Social Will Drive Better Marketing in 2012

The 2012 Social Marketing & New Media Predictions is a new white paper from Awareness, Inc. that features quotes from 34 leading marketing strategists (like David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis, Erik Qualman, Paul Gillin and Steve Rubel) on their top predictions and trends for social marketing in 2012.  Insights come from three groups of influentials:

1. Leading marketing strategists
2. Brand marketers at leading companies
3. Leading thinkers from marketing consulting firms and social marketing agencies

Here are three of the biggest social marketing developments I predict for 2012 with quotes: 

Social media will move out of its own niche and be integrated into mainstream marketing

“Social Marketing will become Marketing. It will just be what you need to do, when you’re trying to sell something to more than one person.”

– Michael Troiano of Holland-Mark

But marketing will be changed by this integration

“Right now there’s too much focus on social media marketing and content marketing. True inbound marketing involves knowing which tactics work [and] …  integrating your SEO efforts together with your content generation and sharing, with your advertising, your lead nurturing, your analytics, measurement and A/B testing, with every tool you use and everything you do as a marketer.”

– Laura Fitton of HubSpot

“It won’t be … sexy, but adding … CRM functionality to marketing efforts will improve our ability as marketers to hit relevant audiences with relevant messages at relevant times and in relevant places. Companies without relevancy in messaging as a priority will fall behind.”

– Jason Falls, founder of Social Media Explorer

“Social media gives us the ability to communicate instantly, yet most marketers have not developed the communication skills to address real time. Marketers have been trained with a campaign mentality, spending weeks planning, designing and executing in a sequential manner. Social marketing is changing that. We now need the ability to react instantly to breaking news, changes on our websites and negative customer feedback. Marketers need a new mentality, infrastructure and workflows to meaningfully participate in real time.”

– David Meerman Scott

Trust will be the new currency

“The rise of the Online Recommendation Culture. Moms’ rapid embrace of social media translates into blogs, Facebook, and Twitter becoming the new ‘picket fence,’ where Moms connect with one another to make friends, hear trusted recommendations, and gain first-person perspective.”

– Stacy DeBroff of Mom Central Consulting

The full white paper gathers insights in six areas:

Part 1 | Predictions for the biggest (social) marketing developments
Part 2 | The role of “big data” in (social) marketing
Part 3 | Key technology to impact (social) marketing
Part 4 | The role of mobile in (social)
Part 5 | The top challenges for (social) marketers
Part 6 | The top trusted news resources

What are your predictions for social in 2012?  Share them here.