New from The Marketing Companion! Your favorite social media personalities as bendable action figures.

Just $12.99. Limited quantities available except for the Mark Schaefer edition. We have plenty of those.

One of my favorite activities is thinking and talking about what's coming next and there is nobody more fun to have that kind of discussion with than Tom Webster as we take on what's next in digital marketing. On the latest Marketing Companion, Tom and I introduce the Marketing Companion Holiday Catalog (and our new League of Legends Action Figures!) and dive into some things we're watching for 2015:

• Why podcasting is having "a moment" and why agencies are behind a growing success
• The mega-trend that may be forging all other digital trends
• Billboards ... a trend?
• The missing link to integrated marketing
• Malignant complexity and its challenge to every marketer
• Facebook -- are businesses going to be in or out? A flight away from Facebook and how it might play out.
• The commoditization of Big Data and the trickle down to small businesses.

And many thanks to our friend Ralph Cipolla for the Awesome Graphic today! Ready to rock? Here we go!

Resources mentioned in this show

Content Shock post Old Spice integrated campaign Tableau software

Please support our extraordinary sponsors. Our content is free because of their generosity.

gShift’s Web Presence Analytics platform provides agencies and brands with search, social and mobile content marketing data in one place. Monitor and report on an entire web presence. Create smarter, faster content through gShift’s proprietary data. Report on the engagement and performance of your content marketing investment.

Our podcast is also brought to you by Voices Heard Media. Please check out this tremendous resource for scaling social media engagement. Take a look at building an engaged and relevant audience through innovative new game, analytics, and polling platforms.

I always find it curious when people compare our social media presence with our REAL presence in the "real world." What makes people think that Facebook is NOT the real world? Increasingly, we are beginning to see these lines blur. We create our personality on Facebook. But Facebook is also creating our personality. Facebook changes our behavior. Seriously. Recently, Facebook demonstrated how it can alter our moods by manipulating our content.  This is a company that can affect our opinions. New research shows that social proof on Facebook contributes to our view of our self-worth, quantifies the value of friends and shapes what content we share. Where will it lead, and in the near-term, what does this mean for marketers? Fascinating question, right? So fascinating in fact, Tom Webster and I devoted an entire podcast to it. This one covers a lot of territory in 30 minutes!

• The power of social proof in our online marketing world
• Content competition and the homogenization of our streams
• How we are being "trained" on what to post on Facebook
• The Facebook reward system that is creating our online personas
• What are the implications for brand content
• Could Facebook manipulate political campaigns? Is it already happening?

I'm sure you are anxious to get right into this one! Let's get on with the show! Resources mentioned in this show The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) by Donna Tartt Suttree by Cormac McCarthy The Counselor by Cormac McCarthy Marketing Podcasts Dotcom by Jay Baer Original Atlantic article on Facebook numbers by Benjamin Grosser

Please support our extraordinary sponsors. Our content is free because of their generosity.

gShift’s Web Presence Analytics platform provides agencies and brands with search, social and mobile content marketing data in one place. Monitor and report on an entire web presence. Create smarter, faster content through gShift’s proprietary data. Report on the engagement and performance of your content marketing investment.

Our podcast is also brought to you by Voices Heard Media. Please check out this tremendous resource for scaling social media engagement. Take a look at building an engaged and relevant audience through innovative new game, analytics, and polling platforms.