On Marketing Magazine's website the Q&A with Terry O'Reilly hints at the continuation of advertising moving form a monologue to a dialog. As the number of media channels grow so do the number of challenges.
2011 saw Google's foray into social media with Google+, Facebook's creation of Timeline, and Pinterest sweep across the social-sphere. It is no surprise that social media keeps expanding and marketers are still figuring out how to engage and speak to their audience.
Marketers need to be able to create a dialog with key audience that extend beyond Facebook. For example Danier used the Danier Design Challenge to engage students to designs a new jacket. The winner of the Challenge had their design produce and sold in stores. The Challenge was facilitated through the Ryerson University School of Fashion and it leveraged social media to choose the winner.
Even toy giant Mattel is taking advantage of expanding its social media presence. In 2011, Mattel created the Fisher-Price Mom Panel to expand its online community at FisherPricePlay.ca. Mattel may leverage other social platforms but they have created their own platform to engage their key audience.
In their annual Marketer Survey, Strategy reported that in 2012 41% of respondents will focus their budgets on social media. An interesting discovery in the report was the desire for marketers to receive more strategic insight from their creative partners. (For the full results visit: http://strategyonline.ca/2011/12/09/2011-marketer-survey-results/)
Although it is no surprise that social media will dominate in 2012, since it clearly dominated 2011, it appears that using social media in a more strategic manner is going to be the key challenge over the year ahead. Some marketers, like Danier and Mattel, have already achieved a social media model that engages their audiences in a meaningful way, however some still have a long way to go.
