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2012: The year to come
Following on from my post last week looking at what's happened in 2011, it felt only right to think forward and look at what we might expect to see in the next 12 months. As always with posts like this, there are a massive number of topics that could be covered. However to keep things manageable here are the main things that have come to our minds.
The iPad 3 is expected to launch in the early part of 2012 and I'm sure this will be welcome news for Apple fans globally. Looking at the tablet market as a whole Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, has this week announced the 'Nexus' tablet which is set to be released in the next six months. Along with Amazon's Kindle Fire offering coming to the UK soon, the tablet market could develop substantially in the new year. What about you gamers out there? Well, there's the Nintendo's Wii U arriving and also Playstation Vita – which one are you more excited about?
Events in London and beyond
In June the UK will be celebrating the Queen's Diamond jubilee and in August, The Olympics are taking place in London. In November Nokia announced a free wi-fi trial taking place in London giving the public free Internet access in parts of the city, and it's thought that this is in preparation for The Olympics. In addition to these events there is also the US Presidential election taking place and it'll be interesting to see how the candidates use the Internet, and social media specifically, for their campaigns. In October Barack Obama joined Tumblr to kick start his campaign and as Tumblr is a personal favourite of mine, I will be especially interested to see how his team use this newer social platform.
Digital marketing in 2012
In 2011 Facebook grew to 800 million users, Twitter to over 100 million active users and Google + arrived, so social media is likely to continue to grow and become a prominent marketing channel for businesses in 2012. Google+ have confirmed they'll be adding more features for business pages too, and brand pages on Twitter have already arrived for a select few. Email marketing will most certainly have its place in 2012 and, in actual fact the DMA have predicted that more emails will be sent than ever before. However next year the focus, more than ever before, has to be on combining marketing activities across the board – email, social media and SMS. We can't ignore the fact that the economy isn't as strong as it could be and businesses of all sizes need to think smart about how they market their offering online to get the best ROI. In lighter news, Emailblog.eu reported last week that spam emails have fallen to their lowest volume since 2008, let's hope that trend continues into 2012 and beyond!
Other things to look out for
The usage of HTML 5 is likely to become more prevalent in 2012 and we wonder how much it'll impact email and website design in the coming year. We've already seen Chrome pass Firefox as the most popular browser of choice so it'll be interesting to see how Chrome continues to grow – especially with the launch of IE10 to keep an eye out for. Netflix is also set to arrive in the UK next year which could change how we view our TV shows and favourite films. Finally, are you looking for a new design/colour scheme in 2012? Pantone have announced Tangerine Tango as their colour of the year for 2012. Are you ready to go orange?
Are there any social or technological changes you're looking forward to seeing in 2012? Share your thoughts in the comments box below or drop me an email!
Leanne Beale
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