Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Yes folks the air is crisp, people are planning holiday parties and that can only mean one thing: it’s time for 2016 trend predictions!

It’s also something I love to do and I have had a pretty good track record with prognostications in the past, so here we go with five marketing megatrends that will affect many businesses in coming months....

It’s a popular time to look into the crystal ball for the next year and make a few predictions. It is also what I love to do most … think about what’s next!Here are some views of possible 2015 digital marketing trends that have my wheels turning....

Social media has been undergoing some major changes this past year. Twitter filed for IPO, Facebook launched video ads, and Snapchat threatens to change the landscape as the next big thing in social media. As more companies begin to leverage social media for personalized, real-time marketing initiatives, it’s imperative to stay ahead of the curve and identify future trends in this space. We asked 60 experts to share their predictions on the future of social media and the ways in which it will impact businesses.

One of the most interesting studies I’ve read recently is Gartner’s Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing, a report published in October that delves into the evolving relationship between man and machine. The key takeaway? “Smart” and predictive technologies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and that applies to our business lives as much as it does to our personal ones.

-  By 2018, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines. 

-  By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate.

-  By 2018, 6 billion connected things will be requesting support.

The implications of our increasingly smart world are both inspiring and frightening (as a copywriter, hearing that machines are making their way into the content realm is particularly scary!). As I started thinking about 2016 trends, it quickly became apparent that many of these same digital themes are making their way into the content marketing and social media spaces — and have been for some time.

Let’s take a look at some of the key trends we can expect to see over the next year. How will content and social — both already digital in so many ways — become increasingly digital in 2016?...

Automation anxiety reached new heights in 2013, when Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, researchers at the Oxford Martin School, published a paper estimating that 47% of all U.S. jobs were “at risk” of being computerized over the next two decades. Although the jury is still out about robots stealing jobs, the pace at which AI and deep learning technologies have been advancing isn’t ebbing concerns over a future of disappearing work. As machines increasingly perform complex tasks once thought to be safely reserved for humans, the question has become harder to shrug off: What jobs will be left for people?

A new NBER working paper suggests it’ll be those that require strong social skills — which it defines as the ability to work with others — something that has proven to be much more difficult to automate. “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” shows that nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations that are relatively social skill-intensive — and it argues that high-skilled, hard-to-automate jobs will increasingly demand social adeptness....

Social media has changed the way that businesses operate in the past few years, and it will surely change -- and grow -- in the coming decade....

According to Sandy Carter, General Manager of IBM Ecosystems and Social Business Evangelist at IBM, there are a lot of exciting changes to come. As an author, speaker and expert in social business, Carter not only makes sure her company stays on top of the latest technology trends and how they can be incorporated into the workforce, but makes sure other companies recognize that potential, as well.

To learn more, we chatted with Carter about what exactly a “social business” is, why it’s beneficial, and how companies can start to adopt that kind of forward-thinking strategy in their business and hiring practices....