Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Futurist and business consultant Amy Webb says that by asking the right questions, just about anyone can do what she does: separate real trends from hype and glean the paths that technologies will take.

In her recently released book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Webb shares some of her methods for analyzing the impact of innovations. She spoke to MIT Technology Review’s executive editor, Brian Bergstein, in an interview that Insider Premium subscribers can listen to here. Highlights condensed for clarity follow.

In October 2016, Nigeria-based BalogunMarket.ng launched an app that allows users to buy products and services via chat. The online marketplace was developed to make the goods sold at Balogun Market in Lagos more accessible by allowing customers to avoid travel and high temperatures in the city.

Users can browse products and complete sales through the app, along side interacting with sellers and haggling for products through BuyChat, the in-app chat function called. Shoppers can also book flights and hotels, order food, and connect with local brands.

More and more, those who look ahead will have an advantage in digital communications, in particular on social media. Anticipating future trends is not just fun, and incredibly difficult too, it’s also vital if you want to be able to allocate your resources properly and develop an integrated communications approach across online and offline channels.

So, after some #Brusselslockdown week-end reading (Forrester, Gartner, Social Media Today, Mashable and more), here’s my take on what the 10 most probable social media trends of 2016 look like, with a focus on government communicators and how they can adapt to or anticipate these trends. Would love to hear about other trends I missed out on.

Here’s a visual summarizing the 10 trends, in case you’re lazy – aren’t we all? Probably trend 11 :-)....

Good riddance, 2016. For many of us, it was 12 long months full of bad news, fake news and surreal news, the most controversial election anyone can remember, plus too many other highlights and lowlights to mention.

This very December, we've seen the many shades of orange upstaged by Pantone's Greenery, and we all know the color of the year is not a nod to hope about the climate or to anyone's envy of the Western world.

Luckily, I can find solace in an area where my company definitely isn't green: spotting trends for the year ahead. Here at Havas PR, we devote the end of each year to spotting trends on the rise, and it's always interesting to look both ahead and back at the predictions that have proven out recently—more stringent legislation around brain damage suffered by football players (forecast in 2010); the universal brain-health movement (2009); and "Local is the new global" (2007).

Here are a few of the trends we believe will directly impact marketers and advertisers in 2017 taken from our more in-depth report, "Blowback to the Future: The Trends That Will Shape 2017":...

Trailing mobile among the most influential consumer trends are three others commonly discussed: the emergence of Millennials (see just how many there arehere); advanced marketing analytics; and demand for personalization.

While not perceived to have quite the same impact as Millennials, the aging population also figures among the top 10 consumer trends, per respondents to the survey. Emerging technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and wearables lie outside of the top 10 consumer trends, outweighed by other shifts including a focus on shopping experience and direct-to-consumer models.

To respond to these trends, marketers are taking a variety of actions, ranging from forming strategic partnerships (54%) to increasing technological capacity (51%) and engaging in dialogue with consumers (48%). That consumer dialogue is a critical focus for enterprise social business initiatives, and is also being increasingly used by CMOs to shape innovation....

It’s clear the shopping scene is rapidly evolving with advents in technology and changing consumer behaviors, so it’s no surprise that new players in the retail game are aiming to spice things up. In PSFK Labs’ ongoing research, we’ve discovered startups that aren’t just doing something cool, but completely innovating the shopper experience and raising the bar for consumer expectation of service. Existing companies—from global retailers to growing brands—can aim to mimic these new offerings and practices.

Below is an excerpt from the Future of Retail 2016, where PSFK Labs has identified five key players redefining the retail landscape....

Now, Los Angeles-based advertising agency Ignited has considered 100 trend reports and identified 15 key trends for 2015 from the most relevant end-of-year predictions.

"Upon sifting through all of these trends, we narrowed it down to the ones that we think will have the biggest impact on our business in the near future," says Frank Striefler, SVP planning & strategy, Ignited....

It’s a fact that predictions have always attracted people’s attention, otherwise all these fortune-tellers and mediums would have been unemployed instead of wearing golden rings and necklaces. Based on this, we decided to peer into our crystal balls (actually with the shape of a screen) and collect all the technology trends that we have this feeling that will be on the spotlight during 2015....