It was December 2008, when I first wrote about trendwatching.com’s Global Consumer Trends of the next year report. trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm located in Amsterdam, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. Reinier Evers; a trend watcher, a presenter and and an entrepreneur founded trendwatching.com in 2002 in Amsterdam. trendwatching.com is an innovative trend firm. What makes trendwaching.com unique is its source of information. Traditional trend reports rely on public surveys and direct sales datas. But trendwatching.com’s source of information is its network. The 2012 version of the popular report has been released.

Let’s look at 12 predicted crucial trends for 2012 from this report:

1. Red Carpet
2. DIY Health
3. Dealer-Chic
4. Eco-Cycology
5. Cash-Less
6. Bottom of The Urban Pyramid
7. Idle Sourcing
8. Flawsome
9. Screen Culture
10. Recommerce
11. Emerging Maturialism
12. Point & Know

The holidays are more than just eggnog and present-opening. This season can give entrepreneurs the opportunity to do great things with their business. Here are some business strategies that will help make your holiday season not only joyous, but lucrative, too:

-  Holiday Deals

The holidays are here, why not stock up on some office supplies while everything is on sale? You can use Dell coupons on a brand new set of office computers or hit up cyber Monday deals on a new iPad to keep your business more organized.

-  Network

Holiday parties aren’t just for socializing. Social, industry events bring entrepreneurs together and allow them to build relationships. Forget LinkedIn or business contact referral groups. Holiday parties allow you to introduce yourself and your business in a laid back environment.

-  Solidify Relationships

Many entrepreneurs see the holidays as a chance to create a tradition with clients. This tradition breeds loyalty, which can help you really keep a client for the long haul. Give your clients holiday gifts, like a bottle of nice champagne, to thank them for their business throughout the year.

-  Reach Holiday Bargain Hunters

During the holidays, people are in spend mode. Take advantage! Develop a marketing strategy that can tap into the holiday bargain hunters. Go mobile with your marketing so that you can catch bargain buyers on the go. Try in-store texting by asking shoppers to text an item number on a product to a short code for a 15% discount. You can also create a campaign which asks customers to text something like “SALES” to a short code, which then sends them promotional texts for a holiday weekend.

Take advantage of the holidays this season to help your business grow. When January rolls around, you’ll be happy you did.

Perhaps there is no better way to gauge the impact the Internet has had on our lives than with the emergence of Cyber Monday—the Monday following Thanksgiving and Black Friday—when people log onto countless retail websites in their quest to find holiday deals. Gone are the days when it’s necessary to camp out in front of stores at ungodly hours, only to stampede through the doors and wrestle fellow shopper for the hottest video games and electronics. Instead, it is now possible to get all of your holiday shopping done while sipping coffee in your pajamas and watching daytime television.

This year, shoppers spent a record $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up more than 20% from last year and surpassing early estimates. Some 10 million people took advantage of this day of online deals, setting a new record. Buyers averaged nearly $125 in spending, and 10.8% of consumers used a mobile device to access businesses’ websites (up 3.9% from 2010).

What does this mean for retailers?

In short, this year’s Cyber Monday shows retailers that Internet shopping, particularly when there are deals to be had, is here to stay and growing in popularity. While spending was up for this day and Black Friday this year, the jump in online sales indicates that this day of spending is really starting to catch on.  Accordingly, in order keep up with this demand, merchants need to continue offering online coupons and deals, and maintain online visibility and brand recognition (more on this later). By using the Internet to their benefit, businesses will stay competitive in this increasingly online world.

Additionally, because so many transactions were conducted on mobile devices, it may behoove retailers to create smartphone apps in order to lure customers to their sites on a regular basis. Whether it’s to sell items, educate consumers about the products and/or services they offer, offer help in finding physical store locations, provide ready access to customer service, or what have you, by staying up-to-date with trends, businesses can get a leg up on their competition.

What does this mean for marketers?

In the ever-changing world of marketing, few things are ever black and white. However, it should be apparent by now that marketing strategies that place an emphasis on the Internet will be successful.  Whether it’s email marketing strategies, SEO techniques, or any of the other sundry options available to marketers, the point is to get online and stay there. By experimenting with different techniques and strategies, you can pinpoint what works best for your clients and what doesn’t, which will not only benefit them, but you as well.

As with any marketing strategy, the key is quality over quantity. Whereas black hat techniques have given SEO a bad name, and Google’s algorithmic updates have demoted some well-known websites, proper use of SEO strategies—such as the use of keywords—can actually work in tandem with Google updates to boost your clients’ online visibility, and establish and maintain brand recognition.

How can I use this year’s cyber lessons to my benefit?

Below are five tips for implementing the lessons of this year’s Cyber Monday into your overall sales and/or marketing strategies:

1. Stay up-to-date with what’s going on online! Whether you’re scoping out your competitors’ deals, learning about how to create new apps, or learning how to design an aesthetically pleasing, navigable website, being Internet-savvy will always work in your favor.
2. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses…be the Joneses! In other words, if you are mimicking strategies that have already proven to be successful, then you remain one step behind your competition. Be the leader, rather than the follower and your sales will reflect it.
3. Listen to what consumers have to say! This can be accomplished by reading blogs that are devoted to shopping, deals, and the like, such as “mommy blogs”, and sites dedicated to couponing, shopping, and and other money/spending-related subjects. By reading what consumers think about various sales and money-saving ideas, you will better understand consumer trends, and will be able to target your audience more effectively.
4. Be liberal when it comes to sales! Despite the recession, when many businesses had to tighten their belts in order to survive, this past week’s sales shows that consumers respond overwhelmingly to a good deal. While it may be true that you will make less on any given item, it is also true that more items will sell, and your customer base will grow exponentially as a result.
5. Think outside of the box! By coming up with creative new ways to approach consumers, you are sure to capture their attention and keep it. It’s easy to ignore advertising that is humdrum, but something that is at once unique and catchy will garner you the brand recognition you need to stay ahead of the game.

Even though the recent recession is already beginning to be referred to in the past tense and consumer spending is up, people are being more thoughtful about the money they are spending. By placing emphasis on customer-oriented sales and marketing strategies, rather than outdated ideas that are no longer effective, you can be assured of continued success, regardless of the economy.

Money has evolved several times in human history: barter, coins, paper, plastic, and now, phones? It’s true — commerce is the next major advancement in mobile technology. Through the use of ‘near field communications’ (NFC) chips, several companies are about to revolutionize the way we shop, replacing our wallets with our smartphones.

Refers to the late 1990s during which countless Internet companies were riding an enormous wave of enthusiasm that pushed their stock valuations into the stratosphere even though they never made a penny. Billions in venture capital were given to entrepreneurs with little or no experience to fund ideas that were ludicrous. It was a crazy time, and people were very excited. With all of the nonsense, many dot-coms did survive, and countless concepts and techniques were developed that continue today.

In these days, professionals from tech and media industries repeat all together that social media companies are over-valuıed and we are “in the middle of a social media bubble”. Some experts think that these social networking sites will never figure out a workable business model because there may not be one.

Mashable shared this Infographic prepared by social media site G+ about top-valuations of  social media sites.

The Internet Internet traffic is increasing very rapidly, close to doubling each year since 1997.    Jesse Thomas collected remarkable stats on the Internet in one video. As the social network sites and YouTube like media-sharing sites take much more time in our lives, People-Powered Internet grows up. Some of the amazing figures about people-powered  Internet shared in the video:

• - Facebook gets more than 260 billios pageviews per month.
• - YouTube serves 1 billion videos in one day.
• - The average Internet user in the USA watches 182 online videos in a month.
• - There are 1.4 billions email users worldwide.

Thanks Jesse Thomas for combining and animating these stats. You can watch the video below:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

There’s a battle emerging over the industry structure of e-books: Amazon has one approach, Barnes & Noble another. Will the clash play out like the computer wars of the late 80s, or the music wars of the late 90s? Let’s take a look.

Years of declining music sales reflect a grim story for the music business — the amount of music people are willing to pay for has dropped dramatically, the unit of business has shifted fundamentally to music by the song, and the preferred medium for acquiring music is now downloading individual songs, rather than purchasing a complete CD. Who is winning in the battle for the soul of the music business? The popular verdict at the moment would certainly be Apple, to the detriment of the traditional music producers and distributors, and with mixed effects for artists.

What are the implications for the current battle over e-books? Amazon.com is certainly gunning for the traditional book business with the advent of its Kindle reader. Note the characteristics of this business model — Amazon sells proprietary hardware, which is linked to a list of electronic books over which they have considerable control, and tied to their website which facilitates just about every aspect of a user’s experience, from the first moment you might become aware that you have a need to getting that need fulfilled, time and time again.

To read the rest of this Harvardbusiness.org blog post, click here.