This has been a transitional year, partly spent recovering from the trauma of the Great Recession and partly spent adjusting to shifts in power in the marketing industry. Everyone from brands and advertising agencies to their employees have been reeling from one change after another.
One of the many unsettling aspects was the rise of social media. I consistently heard the same questions. Is it a fad? Is there any money in it? Will it change everything? What is social media again? (My favorite.)
So I thought I’d look back at a few thoughts from this year about the industry and its future. No one has a crystal ball. All we can do is take leaps of faith, build case studies, lean on each other’s expertise and cobble together our best guess of what our daily lives will look like in a few months or a few year’s time.
In the spirit of Dave Letterman, here’s a reverse order look at ten posts that touched on the future and proved popular this year.
10: What I lost when I found you: Life after social media
9: Surviving social media with your creativity intact
8: Using social media to shoot an Iraqi
7: How advertising handles the chaos of social media
6: Top ten advantages of social over traditional media
5: How top brands build effective online communities: Part 1
4: If you want to go viral get out of the way
3: Top ten things brands forget in their rush to social media
1: Top ten things a brand must be to go social
And my favorite that didn’t make the list:
Powers of Ten for the Twitterverse (Just because I love the original film!)
Before everyone starts disappearing for the holidays, I wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed the dialogue and friendship this year and I look forward to 2010. I hope many of us get to meet in person at conferences and I’ll keep sharing thoughts that I hope are helpful. I’ll be blogging though December but will nip off at one point back home to Sydney, Australia, to see family and spend Christmas on the beach. Weird, I know!