[wire] stone

In my recent post, 2011: Year of the Wave, I proposed that digital applications, experience layers, game play, and social commerce are massive, rising waves, elevating brands who understand them out to new heights, potentially crushing others that don’t.

Today, my co-worker, and [wire] stone’s analytics guru Wendy Ertter found an eConsultancy blog post full of account planning presentations (here). Sorting through the fluff lurked an intriguing-yet-simple framework from Zigurds Zakis called “Account Planning in the Digital Age” slideshare:

Looks pretty simple, right. The big issues, interconnected. Technology is clearly now a key part of the account planner’s formula, as Zakis represents here. Adding “technology” to the standard mix of people, culture, and economy — the general landscape — is a major step forward. The right planning perspective.

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While we can’t see most of them, waves of all different shapes, sizes, sounds, dimensions, and dynamics crest and crash around us all the time. I’ve been thinking a lot about waves lately — 2011 is shaping up to be the “Year Of The Wave”.

From the most astounding we can imagine (Japan’s quake, resulting tsunami, and still-unfolding recovery and nuclear meltdowns); to the bizarre (anti-union and small-government movements in the US and Europe); to geo-political transformation (Tunisia, Egypt, maybe Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ivory Coast), these things don’t seem like isolated moments in time.

For global brands, the world is no less undulating. Troughs and crests seem to rise and fall at unprecedented scale – Facebook and smartphone adoption are two obvious examples. But this year, a few are beginning to crest into massive forces — and brands find themselves going back to school to re-learn the physics of wave dynamics. Here’s a short list of others to consider:

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