I think back to when I attended one of the first Word of Mouth Marketing Association's boot camp conferences in 2006. Facebook was an infant. Twitter was just born. YouTube was still owned by Chad Hurley and friends. HTML5 was a pipe dream and AJAX was just about to become standardized by W3C. The infrastructure was barely in place to create rich, beautiful, useful applications that built communities, delivered value to customers, got them excited enough to tell others. It was only seven years ago!
The timing was fortuitous. If the global slowdown in 2008 happened prior to the adoption and standardization of customer-focused social applications, we would have likely been in more dire straits. Here's the best part, in it's italicized, one line glory.
We have only scratched the surface.
A mobile/desktop web presence plus SEO plus a community of users is all now standard, both for commercial and nonprofits. Don't have any of these? Call me. 2013 is the year of "big data" in marketing. How you use that data is the difference between a sustainable competitive advantage or running with the herd. Oh, and I forgot one other extremely important trend when thinking back to 2006:
