I don’t need to elaborate on either of these too much unless you’ve been stuck in darkened room with no access to internet or information for the past few years.  I’d like to think we’re reaching a crescendo of global volatility and social connectivity but I think we have a long way to go.

The question for us marketers is not just how we can weather the storm of global economic and political uncertainty but moreover how we can capitalize upon it.

2 weeks ago the world woke up to discover Mark Zuckerberg, founder & CEO of Facebook was planning an IPO valuing the company at $100bn, the figures are staggering especially for a business who not too long ago was still being written of as a fad and in an economic environment already having been burned on a number of occasions with over inflated valuations.  This is a very real valuation not so much upon the growth, potential ad revenue and the like, but more of the apparent very real power Facebook has today.

It was summed up by the man himself in his open letter at the announcement, this paragraph is particularly relevant since after the Arab Spring of 2011 Zuckerberg went to great lengths to distance Facebook as an accomplice to the revolution.

“By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.”

Now embracing power his enterprise has, he recognizes that his Harvard pipe-dream truly has the ability to force change, that individuals can gather, exchange ideas and ‘cannot be ignored’

Facebook has embraced Volatility as its mode of valuation and emotional bait to bring more and more people inside.  Growth in the USA is slowing but emerging markets in Africa, Asia and the Middle East where change is so needed are the future of the company.

Now not all of us own or work for an organization like Facebook, but as Marketers we have a responsibility to understand and embrace whats happening around us.  The tools, platforms and connections exist to make ignoring it a professional crime.

In a world full of doubt, fear and uncertainty, we can be very sure of one thing.  Us humans are individuals with collective desires, if we can harness these voices and empower people to advocate our produces then the potential for growth is almost unlimited.  Every marketer has an obligation to serve his client (and potential) base with useful information and the tools to share it.  Our connections are our strength and we plant enough quality seeds in the right fertile land then the harvest will come.

This is increasingly ever more challenging with digital marketing, since new channels or micro channels seem to appear with a head of steam almost every day.  Combine this with the ever changing nature of existing digital channels make budgeting in the 21st century nothing short of a stress induced headache.

In the ideal world, each business and marketing head, comes up with their own way to judge and measure their budgeting, allocating appropriate amounts to each channel (hopefully with some logic and research) and then optimizing their segmented marketing channels as traffic and results begin to come in.

My tried and tested method when launching campaigns and even more so when I’ve been tasked with the responsibility for building marketing departments ground up is the 30-30-30 rule.  Since every campaign will respond differently to a different company or destination goal, no matter your previous experience it’s important to set a phase 1 methodology. the 30-30-30 works well in all initial decision making.  The logic is simple, fragment your top tier decisions into 3 and allocate budget accordingly.

So for example, when starting out and planning required to strategize investment in people, services and media, simply go 30-30-30.  This obviously can become complex and as such further decisions need to made as to which function will take care of which channel.

For me, a typical marketing department allocation of resources should comprise:

30% to employment of personnel
30% to traffic purchasing
30% to outsourced services

The reason for this logic is that it allows (and in some cases forces) me to make tough decisions on prioritizing and managing functions or campaigns.

Within each of these allocations, the 30-30-30 rule is applied again (traffic purchase investment will be split equally between; SEO investment (long term), Affiliate support (medium term) and media buying (short term)

The same logic should then follow through in other areas, for example.  When building a marketing team, 30% should be ‘Money-Men’ (employees who’s work is directly measurable by bottom line results), 30% ‘Internal-Support’ (those who provide critical services to the team, including; analysts, designers, webmasters) and 30% to strategists (these often overlap the previous two, and will include middle managers and product managers)

By now you should be questioning the missing 10%.  To be honest, this is both my favorite part and the most important to the mix.  In every initial planning decision and ongoing optimization it’s essential to have a buffer. This is the ‘spare’ resources used to cover situations when you just know you’ll need an extra few bucks for a campaign but cannot be sure when or where. It’s the spare cash you need when a campaign needs an extra boost or when natural growth in a specific function necessitates the ability to expand without going back to the marketing plan and rewriting.

This 10% is also the fun part of marketing.  It’s the place where creativity flows and experimentation begins.  Without this 10% you’ll be forever bound by the preconceptions you begun with and the tight preconditions that result.

Despite the fact that recent figures show Facebook growth slowing in developed countries (2011 saw a mere 4% growth in USA) Facebook take up amongst 3rd parties is surging to the point of explosion.  Personally I find almost every new website launched includes the option (sometimes the only option) to register using Facebook or twitter access protocols.  Web savvy companies understand the fastest way to build brand exposure and users it to adopt existing technology creating a harmonious and symbiotic relationship between themselves and leading social networks.

2012 will see utter and complete domination by 3 companies; Facebook, Twitter and Google (in that order)

Facebook Domination: Already with over 800 million users (even if we assume only half of those are real active users) represents the most powerful single platform for social engagement.  Facebook arguably knows more about us than Google as we pour our lives into the system to create and sustain our lives.  This power will see Facebook continue to ease itself a growing ad market share (currently around 24% of display ads are served through FB, I see that rising to 35-40 by the end of the year)

Twitter Domination: CEO Dick Costolo in a recent interview outlined his accepted understanding that 40% of twitter users never tweet, it’s a one way Social Broadcast Network.  This is a stunning revelation and positioning, Twitter need not worry that a significant percentage of users never tweet, why? because these people are using the system as a source of information only and this in itself brings it’s own power and potential ad revenue wealth.

Google Domination: Focusing here only on the Google+ since they already dominate every other major market their in.  The aggressive release of SPY World and the subsequent rewriting of the SEO rulebook to dominate the future of search results will place Google firmly at the center of the Social Engagement Paradigm.  As soon as agreements (or loopholes) are reached to work with and not against Twitter and Facebook, we’ll see a new world of information sourcing.

So where does that leave the average company striving to find it’s way on the web?  straight forward and simple… to ignore active social engagement is to not only miss an opportunity (that was missed if you didn’t get on the ball in 2011), it’s now a perilous decision to not engage with customers, clients and potential target market.

By the end of the year it’s a reasonable assumption that our appetitite for non-recommended information or products will be close to finished.  With the average facebook user connected to 150 friends and using the Linkedin metric of degrees of connection, this means the average person has connections to over 1,000 ,000 people to gain accurate, reliable recommendation.  Factor in that more and more people are segmenting their social connections correctly (Friends in FB, Business in LinkedIn, and everyone in Twitter) we can assume we on average can call upon the voices and opinions of over 5,000,000 people!!

Placing trust in ads from the richest advertisers or visiting sites based on the best SEO will become a thing of the past.  The way to dominate the web in 2012 will be to embrace the voices and hearts of those 25,000 connections and incentivize them to become product evangelists.  Not only will this lead to measurable ROI but importantly the search results will reflect these social voices rather than the highest bidder for ad placement.

The final question to be answered is ‘how can I embrace and incentivize?’ lets get serious on this, we just need to do what we should be doing; provide products and services that people really want, delivered in a way they want them, followed up by good customer service.  The final key to the puzzle is the simplest, give these people the tools to shout about it! these tools are already on offer and will continue to be enhanced by the 3 aforementioned dominating companies.