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

In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity.

Small business has almost always relied on word of mouth to succeed. There are very few national TV spots and building-side ads trying to pull you into Daydreams Comics in Iowa City, Iowa or Homespun Crafts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unfortunately, word of mouth for a lot of businesses can only go so far. Social media is essentially a rebirth for word of mouth in a digital age. Platforms like Facebook allow small bookstores to broadcast events to an always ready audience, reaching them on their cell phones as well as computers. Twitter is used by many “pop up shops” and mobile businesses to let consumers know where in the city the business can be found that day. Given the incredible success social media has had on small businesses this year, how should these businesses proceed moving forward?

Word of mouth has always been an important part of marketing, both because it is free and because, almost always, the words are going to a person from someone in their life that they trust. This gives credence to the brand and service, as well as giving confidence to the overall purchase decision. If you’re looking for what to do in Chicago, for instance, you are more likely to take the advice of a person you know and trust who has experienced it than from a kid who once saw a movie about Chicago and thought it was okay.

The massive shift to digital has opened up new avenues of marketing, which are ultimately cheaper and hold lots of promise for small businesses who have limited advertising budgets.

Google AdWords Express

In an effort to give small businesses a bit of an edge in catching the attention of customers, Google launched a service called Boost, which would later become AdWords Express. The idea here is that you register your business with Google and when someone searches for stores in your area, you stand out from the usual suspects (read: international corporations show up as red tabs and you show up as a blue tab that automatically sets you apart).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is emerging from the dark shadow of its past to become a massive force in Internet marketing. Large corporations use it to boost their rankings in search engines, but smaller business can use SEO to deepen their potential customer base. SEO is beneficial for one simple reason: people can’t go to your site if they can’t find it. Targeting keywords specific to your business and location will help more people find your site and hopefully walk through the doors of your storefront.

Mobile Marketing

After this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are considerably more smartphones and tablets out on the market. That number is growing as people move away from stationary computer setups toward mobile Internet devices. Companies like Groupon have launched local services that allow small business owners to create offers and deals in real time and beam them to cell phones of customers who could be in your neighborhood. Your deal that day might win you a new regular customer.

The shop small revolution has a lot of support behind it in the shrinking world. People are starting to reject the convenience afforded by huge corporations and re-invest in their communities by shopping small. The movement will likely grow in the coming years and businesses looking to harness the increasing public enthusiasm for “small shopping” will have to evolve their marketing methods with the digital methods cropping up and leverage them to succeed in the current economic landscape.

Building a brand requires time, dedication and a lot of hard work. Consumers have to trust and be engaged by the company trying to build or maintain its reputation. Ensuring that keywords chosen for a link or campaign are relevant to the business is key, as is ensuring the relevance to any site a link is posted on. Keyword stuffing, the process of loading a page down with links and “relevant” keywords, is not tolerated anymore. Sites that use such tactics face being ignored, down-ranked, or banned, all of which will result in varying levels of traffic loss.

Keyword Relevance

The keywords pointing to a site have to be relevant to the content on both the page the link is placed and to the site linked. Co-occurrence terms are important for the page, too. For instance, in order to rank for a phrase like “laptop battery”, a company might try to get a link that looks as follows:

As a university student, my laptop battery always seemed to be going dead. I hadn’t bought my Dell laptop brand new, but I did make sure to recharge my computer regularly. I ended up purchasing a new battery for my notebook computer in order to keep it running on battery power for more than 30 minutes.

The link relates to the content surrounding it and to the site linked. Further, other related phrases are used throughout, such as a major brand and the terms “recharge”, “computer” and “notebook”.

The Detriments of Keyword Stuffing

Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guidelines enforcer, urges website owners not to take part in keyword stuffing (source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/avoid-keyword-stuffing/). Users who attempt to artificially insert keywords into their web pages are severely penalized by Google’s algorithm. Those who try to hide their stuffing from users or present a different web page to users and crawlers are either penalized or, in some cases, removed from search results entirely, effectively cutting them off from the web community.

Content is King

In February 2011, Google unleashed its Panda algorithm update to quash low quality sites. The purpose of Panda is to find sites that don’t offer original, valuable content to readers and then reduce their value in search results (source: http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking-factor-than-algorithm-update-82564). The engineers at Google have attempted to make Panda match a human’s reading habits, in order to determine whether certain content is relevant and actually coherent. There are many sites on the web that post long articles which begin normally enough, but, shortly after the fold, devolve into machine-generated nonsense. Panda’s purpose, among others, is to rid results of those poorly constructed pages.

Google’s Panda update changed the way that businesses do SEO and branding. They can’t get away with dropping keywords in places that make no sense or overloading pages with every co-occurrence term possible. Those who do stuff keywords into their pages are quickly hit with penalties, resulting in their site being down-ranked or even removed from search results completely, depending on the severity of the infraction. Content has to be purposeful, valuable, unique and of high quality for Google to allow it to rank well in a search results page.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

In marketing products, advertisers zero in on bottlenecks, or places where people get funneled into a small space and end up having to wait in line. Subways, elevators, and checkout lines are bottlenecks for foot traffic, while city interstates and busy intersections are bottlenecks for car traffic.

Bottleneck advertising is especially effective because it reaches a high number of people, but, perhaps more importantly, because it catches those people when they have time to look at the ad and absorb the information.

The same principles can apply to advertising online. Ads are best placed where both the number of users is high and the amount of time that users spend on the site is high. In a physical bottleneck, people are delayed because of spatial constraints, while in an online bottleneck, people only linger on a site if their interest is held by something. So the sites that online advertisers need to pay the most attention to are the biggest “time sinks,” the places where users tend to linger for large amounts of time.

Facebook is far and away the biggest time sink on the web. The total time that people spend on Facebook in a month is estimated at 50 billion minutes, which is more time than people spend on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined. Facebook is obviously exceptionally good at grabbing people’s attention and holding it indefinitely, and therefore a prime site for advertisers.

What makes Facebook such an excellent bottleneck is not just that millions of users log on to it every day and not just that users log in often to check in on their friends, but that the users that log in to Facebook tend to linger there.

Facebook is an exceptional device for holding people’s attention captive. Users can see when their friends are online, which means that when they write on their wall or message them, they can probably expect a reply. Intermittent Facebook chat sessions are a constant back-channel that can gobble up time for students and white-collar workers. Facebook games are also hugely successful at absorbing attention. Farming games and Empire games, the two most-popular genres of Facebook games, both involve built-in wait times before players can proceed. These wait times encourage people to keep logging in as soon as the delay is up so they can grow their city or garden as quickly as possible.

While users are staring at messages waiting for a response or staring at a game screen waiting for a time delay to end, the Facebook ads on the right-hand margin are always there, waiting to suck in the user’s gaze. The ads may not seem all that ostentatious, but they are always there, always changing, and always ready to be clicked.

Facebook ads are different from ads at physical bottlenecks, though, because they can also be intelligently tailored to the user. Users’ personal information is mined to get an idea of what they are interested in, but the users themselves also give feedback on ads they do not like so they will not be bothered by them any longer. With this customized system, computer nerds get ads for gadgets, not for sports equipment, and frugal people get ads for coupons, not for sports cars.

Due to the intelligent tailoring of ads and the fact that they are being posted on the largest online bottleneck, Facebook ads promise to be the most effective form of marketing out there.

 This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Legend has it that U.S. Patent Commissioner Charles Duell wrote that in a letter to President William McKinley in 1899. McKinley should have seen the Patent Wars between Tech Giants.
For high technology companies, no measure is more important than getting new products into the markets ahead of the increasing competition. In the high-tech business, Speed-to-Market has become an essential factor for survival. But as the accelerated new product development process goes on, some products become similar and companies start to sue each other for patent infringement.
The graphic below, shows lawsuits between famous technology companies because of patent litigations. Although patent litigation is not new in the technology world, these suits, specifically around mobile, point to the drastically changing mobile landscape. Because mobile technology was still in its infancy and these large technology companies aree trying to stake their claim to the future of mobile computing.

Thanks for InfoGraphics: Information is Beautiful

On 25th of May, Apple passed Microsoft, for the first time, as the “world’s most valuable technology company” . Apple gained a stock-based valuation of $222.12 billion while Microsoft’s was $219.18 billion. The only American company valued higher was Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $278.64 billion.

Microsoft is still one of the most powerful companies in the world and dominates the software industry with its Windows operating system and Office productivity suite.

Although Apple still sells computers as it was a decade ago, twice as much revenue is coming from hand-held devices and music. Over all, the technology industry sold about 172 million smartphones last year, compared with 306 million PCs, but smartphone sales grew at a pace five times faster.

One decade ago, Apple started to act as an innovator focusing on user experience and design. Also, Steve Job’s return in 1996 is the most important one in Silicon Valley with an inapproachable benefit for a tech company.

Google, with a market capitalization of $151.43 billion, is the third most valuable tech company comes after Apple and Microsoft. There are ongoing battles between all three companies at different areas; iPhone vs. Nexus One, Google TV vs Apple TV,Windows vs Chrome OS are the most known ones in these days.

As all these competition is going on, there’s an interesting statistic: Apple and Microsoft initiated the personal computing revolution in the late 1970s but nearly a decade ago there wasn’t any Google…

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.