But how have retailers achieved this and what can you learn from them? Well first and foremost, and perhaps most importantly, was the ‘fortune favours the brave’ approach taken by major brands and many smaller players alike. The wisest of retailers looked at the situation at the beginning of 2009 and realised to survive they needed to continue investing in marketing, particularly online, by ramping up their efforts in order to match the expectations and demand of their customers. Three key areas have been integral to success:

Improvements to website

Retailers worked hard to improve their websites, with a particular focus on design and user-experience. If there is one analogy that I cannot stop saying to people right now it is this…’you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink’. No words could better describe the workings of a website because in many ways it is relatively easy to drive traffic to your website. However, actually turning visitors into customers is a whole different ball game. Research from Amaze and the University of Glasgow discovered a staggering 87% of customer abandon their baskets before completing their purchase. This should highlight just how hard you have to work to turn an interested window shopper into a purchasing customer.

This challenge is only met with a well designed, intuitive, content-rich website that instils trust in the visitor. Retailers are realising you need to offer a lot more than a list of products. Useful and engaging content, such as ‘how to’ guides, articles, blogs and especially video have become vital to retail websites over the last year or so. Marks and Spencer and ASOS are just a couple of the retailers who have invested heavily in cat walk style video to show their products off in a more engaging way. I don’t have the data available but I bet it’s had a profound impact on conversion rates.

Social media

Many retailers have also embraced social media as a means of creating open dialogue with their prospects and customers. Facebook and Twitter have proven to be particularly powerful tools with retailers looking to connect with their audiences with product updates, sales, promotions and so on. The recent figures released by Dell show that with the right strategy in place Twitter is a viable marketing channel that can be linked directly back to sales and ROI.

The rise of social media has also contributed to retailers upping their game when it comes to service. In an age where blogs, forums and review sites offer an open invitation for customers to say both good and bad things about a brand, companies have realised that they need to wow their customers with great service and communication. The use of social media tools are therefore perfect for creating open dialogue with customers both as a promotional tool and for customer service.

Measurement

Retailers are implementing systems that allow multiple channels to be measured with a high degree of accuracy. In turn, the marketers on the front line can demonstrate to the big cheeses that Internet marketing is not a passing fad but the most targeted, cost effective and measurable means of reaching their target audience available.

It is worth noting that retailers have also benefited from changes in consumer behaviour. The average consumer has become more astute and explorative when buying online meaning they’re investing more time in hunting down a bargain or discount. According to a recent Paypal report, 62% of shoppers believe the best bargains are to be had online. The advent of voucher codes along with the discount boom helps provide a constant incentive for people to browse and spend more time on the Internet than they would normally spend visiting the high street on a Saturday afternoon. (And with that men up and down the country are rejoicing as their better halves turn to the Internet instead of dragging them around the local shopping centre!!).

In a follow up post to this one I’ll be going into more detail on what needs to be included in your digital strategy for 2010 if you are to repeat some of the success stories highlighted above. In the meantime, bear this in mind; Retail Decisions (ReD) has calculated that internet retail sales in the UK hit £49.8 billion in 2009, up 21% from 2008. Overall, up to 33 million consumers made an online purchase last year. And according to research carried out by eDigitalResearch, four in ten consumers plan to spend more online next Christmas due to a positive online experience this year. It might be said therefore that online retail has defied the recession and in my view will continue to do so.

So as we say goodbye to a pretty rotten 2009, it’s time to start afresh and review your plans for 2010 to ensure you are positioning yourself to take full advantage.

The question is who and what will be the shining stars of 2010?

@MarkPollard's (Mark Pollard, Strategy Director at McCann Sydney) is excited about the development of personal network recommendations that he believes ‘lie in waiting'.

"I'm really interested in the changing face of recommendation. A few years ago, a visit to eBay or TripAdvisor would see you quickly getting a feel for the types of feedback people left and, more or less, accepting a lot of stranger recommendations, feedback and suggestions at face value. But, now, if you visit those websites, you may need to trawl through not only a lot of stuff, but a lot of crap stuff to work out your own opinion on something. I went through this recently trying to plan a trip to Hawaii. There was just so much 'consumer review' noise, and a lot of websites haven't built in clear, compelling status systems that show which members' opinions are typically worth more than others in certain contexts. So, if you're like me, you get that 'decision inertia'."

"Contrast this noise with my recent experience on Foursquare," says Pollard, "and I'm actually really excited about personal network recommendations. If I'm in a particular area or at a certain cafe, then I can check into Foursquare and see a friend's recommendation about what to do or eat. That recommendation is worth more than anything a stranger (online or offline) or a waiter could tell me. Yes, I can ask opinions via Twitter, email, phone or Facebook, but the serendipity and trustworthiness of a system that tells me something before I need to ask, is a beautiful thing."

"Foursquare will get noisier", he predicts, "but hopefully they will create tools to segment or decrease the noise".

@darrenwhitelaw (Darren Whitelaw, General Manager, (Corporate Communication at Department of Justice Victoria) predicts that Foursquare is actually likely to fall by the wayside.

"2010 will see a further explosion in mobile computing, and a jostling for top place on the location-aware social applications. Despite the hype, FourSquare will fail to earn mainstream acceptance. Early adopters will embrace GraffitiGeo - an app for people to write a virtual "tag" about their favourite restaurant, cafe or bar - and this user generated content will be the seed for the roll-out of augmented reality apps in major cities of Melbourne, Sydney and later Brisbane."

@jasondavey (Jason Davey, Managing Director of Bullseye), agrees. "Augmented reality will take off: the overlay of user-generated (social) information with spatial data will spark lots of new applications and services. Walking down the supermarket aisle will never be the same again! Poor products will struggle to hide as consumer reviews on products and their prices will mean shoppers will become collectively smarter at the point of purchase".

@Brandamentalist (who is David Ansett, Founder and Creative Director of Storm Design) sees the overarching theme for digital in 2010 as Engagement.

"We believe there is huge potential for brands to engage their communities of customers and other associated tribe members at a much more conversational and intimate level than they currently do. We believe brands should be shifting their paradigm from 'One Way Messaging' such as TV, print and press ads, billboards, direct mail and even PR, to 'Two Way Communication', through opening channels to build relationships with their communities. The channels that stand out for us with the greatest potential are either on-line social networks or online social network-related."

Ansett continues, "We see companies engaging brand communications specialists to establish customer relationship interfaces, where the company builds a new level of relationship by speaking at a personal level to their customers. With a primary focus of relationship building, the interface will also help the company to gain a richer understanding of the people who make up their community or tribe, and use that knowledge to create better product and service offerings".

New Zealand Social Media Guru @audaciousgloop (Simon Young of SY Engage) has shared ten excellent thoughts, which tap into the ownership of data and the development of communities and social engagement on mobile:

1. We will continue to see the push towards data portability and consumers owning their own data. (Although maybe not so much of that last one, the Facebooks and Twitters of the world will try to make it so ridiculously easy to roam around the web using their IDs that people won't be so concerned with ownership - but any failure by these companies will bring the issue up again)
2. Businesses based purely on advertising will see a decline, as people trust ads less and less and other people more and more. In response, advertising will try different ways to become more social.
3. Mobile web will become normal and widespread; services like Foursquare will be the new secret weapon for local businesses in the know. Marketing will become about being useful to the customer, combining commercial messages with public service.
4. Simplicity and aggregation will be a key playing field. Any service that brings together all your other services or networks - and looks great, and is easy to use - will be popular. Of course it will be a crowded field, and there will be many players that do it technically well but neglect the usability.
5. Social media will stop being a newsworthy marketing ploy in its own right, as more businesses get on board and start connecting to their audiences. Businesses will need to find something intrinsically interesting about themselves, rather than just the fact that they're on Twitter (and that their product is great, of course).
6. Consumers will be even more wary of businesses engaging with them via social media. The stakes will be very high for being interesting and relevant.
7. Tools will arise that allow social media to be more like email marketing - allowing for smart segmentation, personalisation etc. However, just as many marketers haven't taken email marketing to its full potential, they won't take advantage of these either - and they'll continue delivering slightly crappy customer experience.

Combining the thoughts of @markpollard, @Brandamentalist, @darrenwhitelaw, @jasondavey and @audaciousgloop, we can see some clear themes emerge.

Firstly, digital personalisation and relevance will be the key to influencing consumer behaviour. Mobile platforms, such as Foursquare and GraffitiGeo, will be the drivers behind this, but many more applications will enter the market. And, as we heard from @darrenwhitelaw and @jasondavey, the content generated by the users of these location-based social networks will be used to realise the full potential of augmented reality.

Secondly, consumers will become more socially savvy. They will become even more wary of brands contacting them via social networks, so marketers will need to work smarter. As @audaciousgloop says, they will need to find something "intrinsically interesting' about themselves to be players in the digital space.

Judging by the predictions of my ‘Tweeps', word-of-mouth has never been more important, our networks have never been larger and consumers have never been more cynical.

The message is clear. In 2010 (and beyond), marketers will need to be increasingly willing to trade reach for deeper engagement. Consumers are out there talking about brands (loudly, on the street, and via their mobiles!). As this noise gets louder, we will need to get smarter, more personalised, more filtered and more relevant. If you haven't already, be prepared to combine your real and virtual worlds, because they are merging fast.

Perceived value is not necessarily the same thing as real value. For example, in the luxury goods industry, consumers pay for the name and the brand, even though in reality almost everything nowadays is made in China, where production cost is a mere fraction of the retail price.

The same principles can apply to salaries. If your perceived value (defined by your recession-dampened salary) is a far cry from the value that you're bringing to your company, there are a few things you can do to boost it.

Document your contributions and the goals you have accomplished for your company. Have you taken on extra responsibilities and executed them well? Are you achieving gains for the company that are unmeasured and uncommunicated? You probably document this when you write your resume, but it can be just as useful in your current company.

Don't assume people notice your achievements. You may need to raise your visibility at work and the visibility of your contributions - not obnoxiously, but to make it easier to match your perceived value with your real value.

Never threaten to leave if you don't get a pay rise, but if you have access to benchmarking data you'll be able to demonstrate what people with your skill level are earning across the industry. If (and this is an important if) you're doing a good job and are seen to be doing a good job, you will have a shot at returning your earnings to pre-GFC levels.