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.

Would you like to ask a question of George Halvorson, the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, about health care reform and technology?

Please join me this Wednesday, November 18, 2009, from 2:30 – 3:30 pm New York time.  I’ll be live-tweeting a webcast with him.

You have a special opportunity to submit questions to him.

To ask a question, please include it in a comment below.  Or if you prefer, tweet it to me @smallbiztrends.   I will make sure your questions get passed along to him.  I can’t guarantee he’ll have time to answer all questions, but I will definitely pass them along.

Here are some questions that have already been floated by members of the Small Business Trends community:

1) Does there really have to be so much paperwork involved with health care?  Will we ever get to a system like some countries where it is paperless and takes a doctor or hospital just a few clicks to submit a claim?

2) Will things get better under the health care proposals being floated in Congress right now, or will the proposals increase bureaucracy, paperwork and costs?

3) Technology sounds great — but how exactly will technology make a difference in health care to the average person?

4) How will technology in health care impact those small businesses in the health care industry?  What about those not in the health care industry?

5) Will technology make health care better?  Or just more impersonal?

I’m sure you can think of other great questions.  Here are the event details:

What: “How Technology Will Make the Biggest Impact on Health Care Reform” with George Halvorson, the CEO of Kaiser Permanente

When: November 18, 2009:   2:30 – 3:30 pm Eastern (New York) time

Where: Online at INPUT / OUTPUT

Registration: Not required

Hashtag for tweeting: #hpio

PS, Many thanks to HP which is bringing us this event, and whose sponsorship of this site makes it possible for the Small Business Trends community to have this opportunity to participate.

From Small Business Trends

How Technology Will Make the Biggest Impact on Health Care Reform

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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