In 2012, we expect to see certain trends become standards, just as location and personalization became essential elements to success in 2011. This year, there are a number of trends to watch and a few that have the potential to become fundamental to your business in a very short time. Whether they come to be indispensable or mark the beginning of something larger, here are some key trends to keep your eyes on in 2012.

Shopping from everywhere becomes the norm: The number of companies who make it easy for customers to buy from nearly anywhere using any connected device, and the number of consumers who expect this option, will surge. This increased consumer appetite for anytime, anywhere shopping will necessitate that brands stop focusing on disparate channels and concentrate on seamless experience ecosystems. [...]

Happily, the hustle and bustle of shopping, wrapping, and yes, the dreaded returns, is behind me this year. Thanks to my handy spreadsheet to keep track of my kids, nieces and nephews as well as friends, neighbors and colleagues, I managed to be fairly efficient. But it’s not the spreadsheet that made the difference this year—it was my iPad and my iPhone, from which I completed over a dozen transactions. Seems like I wasn’t alone in my mobile ways, as mobile shopping was up 173% this holiday! Wow. We may readily take that figure in stride because it seems obvious, natural even. Our devices have become so much more than shopping facilitators; they’re an extension of ourselves, our instincts, our impulses. They’re also wonderfully liberating. Long waits, out-of-stocks or unhelpful salespeople are no longer a deterrent for getting what we want. Thanks to innovators like Gilt, Amazon and HSN, shoppers could receive mobile-only offers at various competitors while standing in long lines on Black Friday. [...]

Mobile devices are redefining shopping, from inspiration to purchase and beyond. In fact, according to comScore, 10.8 percent of people used mobile to visit a retailer site on Cyber Monday, up from 3.9 percent in 2010. Also up—by nearly two and a half times—was the number of items U.S. shoppers bought via eBay Mobile on Black Friday.

Thanks to smartphones, consumers can buy, research and browse at home, in store or nearly anywhere else. They can use barcode scanning apps to compare in-store prices to those online and instantly purchase via mobile. They can buy coffee at Starbucks with the company’s mobile payment app, which has seen more than 26 million transactions since January. And they can even “tap to pay,” using services like Google Wallet and ISIS, at select offline stores, public transportation providers and online merchants. Soon, this capability will be everywhere. [...]

Few mobile activities can boast ubiquitous access and use across all mobile phones like SMS. The CTIA reports that the number of yearly text messages grew by over 1,750% from 2006 to 2011. And with an open rate of 97%, it’s no wonder why brands are starting to accelerate their mobile presence by launching mobile initiatives like SMS campaigns. Standard SMS campaigns offer great value to consumers (the cost is almost negligible) and keep brands top of mind while aligning with CRM efforts. Not to mention, they’re a great way to engage your customers and take a step toward the O.P.E.N. direction! [...]

As an analyst at a digital agency with clients across a range of verticals, the question I get asked most often is, “How do I measure the ROI of my digital and social media efforts?” Unfortunately, there is no single formula to do this, and the explosion of digital touch points over the past five years has made the goal of a single formula even less attainable.

In the case of a direct response campaign driving to an online purchase, getting to a hard ROI is practical (and is the basis for performance marketing). Typically, though, those calculations still undercount the impact of the investment by not taking into account the “brand” value and impact of the campaign, and those calculations will also overcount the results of the investment because they take full credit for revenue that was triggered or influenced by activity in other marketing channels (for instance, the revenue we garnered from our retargeting campaign was influenced by the volume of traffic to the website in the first place, which was influenced by paid search investments, which was influenced by consumer interest generated through TV and print). [...]

download add a comment Tweet In the latest Resource Interactive weThink podcast, the RI:Lab expert panel discussed Kindle Fire, Google+ brand pages, the supposed death of Flash and more. Adobe Abandons Flash for Mobile Browsers Recently, Adobe announced that it was abandoning work on a Flash Player for mobile and focusing its efforts on HTML5. [...]

download add a comment Tweet In this edition of the weThink podcast, the panel fills your ears with their previous Google+ predictions, a native app versus mobile web discussion, talk about Facebook mobile experiences, a look at the iPhone 4S and more. Revisiting Google+ Three weeks into the Google+ public launch, the podcast panel decided [...]

Mobile devices are fast becoming the hub for all our digital activity. From the tons of compelling apps being released—some of which are replacing their desktop counterparts—to the continual increase of tablet sales and decrease of PC purchases, mobile devices are starting to affect everything we do in the digital world. Consumers are using mobile [...]

We’ve talked about Near Field Communications (NFC) a number of times. Now, it looks like momentum is shifting to a point where NFC—which lets devices wirelessly transmit data such as payment info, loyalty points and coupons to nearby receivers—may be closer to reality. Google recently made NFC the backbone of its reported initiative with Citigroup [...]

It’s becoming well established that mobile is the new PC. New tablets launch nearly every day, about a billion mobile devices are accessing the Internet and app stores are opening left and right. If these facts don’t convince you, maybe you’ll be swayed by the increasingly large number of people using mobile devices to buy [...]