As a marketer, I read David Mullen’s 5 PR Predictions and think he has some great points.  I want to focus on his point about measuring people.  I agree with David that we will start measuring people instead of impressions, but I think it will go a lot further than that.  I don’t think the economy is turning around so quickly, which will cause companies to be very “bottom line centric”.  Companies will want to show how their investment in Web 2.0 has paid off and that will mean qualifying the active users/visitors.  It will mean developing ways to report how effective social networking tools are, like managing a twitter account.  Yes, twitter allows the company to talk to it’s customers one-to-one, but did that person buy something?  Did they click on an ad?  Did they refer someone?  How long did the cycle take? 

I think 2009 is going to be the year of the number crunchers and web analysts.  Maybe it is time to take a statistics refresher course.

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I think Al Gore’s work to make people aware of global warming has been a fantastic marketing campaign.  His movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘, started to raise awareness and the public conversation about global warming and climate change.  In the last few months, he helped launch an organization called We Can Solve It, whose motto is “we can solve the climate crisis”.  This organization is marketing heavily and has not only made people aware of the issues, but is also instructing people how to help.  This means, they are trying to rally a grass roots following to solve the problem.  I think they have the right idea.

Imagine marketing AI as a problem that we haven’t solved yet, but can be solved!  Imagine a marketing effort that not only educated the people, but also wanted to activate the masses.  I think that in this day and age, one where web 2.0 and collaborative spaces have proven successful and extremely useful, we should be able to do it!  Now all I need are a few people to help me get the ball rolling.

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