What are some "wildcard" trends we might see in technology marketing over the coming year?

This is a great question because technology marketers are spending so much time, effort, and money on such a wide variety of initiatives right now that it's hard to imagine that there's a wildcard out there. Most of this time, effort, and money, however, is being spent on execution oriented activities such as marketing automation and social media. These efforts tend to quickly gravitate towards the tactics of executing a campaign or program and it's rare that technology marketers spend a sufficient amount of time on strategic marketing activities.

With that in mind, here's a contrarian view on where technology marketing is headed in 2012 - technology marketers will return to strategic marketing. And here are three specific areas where we'll see that happen:

1. Revisiting positioning - Inbound marketing, demand generation, social media, etc... none of it matters if a company doesn't have a strong position. The fastest growing technology companies don't exhibit any consistent patterns when it comes to marketing execution (in fact for a long time, some of them didn't even do any marketing - see Google), but they all share one common marketing characteristic - they've created a strong, memorable position in the mind of their target customers. A handful of technology companies do a good job of this already and the efforts usually pay off in spades - think Salesforce.com. That's a powerful position that now allows Salesforce to leverage social media, inbound marketing, and all of the other tactics du jour without even really trying. Expect technology marketers to realize that many of their tactics don't work without a position that resonates in the mind of the customer.

2. Tighter coupling with the product - The internet and social media in particular is enabling new forms of accountability and transparency in the technology industry. Now, technology marketers must deliver on the promises they make during their marketing and sales cycles. Does the product really deliver on what marketing and sales are claiming? It better, especially in this new age of customer to customer communication.

3. The consumerization of IT marketing - For the last couple of years, we've heard a lot about the consumerization of IT, but we haven't heard about the consumerization of IT marketing. A lot of IT products have evolved to a point of being more consumer-like in nature. They are easier to use and easier to buy. But most vendor sales and marketing efforts seem to be stuck in enterprise mode. There are signs of a transformation that will make technology marketing more consumer in nature. For example, some vendor sales organizations have optimized for lighter weight telesales operations and many technology start ups are taking a fun, friendly, consumer approach to their corporate marketing efforts, even when the target market is the Fortune 500.