding of the way in which human brains take in and process information, and the brains ability to recall that information later on. The common thread to all of their presentations: fewer slides, fewer words, and carefully chosen images.
It might seem impossible to reduce your decks down to the bare minimum, but there is also science behind the 10 page limit. Ten pages is optimal because normal people can’t retain more than 10 concepts in a single sitting. As you add more concepts, the initial concepts you presented in the early pages, drops out of memory. Without a 10 page limit, the other 30 ideas in your presentation are lost to the ether. It’s much better to stick to the best and the brightest ideas, and leave the rest for independent reading as a leave-behind.
Most often you’ll have been given an hour, but human beings are social animals and clients are not hiring an agency for their PowerPoint skills. They are hiring human beings who are experts in a field who are also people that they want to work with. Don’t diminish yourself by putting all the attention on the deck. You’re the consultant, consult – live. Introduce what you want to talk about in 20 minutes. Give the audience food for thought. Pose a couple questions. And then open up the conversation to listen to what they really want to say.
A 30 point font is fairly big, it’s true. But if you strive to get there, you’ll realize that you will have to cut away a lot of copy that simply isn’t all that compelling. Reduce the slide down to the most important idea, and make that idea shine. Steve Jobs is very famous for presenting slides with a single word, or a single phrase, and then speaking about the idea verbally. This method gets the idea into the audience’s head quickly, and then turns the attention back to the presenter. There are two benefits to this. One is quick, easy, and memorable communication of the central idea, and two, continued focus on the presenter.
Kawasaki allows for some leeway here by adding, if 30 points seems too dogmatic, find out the age of the oldest person in the audience and divide by two. That’s the optimal font size for the audience.
It will be a lot of work initially, to reduce your ideas down to the most important component pieces, but if you make the effort, the persuasive power of your presentation should rise dramatically. And you’ll become more memorable to your clients.

Now that we’ve had a couple of weeks of 2013 to catch up on our RSS feeds from the holidays, let’s review three of the most influencial trend forecasts from the greater digital industrial-complex and finalize our preparations for year to come.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends
The Queen of digital forecasting is indisputably Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Her annual “Internet Trends” is the industry standard for providing a high level overview of the overall landscape and its growth per platform. From the graphs showing the growth of internet usage over time, to exact numbers on smartphone and tablet penetration, she provides the justification for moving money from traditional marketing budgets into mobile and digital campaigns. In particular, pay attention to page 19, where she identifies the huge opportunity within the delta between amount of time spent on mobile devices vs. the amount of media spend targeting mobile. Many a marketing plan this year will include Meeker’s data to justify an increase in the mobile marketing budget.
The entirety of her report can be summed up in the phrase “Re-Imagination”. She presents a plethora of examples where the digital re-imagining of categories and verticals have lead to innovation and improved consumer experiences. Obvious examples include the transition from desktops to tablets, a trend we know is just getting started, and that influences every single project we will kick off in 2013.

eMarketer’s Trends for 2013: Big Data

eMarketer’s end of the year reporting is divided into five major subjects, all available for free. One of the subjects that they cover well, a trend that made a large number of industry trending reports, is Big Data. Marketing increasingly depends on Big Data to give them insights in to their consumer’s behavior. It’s not an easy beast to wrangle, of course, but it’s definitely an opportunity for the IT department to show huge value to Marketing.
In surveying business executives about Big Data and where they believe the best opportunities lie, the top three answers were:

1. Customer insights, segmentation or targeting
2. Budgeting, forecasting or planning
3. Operations, service delivery or supply chain management

Of course, executives have asking for help with these three opportunities for a while, but now the IT department can step in with data and dashboards to provide guidance to help set the direction of the company overall.

Gartner Technology Research: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013

Gartner, another big shot in forecasting industry trends, summarized a large number of these discrete threads into bigger themes, two of which stand out as sizable opportunities for large IT consultancy firms in the business of helping their clients optimize and act upon their IT resources and assets.
The first is a theme they call Actionable Analytics. Again, this is part of the previous Big Data trend that eMarketer reports on above, but Garther speaks to the necessity of converting those vast swaths of data collected within the system, for each and every interaction taken in the business, into something that can be presented in a way the variety of organizational departments can understand and use to improve their performance. It will be increasingly valuable to be able to present Big Data findings in a way that’s easy for Marketers or the Sales Force to not only understand, but to be able to act upon.
The second theme which is of great interest to IT consultancies is what Gartner calls “Integrated Ecosystems.” Technically consolidation is often the objective in order to gain efficiencies to lower cost or increase security, but thematically, integration should be the goal across departments to maximize the benefits of the entire ecosystem. Again, marketing needs to know the real time effect of each of their campaigns, and each action within the system  by the consumers, in order to create the most effective marketing campaigns. Sales, also needs to know the point of entry into the sales funnel, so they can maximize the messaging and respond appropriately in each stage of the deal. And the enterprise social media team, who is managing a very diverse number of channels and consumer messages, needs to analyze in-bound marketing efforts – SEO/SEM, Social, and CRM – so they can tweak the system to traffic all of the activity to the most appropriate recipients.
Because I love trends and lists, I have compiled 50+ trend lists and predictions for 2013 into one master list so you can compare them all and make your own conclusions.