Keeping up with what’s trending on the internet is an essential part of managing online marketing and geo marketing. Advertisers must keep up with what is popular and topical across the internet in order to make sure their online marketing and mobile marketing remains relevant.

Trending on Twitter is the main way to keep up with what is happening on the net, however there are many tools to help make even greater sense of the wealth of topics being discussed online. Trendmaps.com allows users to see to see what is trending by location, showing a map with popular topics associated with different countries and regions, which proves very useful for geo marketing, as online marketing efforts can be tailored to individual countries depending on the hot topics of that country.

There are also further domestic sites such as What’s Trending which will provide explanations of the latest trends, and help marketers to understand why topics are popular. Geo marketing requires an understanding of individual territories however it is impossible for individuals to keep up with news in all targeted territories across the world so sites that provide help towards understanding are useful in online marketing.

Groups of users can also be targeted on Twitter by using a variety of search engines to find key words or hashtags for online marketing. This is not only limited to Twitter, Google provides a dedicated blog search engine much like it does for news or shopping.

If you want to evaluate your online marketing influence by your social media profile, one dedicated application is Klout, which measures how influencial you are online by your social networking followers and activity. However don’t expect to score a Klout of 100 unless you are Justin Bieber, the internet’s most influential personality, whose online marketing potential has recently been highlighted with fees paid for his tweets about Spotify.

Smartphones look set to play a key part in many consumers Christmas shopping as online marketing and new methods of mobile marketing play a greater role in product decisions. In America, two thirds of shoppers said that their smartphone would have a role in purchase decisions during the back to school shopping period.

For the much more lucrative Christmas period advertisers will look to increase their online marketing and mobile marketing efforts ever further. QR codes are one such methods of engaging customers though mobile marketing. The codes are displayed in store, on billboards or in a variety of media which can be scanned by a smartphone’s camera. The scanned code then links to a website, application or text message which can offer the user discounts or other ways to engage with the brand. The method has been around for a while but is growing in popularity as the hardware to engage with the codes becomes more readily available.

Most of the population of the US and the UK are unaware of QR codes and their mobile marketing intentions however in larger cities their presence may become unmissable. Ebay have launched a ‘pop-up’ store in London for five days over the Christmas period which will contain products with QR code links to their online marketing. There will be no over the counter purchases as the store simply acts as a vehicle to promote the online auction site. Larger retail stores such as Debenhams and John Lewis are also keen to make use of mobile marketing by displaying QR codes, while Starbucks teamed up with Lady Gaga to promote their online marketing efforts with a scavenger hunt to promote her new album.

While QR codes provide a convenience and a thrill from using the latest technology, many customers will simply be responding to online marketing from manually entering product information to their phones in store as mobile marketing offers a wider choice and greater price competition than the high street can.

Geo marketing has long had an important presence in online marketing, with many stores and restaurants making sure to promote their presence on Google Map and Facebook Places. However, geo marketing now has a more important role to play in online marketing as many social networking sites are now bringing geography into the equation.

Facebook’s new updates place greater emphasis on geography, with status updates now including the person’s location. Facebook photos can now also be tagged by location, and all the data about where a person is brings a new avenue for targeted online marketing. Facebook adverts traditionally targeted people by their interests and other data they had volunteered to the service. Now they have shared where they are, advertising can be localised. If they are currently there, businesses have the opportunity to target users with mobile marketing offers.

Foursquare is another popular social media app which has always had its focus on geography. The app’s philosophy is to allow users to get more from their city and see what their friends are up to. Of course this is where businesses can target them with mobile marketing by telling them what is going on in their city and providing offers.

This week the iPhone application ‘Oink’ launched promising to cover online reviews in their entirety, not just reviewing the restaurant but the specific meal. As apps such as Oink grow it will be crucial that customer satisfaction is met as smartphone users can share their approval or otherwise whilst still sat in the restaurant.

Geo marketing will continue to grow as location becomes an increasingly significant part of social media, and social media will continue to lead the way for new methods of online marketing and mobile marketing.

Adobe’s announcement last week that the most recent update of Flash player for mobiles has had a significant impact on the world of mobile marketing. Most notably it represents a victory for Apple, who opposed the use of Flash on their mobile devices, and a defeat for those who embraced it on theirs. It also has a significant impact on all mobile marketing activities which can no longer be ported from the flash version of the online marketing on a desktop computer to mobile marketing on portable devices in the future.

Apple’s late CEO and founder Steve Jobs vigorously opposed the use of Flash on the iPhone and iPad citing battery life and frequent crashing as the main reason not to include support for the plugin on Apple’s products. This was seen as a chink in the iPhone’s armoury by many, with Flash support being a key attribute of many devices, none more so than the Blackberry Playbook that sold Flash as its key advantage over the iPad in its print, television and online marketing, even using the song ‘Flash’ by Queen to emphasise Flash in its products. The announcement of the death of Flash appears to be nothing short of a PR disaster for the tablet now.

The news also brings problems for online marketing. Marketers’ expertise in Flash will no longer have any use when designing marketing content for mobiles. A lot of online marketing efforts also come from interactive media and games which are becoming more popular on the move as smartphones become more powerful and wireless networks more readily available. Smartphones also provide many geo marketing opportunities and along with all previous online marketing endeavours, new avenues can only be exploited by making the transition to HTML 5. Google makes no direct profits from its Android operating system, only from increasing the availability of its search engine where its revenues come from online marketing. Google will be keen to ensure that mobile marketing’s transition to HTML 5 is as smooth as possible to maintain its online marketing revenues.

Flash player was not built for mobiles and mobile marketing, it has been adjusted from the desktop version that became popular with the growth on the internet on personal computers, and has simply been adjusted for portable devices. Steve Job’s further criticised the platform for lacking security, security which will prevent more intrusive online marketing techniques. Many believe Apple was simply not happy at the level of control Adobe had over the plugin and preferred to embrace the open sourced alternative, an irony considering the amount of control Apple retains over its products. Mobile marketing must respond to the change.

Social Media has become a huge part of everyday life, and with the ever increasing adoption of smartphones, it is growing even bigger as people communicate and share while on the move. Although Facebook has by far the largest share of the market, there are many other social media avenues which demand our attention, and of course there are still text, email and messenger services to also consider in the plethora of communication services that is the modern smartphone.

So how do we streamline all of these into the most efficient method of communication? Many smartphone makers have integrated social media elements into their contacts or designed applications such as Sony Ericsson’s ‘Timescape’ feature which displays all communication activity from Facebook and Twitter, along with text messages and calls.

The same can be said for many other third party apps which offer a variety of ways of aggregating all your social media into one handy application; it depends on personal preference for what you want to do with the information. Some will provide trending topics around the world. Digg and Reddit are two such social media content streams which are in effect aggregators themselves. Others will provide social media feeds from your personal network with a variety of filters for both with the ability to communicate a message to many networks at once. There are many examples of these such as Hoot Suite, Tweet Deck or Brief Me. Many will include social media alongside traditional news apps such as Pulse News or Buzz Deck. However none appear to provide the perfect solution that enables them to become the runaway market leader. It is a matter of preference in terms of design and which social networking sites are available in the applications.

Messenger services however have a much clearer runaway success with Research in Motion’s Blackberry Messenger Service proving a key component in the Smartphone’s success amongst teenagers. Apple has announced plans to launch a similar service on the iPhone, with iMessage due to arrive in 2012. Google Talk operates in a similar way, but it is not limited to the Android platform. There are further third party apps which will operate across all platforms, and it is becoming likely that the popularity of these services will continue to grow. One such service called ‘Whatsapp?’ recently announced over 1 billion messages per day were sent using its system.

It looks likely that data services will begin to replace SMS as the preferred choice for messaging between phones as social media and instant messaging via the internet continues to grow and grow. However while there is such an abundance of choices to communicate with through wireless networks, it may still be a while until an application perfects the art of keeping track of it all.

The world’s most popular social networking site Facebook is due to receive another facelift.  The new ‘Timeline’ update to the profile page will details users updates in a new layout which makes it easier for users to tell their story from beginning to end.  The layout allows easier navigation of historic posts, which date back to when the user joined Facebook, and potentially even further than that, right back to the users birth date.

The Timelines update promises to be the biggest makeover of the profile page since the social networking site was founded, and as ever, such a radical change is sure to prompt outrage from many users who have never wanted the service to change from the minimalist service they signed up for in 2005. Greater ease of access to more information has also raised privacy fears.  However the change promises to add a whole other dimension to Facebook, allowing users to tell their life story, rather than what they have done in the last week.

The majority of most Facebook users lived a longer period of their life without sharing every little detail about it online before Facebook came into being.  Facebook now wants to give users the opportunity to share those key moments of their lives pre social networking to give a richer and fuller life story than what can be garnered from a status update about what was on TV last night.

This should encourage users to upload their old photos which pre date their Facebook account.  One application that has positioned itself to take advantage of this is a new iPhone app called ‘Shoebox’.   Shoebox allows iPhone owners, and soon Android users, to employ their smartphones’ camera as a scanner, with the selling point being the ability to upload pictures from film cameras from before the digital camera revolution that arrived shortly before social media.

Perhaps this will allow users a greater opportunity to express who they are online, or perhaps simply an opportunity to express frustration at having to learn a new way to use their favourite internet site.