2010 – The year that social and digital were finally taken seriously by business…

It’s taken a while, but the power of digital and social have finally started to be fully realised by big businesses. They have seen that with sites like Linkedin, social media provide one of the best possible ways of recruiting new employees. They also now appreciate that sites like Facebook are great ways of monitoring what their demographic really want and ‘like’. Just last year, a lot of companies still thought of social as some kind of gimmick. Now they are starting to see that social is the future of marketing full stop. There are barely any companies out there with no social presence and if there are, they will not make it far into 2011. Social provides a business with a cheap, efficient way of engaging with their customers and finding new customers. It is now possible to run a successful, vibrant company using just social channels. Plenty of marketing campaigns have been waged, with huge success, solely on social platforms.

In the year when online advertising overtook print advertising for the first time, newspapers and magazines are evolving to make their online presence just as important to their business as traditional print methods. The Telegraph has released the first paid subscription online newspaper in the U.K, while The Sun is publishing its first Christmas Day edition in 41 years, via the iPad. Dominic Mohan, editor of The Sun, said: “Throughout The Sun’s 41-year history we have always respected the agreement among newspaper publishers in not publishing a Christmas Day edition of The Sun. However, this year we have seen dramatic innovations in the way that we deliver news to our readers and couldn’t resist the opportunity to break with tradition and produce this dazzling digital edition of the paper – direct to readers’ sofas on Christmas Day.”

With iAd, seemingly shaping the way we will witness advertising in the future, the big brands are seeing that digital is the way forward. The future is a digital one, where technology, the individual and business, seamlessly integrate. Tailored ads, based on our location and our ‘likes’ will come straight to our handheld devices. We will be able to scan a picture of a product and gain all the information we want on it, taking us to best location to buy it, relevant to current location. These developments are a little further down the line, but history will remember this as the year that started the ball rolling.

Let’s toast to 2010, the year that changed the digital world forever…