We get excited when we get a chance to ahead forward with our full-service clients and strategize on the trends and tools that that will shape the coming year. Recently we gave some general ideas on how to create a social marketing plan for 2012. Today we’ll build on that and share some of the insight and best practices we’ve been developing with our premium clients.

As always, to go deeper on how each of these concepts can be integrated into your plans for next year, simply contact us. Without further ado, here are three important trends to bank on in 2012:

Go Mobile: Mobile continues to be adopted heavily as a research and purchasing tool by savvy consumers, accounting for 14% of all Black Friday traffic by some reports. Marketers should view it as a core tenet of 2012 planning. Stay ahead of the curve in 2012 and interact with your on-the-go audience in fun and unique ways. Utilize check-ins, instant offers or coupons to engage your audience in real-time. Think about using QR codes, which are underused and often misunderstood; when used properly they can help drive consumer behavior and can be a great compliment to a promotion such as a sweepstakes. Go beyond the web and reach customers in person or through print ads that utilize QR codes to drive consumers to your website, social channels, or a dedicated microsite.

Go Cross-Platform: Cross-channel promotions are becoming more essential than ever, as Google+ and other platforms continue to grow in popularity and cater to different user types and behaviors. The most social brands on the web are already experimenting with Google+ to find ways to authentically interact with their audience on this emerging platform. Google already announced that promotions cannot be hosted on the social network, surprising many brands that look to promotions to grow their audiences and interact with their fans. Instead, brands can use dedicated microsites, promoted and linked from their Google+ pages like they already do with Twitter sweepstakes, as the hub of a promotion geared toward their Google+ audiences. Microsites are the perfect way to allow engagement for users from their preferred networks, while controlling the visual branding, sharing tools and features.

Get In the Cloud: You know about the cloud, but you thought it was just for storage, security or distributed processing? It’s time to take your marketing into the cloud, too. Proactive brand marketers, already investing resources to engage audiences across social channels, think of their marketing as an always-on service targeted across a vast network of consumers, rather than a series of one-off campaigns and promotions. They use technology partners to deliver on-demand marketing utilities, ranging from promotions to branded apps to powerful back-end management and metrics dashboard.

You can start integrating the cloud by licensing a Software-as-a-Service tool (such as the Votigo Platform for creating audience engaging apps across all social platforms) or by tapping into a powerful API which your own developers can use to build out the social marketing apps that your need to take your audience to the next level.

Mobile…cross-platform…cloud.  Three technology trends in a grander context, and three critical components of your 2012 plan.  Check back here often, sign up to hear from us, or follow us on Twitter for frequent updates, offers, and examples of great executions.

It’s an exciting week for us at Votigo as we go on a mini-roadshow to debut the Votigo Platform, our recently-announced self-service interface for launching branded social media promotions.

Using Votigo’s self-service platform, brands can now launch promotions apps for Facebook brand pages using the same powerful technology that we have used to launch promotions for our full-service clients since 2007.  The first promotions available include video or photo contests and sweepstakes for Facebook brand pages.  The launch is in invite-only beta (request an invitation here) and for the next few weeks, beta users can launch promotions for just a few cents each (in exchange for two cents worth of feedback).

Starting tonight, and all day tomorrow and Wednesday, we will be at the DEMO in Santa Clara, CA, among the nearly 20 technology companies debuting new products in the DEMO Showcase while yet-to-launch products compete nearby for $1M in funding. DEMO also features an incredible agenda headlined by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Box founder Aaron Levie, and Intel chairman  Bill Campbell.

If you are at DEMO, please stop by the Showcase.  You can also follow #democon on Twitter.

On Thursday night, we’ll back in our own backyard (one of them anyway) for BoulderBeta. This year’s 6th anniversary tour of what was originally SFBeta now includes San Francisco (Tuesday) and Boulder (Thursday), plus Seattle, New York and Boston in October, and Dublin in November.
Joining us Thursday night will be Crowdspoke, MetroGnome, Mshopper, splick-it, and spotinfluence among other great companies and start-ups based in the thriving Boulder and Colorado tech scene. Hope to see you there if you are nearby. And if you have any questions about these events (there’s still time to register for both) or the Votigo Platform beta, please contact us.