Well here we are, the end of another Alchemis year. As I sit here shining my baubles ready for the festive break, I look back at a year of winning new business and what has been pushing prospects’ buttons.

It’s been a good all rounder, with my clients winning business at a steady rate. Across the board most marketing disciplines have been successful in securing new clients, but the unique and still relatively untapped area that’s been winning new business has been social media marketing.

Social media marketing is as hot a topic as it was a year ago, but you would be amazed at how prospects in all sectors have yet to realise what can be done. It’s not all about a fan page on Facebook but what you do with it that matters.

The great thing is that a vast range of clients in the marketing services sector can help companies and brands to harness social media successfully; micro sites, viral campaigns, search marketing, and even market research can all be applied.

I will certainly be pushing this angle next year, as there are significant opportunities as more marketing budgets are being shifted towards social media.

One of my favourites of 2010, was the Marmite Bars Facebook campaign.

The campaign asked the public to become part of a travelling video diary, and were given samples of the cereal bars to have their reaction videoed with some funny results. Brave move.

If you can’t be a banker then it looks like social media is the place to be.

A recent survey from a digital recruitment agency which analyzed data from around one thousand vacancies concluded that the average Account Director salary within the social media discipline grew by a whopping 19% in the first half of 2010 compared to the second half of last year. The average rise in digital industry salaries as a whole was a more modest 3.4% since the second half of 2009.

This follows the creation of more social media roles by big brands such as Sky, Starbucks and O2 and an ever increasing amount of new business within this field.

I should point out that average salaries in social media are still below equivalents elsewhere in the industry, but with this growth rate the balance of power within the marketing mix is certainly shifting in favour of the geek and this is being reflected more and more in the type of services offered by our client base. Watch this space…

I read an article in Marketing Week recently which explored the new buzzword of digital marketing, ‘Social eCommerce’.

Social eCommerce is the integration of eCommerce and social media and it’s a movement that has really taken off in the past few months. However, I do wonder whether this concept has been introduced to the digital mix too soon, especially at a time when some retailers have not even mastered the art of providing good transactional sites and many websites still remain difficult to navigate and fail to entice customers to buy their products.

Amazon is one of the first companies to embrace social eCommerce and they have definitely earned that right, as advocators of the eCommerce explosion.

So what have Amazon actually done?

Amazon has launched a new program that lets shoppers access their Facebook pages directly through Amazon.com. The program allows them to receive personalised movies, music and book recommendations based on the preferences listed within their profiles on the social networking site. The application also keeps track of friend’s birthdays and can automatically provide you with gift suggestions based on their listed preferences.

Amazon, sensing the backlash about privacy, has already promised not to share information with Facebook or any outside sources. However, despite this promise, there still seems to be scepticism about other companies going down this route and it remains to be seen how popular this new feature will be.

Whatever the cost, brands in this day and age need to be continuously demonstrating that they are moving with the times and this is probably why Amazon have been prepared to take the risk.

Please let us know if any of you have had any experiences with social eCommerce and whether you feel it will take off.