Recently analyst firm Frost & Sullivan celebrated its 50^th anniversary (happy anniversary!) by releasing a list of the 50 emerging technologies most likely to make a meaningful impact on the world. The firm boldly predicts that their list of technologies will change industries, research agendas and even how we live.

Bold stuff for a list of 50, but after eyeballing the list (and having to look up a few terms) it does seem to be solid. I am most excited about:

• Wearable sensors (Star Trek is here!),
• Personalized medicine therapeutics (I’m over 40),
• Nanoviricides (Had to look it up, again 40+), and
• Carbon-fixing technologies (Do I need to say why?).

• Wearable sensors (Think about it),
• Artificial photosynthesis (Not sure why but seems like something we should not mess with, i.e. Jurassic Park but with plants),
• Energy harvesting (Can you say Matrix? I saw what Keanu Reeves when through), and
• Inductive wireless power transfer (I would worry about walking to a wireless “third rail” and getting an unexpected and unwanted jolt of energy).

Seriously, from the list below what excites or worries you…and what did the smart folks at Frost & Sullivan miss?

1. Accelerated carbonation technology

2. Biomass-to-renewable oil conversion technology

3. Microchannel process technology

4. Carbide-derived carbon (CDC) technology

5. Breathable antibacterial coatings, products

6. Plastic conversion to oil by gasolysis

7. Algal-based platform for production of a wide variety of chemicals

8. Destagnation and destratification of water

9. Non-woven coating spray-on technology

10. Artificial photosynthesis

11. BPA-free epoxy lining of plastic bottles

12. Hydrogen storage technology

13. Production of liquid biofuel from industrial waste gases containing carbon monoxide

14. Mini-chromosome gene stacking technology

15. Nanoparticles for use as anti-viral agents or “nanoviricides”

16. Substitute pancreas for diabetics using stem cells

17. Wireless sensors and ubiquitous sensors

18. Energy harvesting

19. Wearable sensors

20. Fiber optic sensor for security

21. Structural health monitoring sensors

22. Intelligent robots

23. Flexible electronics

24. 3D integration

25. Smart grid networks

26. Mobile projection systems

27. Advanced storage technologies (MRAM/PCM)

28. Hyperspectral imaging

29. Haptics and touch technology

30. Energy-efficient lighting technologies

31. EUV for higher transistor density

32. Energy-efficient variable frequency drives (VFD)

33. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems

34. Micro and nano manufacturing technologies

35. Machine vision systems

36. Charging infrastructure for electric vehicles

37. Inductive wireless power transfer

38. 3D cell culture systems

39. Personalized medicine therapeutics

40. Dendritic cell therapy

41. Vaccines for infectious disease and cancer

42. High-throughput sequencing technology

43. The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution

44. Quantum computing

45. Energy management and carbon accounting systems

46. Fuel cell technology

47. Sea water desalination technologies

48. Green building technologies

49. Carbon-fixing technologies

50. Medical imaging technology

The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) released the sixth annual State of the Industry: Technology in Georgia Report on March 28, 2012. As one of the nation’s leading technology states, during 2011, Georgia’s technology community had an economic impact of $113.1 billion in sales. Technology now accounts for more than one-third of Georgia’s total exports, and the state gained 6,000 technology jobs in 2011.

The technology industry is a major part of Georgia’s economy and vital to the state’s future. TAG’s annual report provides stakeholders with the information needed to support legislative, economic development and promotional efforts for the information technology sector. To learn more about the top 10 findings of 2012 State of the Industry: Technology in Georgia report, visit www.tagstateoftheindustry.com.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Marketers ‘get’ social
from BtoB Magazine
For those who still believe b-to-b companies don’t get social media or don’t care, last year should have been a wake-up call.

Leaders See Positive Role and Growth for PR
from Culpwrit
Conducted by the USC Annenberg Strategic Communications and Public Relations Center in conjunction (SCPRC) with the Institute for Public Relations (IPR), the GAP VII study summarizes industry perspective from 620 senior communicators.

Facebook buys Instagram: What does it mean for your brand?
from PR Daily
Facebook announced on Monday that it acquired the popular photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion, marking the social network’s biggest acquisition to date. What does this mean for brands? Here’s London-based PR professional Adam Vincenzini’s take.

The Perfect Length Of A Presentation Is….
from Mr. Media Training
Twenty minutes. At least that’s what new research from Maureen Murphy at the University of North Texas (UNT) suggests. Author Susan Weinschenk, writer of the forthcoming book 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, agrees. She points out that the terrific TED talks are usually 20 minutes long.

What you need to know about the state of social media
from Ragan.com
Social Media Examiner recently released its 4^th annual survey of social media marketing; 3,800 marketers answered the survey. Eighteen percent of B2B marketers, as opposed to 14 percent of B2C marketers, say they’ve used social media for three or more years.

LinkedIn introduces business targeting tools
from BtoB Magazine
LinkedIn Corp. will launch two new tools to enable businesses to better target followers and report on their brand engagement.

PR pros, 10 ways to woo journalists on Twitter
from Ragan.com
Twitter isn’t just for building your loyal fan base. It’s also an excellent place to start building your network of journalists. Here are 10 tips to help you begin making valuable connections with journalists.

6 tips for becoming more persuasive on social media
from The Publicity Hound’s Blog
Social media provides many tools that help marketers, businesses, and bloggers persuade readers to become repeat visitors and eventually customers. Here are six tips for effectively persuading visitors with social media.

How to create a Facebook page that’s irresistible to fans
from PR Daily
For social media managers, Facebook brand pages are a relatively simple way to connect with fans in real time. Making your Facebook page a destination isn’t easy, but some brands are doing it with aplomb. Here’s how.

Targeted media to grow 8.1% this year
from BtoB Magazine
The targeted media category, which includes b-to-b media, branded entertainment, direct marketing, outsourced custom content and pure-play consumer Internet & mobile services, is expected to grow 8.1% this year.

At a local presentation, a tech-savvy audience began tweeting at both the presenter and the organization only to find the Twitter handle for the presenter was a young poker player in the west coast who looked nothing like the presenter. Although the audience quickly adjusted by tweeting at the company instead of the individual, I’m sure the poker player was bewildered by the mentions accompanied with technical jargon about a presentation he clearly did not present.

While it’s not the end of the world if your company’s CEO doesn’t tweet, a Burson-Marstellar study in 2011 found that 77 percent of Fortune Global 100 companies are using Twitter. Although many brands post regularly on Twitter, how many times have you seen the CEO or CMO tweet? Outside of the SMB world, I’m guessing not very often. While they are few and far between, a study by social media branding firm BRANDfog found that consumers and employees regard company leaders who engage on social media platforms positively therefore affecting the view of not just the brand, but also of the executive leadership team. Here are a few statistics pulled from the survey:

• According to the respondents, 78 percent said CEO participation in social media leads to better communication, 71 percent said it leads to improved brand image, and 64 percent said it provides more transparency.
• In fact, 86 percent of respondents rated CEO social media engagement as somewhat important, very important or mission-critical. At 94 percent, respondents said C-suite social media participation actually enhances brand image.
• Looking internally, 82 percent of employee respondents trust a company more when the CEO and leadership team communicate via social media.

Although these numbers clearly indicate the importance of C-suite transparency in social media, C-suite buy-in along with speed of adoption of new online technologies continue to be two major challenges for many organizations. To view graphs and additional information, read the following article.

Recently I watched Sherry Turkle’s TED presentation “Connected, but alone?” It got me thinking about how as professional communicators we are expecting more from technology and much less from each other. This “new kind of connection” as Turkle puts it is not one we should be proud of; rather, it’s something that should worry us.

One 18-year-old boy she recently interviewed wistfully said to her, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.” WOW! This is just sad and is not good for our profession.

The art of true conversations with the give and take, the half-baked comments and the real person-to-person connections is what makes us human. It is also what makes the marketing and PR industry both exciting and important.

Turkle, a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, gave me pause to think about how we use technology to communicate or to avoid real communications.

If you sleep with your smartphone, prefer to be with your iPad than with a friend, or favor emails over conversations with colleagues, you need to find 19 minutes and 48 seconds to see what Turkle has to say.  In fact, I think anyone that is paid to communicate professionally should see this presentation.

It just might cause you to rethink a few things. At the very least, I hope it will give you something to talk about, with maybe a coworker over coffee in the break room.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Study: ‘Big Data’ poses opportunities, challenges
from BtoB Magazine
According to “Marketing in the Digital Age,” 75% of respondents said understanding “Big Data” can dramatically improve their marketing efforts, and 90% said digital marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs. However, 58% said they lacked the skills and technology to perform data analytics, and more than 70% said they aren’t able to leverage the value of customer data.

12 incredibly useful digital tools for PR
from PR Daily
What are the key social media tools that PR professionals need to go from bumbling amateur to results-driven superstar? Here are 12 of them.

Facebook Explores Search
from March Communications
Though Mark Zuckerberg tends to deny direct competition with Google, Facebook is rumored to be entering the search market. Though search has not been a priority for the social networking powerhouse, this Businessweek article reports that more than 20 Facebook engineers are busy working on an improved search engine within the site.

10 Ways to Humanize Your Brand On Social Media
from Mashable Business
Marketers are suckers for a catch phrase, from “join the conversation” to “think like a publisher.” Now, thanks largely to Facebook Timeline for brand pages, the new marketing slogan has quickly become, “humanize the brand.”

15 ways to boost your tweets’ click-through rate
from Ragan.com
How do you get someone to click on your links on Twitter? It’s one of the most pressing questions I see day in, day out—and rightly so. Attracting more people who like what you are posting is essential to success on Twitter. Here are 15 top techniques for improving your click rate.

Report: No. 1 social media question: ‘How do I measure?’
from Ragan.com
SocialMediaExaminer.com released its fourth annual social media report and, based on the responses of more than 3,800 surveyed, it reveals how businesses are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. In reading the report, there were several conclusions that I found interesting for anyone grappling with how to effectively integrate social media into their communications plans.

Custom Content Conference: New technologies enable, complicate content marketing
from BtoB Magazine
The major theme dominating the three-day Custom Content Conference, last month in Washington, D.C., was how technology has both enabled and complicated “engagement,” that elusive goal of all content marketing.

8 simple, yet powerful types of headlines
from PR Daily
The first thing most readers notice in print or online is a headline. Here are eight categories appropriate for selling something, whether it’s a product or an idea, along with a sample headline of that type:

The Objective News Story: Dead or Alive?
from Crawford by James Crawford
The New York Times story excoriating China for engaging in pay-for-play media, much of it placed by U.S. PR firms, might have horrified us all but for two things. First, the Times is a century late breaking the story — paying for coverage has long been common practice in other lands, and not just in emerging nations. Second, U.S. media are in no position to point fingers.

Top Five Reasons To Work With Startups On The PR Front
from Storytelling Techniques For Effective Business Communications
I decided to draft my own top five list on the benefits of working with start-up ventures.

I recently attended a Technology of Georgia (TAG) association meeting on alternative payments. The discussion centered around evolving consumer payment behavior and the proliferation of interactive technologies, among other things. Several familiar names kept popping up—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Paypal. Javelin Strategy refers to these organizations as the Gang of Four (and possibly five). I have used four of the five to make payments, and I’m not alone.

The million dollar question is how consumers perceive trust, innovation and privacy in relation to these brands versus their primary financial institution. In the past year, consumers have shifted away from large financial institutions to smaller community institutions, signaling a sea change. But will 2012 be the year mobile payments truly take hold?

According to Yankee Group, more than 2 billion new users have adopted mobile technology in the past five years. Additionally, the firm projects U.S. tablet sales to total nearly 25 million in 2012 alone. Predictably, flip phones are going the way of the buffalo and smart phone purchases are increasing. I purchased a tablet in the last five years and I’ve been a smartphone user even longer than that. Though I have purchased items with my phone in the past, I’m not entirely ready to ditch my wallet yet in favor of mobile.

A surprising trend among smartphone purchases is the growth in the prepaid market. According to The Stevenson Company’s latest TraQline Wireless report, smartphones are gaining share at a rapid rate in both prepaid and postpaid, and now represent more than 50 percent of all phone purchases.  As a percentage of total cell phone purchases, prepaid purchases have increased 370 basis points from 2009-2011, and now represent 17 percent of total cell phone purchases. The top five prepaid smart phone retailers gained share year over year.

So what does this year hold for mobile commerce? Only time will tell. How you are using your mobile phone today is likely to evolve with the options available. As more retailers make paying by phone an option, it will be interesting to watch consumer adoption rates of this technology.

What if achieving success was as simple as being happy? While we are wired to believe that happiness stems from success, psychologist and author Shawn Achor argues that the reverse is true. According to him and other experts that study happiness, work will become more productive, enjoyable and rewarding if we find our happy place.

The author of The Happiness Advantage delivers this message in his TEDxBloomington presentation that the Arketi account team viewed earlier this year. Achor states that 75 percent of our job success is predicted not by intelligence, but by our optimism, social support network and the ability to manage energy and stress in a positive way. To achieve this, we must rewire our brains to think more positively.

One way to do this, Achor explains, is to keep track of three things that you are grateful for each day. In just a two minute span of time repeated 21 days in a row, it is possible to train our brains to think more optimistically and more successfully.

Following the presentation, each Arketi account member received a small notebook to do just that. I’ve been writing down my three gratitudes each day and have continued doing so past the recommended 21-day period. For me, this exercise has been easy to implement into my daily routine, and I truly feel as though my overall level of happiness has increased as a result.

I encourage you to give this exercise a try! If you’re a team leader, consider sharing Achor’s presentation and help to make your employees happier. In just 42 minutes, you can unearth a happier and more successful you. And that return on investment is definitely worth it.

Here are our top 10 picks for this week:

Guide to infographics: 3 essential tips for creating them
from PR Daily
If you know the underlying principles that help shape the truly good ones, you’ll have a better handle on infographics design and how to build a visual winner from the ground up.

The Best PR Plans and Results: Insights from PRSA Silver Anvil Judging
from Authentic PR Counsel
Having judged in many different categories over the years, I continued to see consistent patterns in the most brilliant PR programs and, of course, the less than brilliant, no matter what the category.

How B2B companies are using social media
from PR Daily News Feed
B-to-B marketers have achieved some fairly impressive successes—particularly when it comes to selling, reports an IBM study. The study revealed a 400 percent increase in sales in the first quarter tied to a pilot program of social selling. That and more are included in this infographic from InsideView.

The Importance of Public Relations(hips)
from March Communications
I had the pleasure of attending the Publicity Club of New England’s tech industry panel last week. Whereas past events focused on making the most of product launches, for example, the journalist speakers this go-round stressed the best ways of building solid, mutually beneficial relationships with influencers.

5 ways to use Twitter more effectively
from Ragan.com
Social media scientist Dan Zarrella recently published an infographic with great insights on when and how to tweet. Among the infographic’s highlights: Place links 25 percent of the way through your tweet, include widely retweeted words and phrases, and tweet later in the day.

Was Analytics Google’s REAL Social Media Missing Link?
from Marketing Pilgrim
With today’s announcement of social media integration into Google Analytics we may now have a vision into one way that Google could put a hurt on the likes of Facebook and Twitter without having to be a social media giant.

Study: Only 21 percent of companies measure social media
from PR Daily
Despite widespread use of social media among businesses, the majority of organizations don’t measure social media ROI. According to a recent survey by SHRM, only 21 percent of organizations measure social media ROI.

10 types of content that drive comments and shares
from Ragan.com
A while ago we talked about 10 content ideas that elicit comments and shares. The comments were full of more really good ideas. Here are 10 additional ideas to spark comments and shares.

A Fool-Proof Formula for Easily Creating Compelling Content
from copyblogger
The secret to prolifically creating excellent content isn’t inspiration or brilliance — it’s found in structure, planning, and research.

PR budgets up, but AOR relationships on the decline
from PRWeek US
PR budgets are mostly up compared with two years ago, and measurement and evaluation are also on the rise, according to findings from the USC Annenberg Strategic Communication and Public Relations Center.

Where did all the marketing talent go?

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece recently around the pending IPO of social media juggernaut Facebook and whether or not its 27-year-old CEO is up for the job of becoming the youngest CEO in history to lead a Fortune 1000 company. The same “youth vs. experience” debate seems to be playing out among the ranks of B2B marketing organizations – creating a serious challenge for CMOs and Senior Marketing execs.

If you look at the ads being placed by technology organizations, it appears organizations are placing higher value on enthusiasm, passion and understanding of latest marketing trends than overall years of experience.  And they seem willing to trade a title for less experience –and the lower compensation demands that often accompany less experienced candidates.  For example, I came across a recruiting ad from a small technology company that is becoming all too common in recruiting circles. Looking for a Director of Marketing (a “second in command” type position from the description) to drive a large part of the company’s demand generation and web strategy efforts, the company outlined a long list of attributes including enthusiasm, passion for marketing, high energy, etc.  The experience required for this Director level job: just three years.

While I’m willing to concede that youth brings fresh ideas, enthusiasm and a generational perspective that those of us in the grey-hair camp might struggle with from time to time, I can’t help wondering if this technology organization might be better served looking for a more seasoned executive to lead such an important part of their operation.  And if B2B marketing organizations overall wouldn’t be better off placing a higher value on seasoned staff.  Especially as marketers are being asked to do more with less and make every activity count in a measurable way, does it not make sense to seek out the “been there, done that” base?

Consider the following recent research items:

• From a UK-based Fournaise Group study — 73% of CEO’s stated that “marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be.”
• From Sirius Decisions research — less than $1,000 is spent annually on training of marketing personnel
• From the same study — only 1.1% of Marketing execs responded with a yes when asked if their marketing organization had the right skill set to succeed.

There’s no doubt skill requirements have changed and ongoing training investment must increase if we expect to keep our seat at the executive table.  But maybe it makes sense to look for a few more seasoned marketing professionals and help them sharpen their skills with some of those training dollars rather than default to a younger candidate. It may cost a bit more up front and you may have to hear a few war stories about how it was “back in the day”, but you may find that creating bench strength by adding a few veterans that are willing to add to their skills portfolio leaves you better prepared for the challenges ahead.