It is with both excitement and and a bit of nostalgia that I announce this will be my last blog post on www.MartyCollinsBlog.Spaces.Live.com. I started this blog January, 2007 and it has served me well for over two years but the time has come to make a separation between my professional blogging site and my personal family site. For that reason I am moving Marketing Today to www.Marty-Collins.com. There are new features I’m going to be adding on the new blog, namely a vlog series. I hope to increase the regularity of my posts with the video content.

Come join me over at www.Marty-Collins.com!

Peter Kim published a great paper that is well worth your time to read. He amassed a group of thought leaders in the social media space to give their predictions for 2009. While he didn’t invite me to add my 2 cents this year I’m going to do that here and maybe he’ll invite me next year. :)

Agencies: Social media agencies will continue to grow and add clients at the expense of the larger media/creative agencies. I talk a lot to marketers working in social media and all agree large agencies have not yet developed this muscle thought they do pitch it as a core competency in some cases. In this economic downturn my money is on the small, nimble agencies. They are hungry for this work and are regular contributors to the social media community which means they have their fingers on the pulse of what’s next. I recently hired a small agency to work with Windows’ on a 12 month roadmap for our social media team and one of my core requirements was the people at the agency HAD to be participating in the space; blogging, chatting, etc. They have to be using the technology and participating which shows skin in the game.

Apps/Widgets: The current business model for apps is broken. Apps are very difficult to discover whether it’s on Facebook or the iPhone which makes scale virtually impossible to reach. App networks are beginning to emerge where a brand can basically  ‘rent’ an app for a period of time garnering them the exposure of the apps fan base without the investments of time and resources to build the app then find the followers. This makes sense to me if the brand can find the right fit. If you are Random House and you have a new book being published an app or widget that is devoted to literary reviews or discussing books like Goodreads would be very appropriate. For a fraction of the cost Random House would get the exposure to their target audience without having to build an app that would likely never be discovered by more than a handful of people.

Strategy:  While a few of the experts in Peter’s paper predicted this would be the year for brands to build an actual strategy before chasing the shiny new object I am less inclined to agree. I’m happy to say this is in fact exactly what my social media team is doing right now and we are very excited to be working with Ignite and Jim Tobins’ group on this.

Windows Live Writer: I am writing this blog post right now on the airplane ride from San Jose home to Seattle. I love Windows Live Writer and so does just about everyone that uses it. Check out what our community has to say about it.  Writer will change the way you blog. I think Writer will get more attention in 2009, it’s a sleeper product waiting to explode.

Plus a few predictions that are a going out on a limb;

1. Second Life will finally call it quits
2. Mobile will still not make a dent in the opportunity awaiting that industry
3. Brands will continue to stumble with splashy campaigns that are less than authentic – hiring bloggers, planting UGC

I presented at the Social Networking Conference a few weeks ago and had hoped to share a video of that presentation but due to technical difficulties by the videographer there is no video to share. I have shared the slides below. I’ll be the first to admit the slides by themselves do not tell the whole story. For that you’ll just have to come see me speak at some point. But I did want to share the perspective I presented.

The Windows Social Media team is focused on maintaining an ongoing conversation with our customers regardless of whether we have a campaign in market. Our Anytime, anywhere approach is about building channels and putting tools in place to be able to constantly know what consumers are saying and have a built in mechanism to talk to them. We don’t want to wait for a campaign to talk to our customers and we certainly don’t want to wait for a special occasion to get feedback. I think of Social Media as the new CRM – and that’s how I’m explaining it to my executives.

Here’s a picture of me and a bunch of somewhat interesting data points about myself. This data could be interesting to marketers if they are targeting moms, travelers, skiers or maybe entertainment lovers. Traditional marketing says this data has to be collected, stored, scrubbed, etc if a marketing team wanting to maintain a database to reach out to their customers with coupons, offers or product information. Think monthly newsletter or DM flyers. But what if you as a brand don’t have to host, manage and maintain that database…

Here is where you can find all the data points I identified above… on my Facebook profile. Get it? People are putting the data out there in droves. And it doesn’t rely on the brand anymore to solicit, manage and store it.

So you have to ask yourself as a brand marketer, are you inviting your customer on a first date? Wining and dining them and then not calling in the morning. How do you think that makes them feel? They’ve raised their hand, right. Said they are interested in you shoe, car, bag, whatever. They maybe even did something to try and get your attention like creating a commercial or designing a new logo. Did you say thank you? Figuratively and maybe even literally. If you are a non-profit it’s even more important. Did they give you money? They are a part of your extended community now. You should absolutely have programs in place to continue the conversation with them, especially if you want to ask for money again next year.

Here’s the deck: