At this time of year, it’s always fun to both reflect on what we’ve seen, heard, and learned over the past 12 months and to look ahead to what’s still to come. Over the upcoming days, I’ll be writing about some of the key trends I see for Marketing Automation in 2010.To kick it off, here’s trend number one.

Trend 1. Inbound Marketing “Meets” Marketing Automation
“Inbound Marketing” had a big 2009. The Inbound Marketing Summit expanded to three events (looks like they’re doing four in 2010), Hubspot continues to do a great job evangelizing the art of “getting found by customers”, and Social Media, a pillar of Inbound Marketing, might have gotten a *little* attention! Eloqua just made an announcement about this too.

Getting found, generating web traffic, and converting that traffic are all admirable goals found within Inbound Marketing. However, in a complex selling environment (usually B2B), it’s not enough. After the lead is captured, lead nurturing and lead scoring need to kick in immediately to develop relationship with the prospect.

Do Your Prospects Travel a Predictable, Linear Path?

Why? The buying process in a complex selling environment is not linear – far from it! In fact, the buyer’s interactions are all over the place – up, down, left, right, zig-zag … kind of like a game of chutes and ladders.

How does a business determine who has done more than just respond (shown inbound interest)? Which inbound prospects are truly engaged? In an eCommerce environment, the sale is fulfilled online, in a shopping cart, and it’s easy to see who completed the transactions or who abandoned. In a complex sale, however, the sale gets fulfilled through a person. A connection needs to be made, but up to 70% of inbound leads aren’t “sales ready”. In this environment, there needs to be more. After inbound interest, Marketing Automation enables delivery of appropriate messages, emails, website personalization – all designed to drive a “right-time” interaction with sales.

It comes down to a simple hard truth: Inbound Marketing by itself isn’t enough in B2B. Maximize the revenue opportunity from inbound leads and optimize the burgeoning customer relationship after and expression of inbound interest is expressed through Lead Management.

Read more: Paul Dunay recently called this Inbound Interaction Management on his Buzz Marketing for Technology blog.

Next: Marketing Automation 2010 Trend 2 of 5 – Measuring Marketing All the Way Through to Revenue …

The most successful companies in the tech industry learned long ago that they would be far stronger if they created an ecosystem of allies who build businesses on top of theirs. They designed their technology as platforms, or foundations, for others to build upon. (Think Microsoft’s Windows and the hundreds of thousands of applications created to run on top of it.)

Now governments are following the same path–most notably the Obama administration. It’s attempting to create an innovation platform that organizations and businesses can use to make themselves stronger and/or help improve the performance of government. Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and promoter of the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 phenomena, calls this the Obama administration’s most important technology initiative. “The government is starting to think like a platform provider rather than an application provider,” he wrote me in an e-mail.

The most significant step so far has been Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s Data.gov project. Launched on May 21, Data.gov is a collection of federal data housed on the www.data.gov Web site that’s open to public access. It’s not just a bunch of impenetrable databases, through. Kundra and his team has provided easy-to-use tools that people can use to make use of the data–and they welcome suggestions on additional data sets and tools that people would find useful. The project launched with 47 data sets and now hosts over 118.000 of them.

A couple of examples of how Data.gov has been put to use:

Datamasher: Allows people to compare vital economic and demographic data by state, and view it graphically. There are more than 1,500 mashups of data available so far.

FlyOnTime.us: Allows travelers to see the on-time records of specific flights between cities.

One unintended effect: In an era when traditional media is short of people and resources, non-journalists can do their own investigating and data mining.

This notion of providing an innovation platform is central to the national innovation strategy being developed by the federal Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. He’s in the final stages of working up his platform for consumer e-health, and says he’ll reveal the details soon. For now, here’s a high-level teaser: “The government doesn’t have to run everything. We can create the conditions whereby we improve our collective well-being.”

I have a feeling that Big Government, Obama-style, is going to be a new sort of Big Government. Likely better, too.

IBM today unveiled a new software platform designed to fundamentally change the way that local, state and national governments manage and deliver services to the public.

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Google Social Search is ready to surface content created by your friends in regular search results pages.

(Credit: Google)

Google is ready to show off its concept for social search while it figures out what to do with Twitter’s fire hose of data.

Last week at the Web 2.0 conference Google’s Marissa Mayer demonstrated the service, which will go live as a Google Labs project on Monday. Google Social Search links the concepts of so-called “real-time” search with Google Profiles and custom search results, allowing searchers to find content created by friends or contacts with Google Profiles.

Google Social Search was developed separately without the Twitter deal in mind, said Amit Singal, a Google fellow. The opt-in service provides your Gmail contacts and friends on public social-networking services with the content you’ve linked to your Google Profile, such as blogs, Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, or any number of published material.

That means that if you’ve linked your personal blog to your Google Profile, your contacts will be able to see your blog posts related to a given query directly in their search results pages. Those links will be placed at the bottom of the search results page for now, and searchers will also have the option to refine the search results page with a new “social” link on the left-hand side of the page to focus just on content from your network.

Public social-networking content from friends of friends will also be available through this service, with a description of how that person’s content is linked to your network appearing within the search result.

Originally posted at Relevant Results