Given how much of the current web — social and content marketing included — revolves around search, voice search represents a game changer, especially given mobile use with Siri and Google Voice Search.

Voice search will have a big impact on businesses who already spend a majority of their online advertising budget on search. Will user generated content factor as strongly when only one or two results may be served via voice?

Author of Marketing in the Age of Google and founder of search agency Nine by Blue Vanessa Fox will open xPotomac with this session.

Perhaps the most immediate issue facing interactive design right now, the mobile revolution forces every marketer to consider multiscreen environments. Consider the five screens that someone may use to access content: Smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop PC and finally Internet-empowered widescreen TVs.

How will people use multiple screens simultaneously, including social TV and work?

The consolidation of the social web into corporate media companies combined with the increasing focus by search algorithms on frequency and social validation has harmed individual blogs and voices.  Small businesses and entrepreneurs struggle to compete in the face of these virtual machines.  Dino Dogan , founder of Triberr, discusses how his network of small voices has found a new way for the groundswell to shine through.

In today’s online world social scoring systems like the Klout and Kred matter. For example, some jobs are tied to scores now. Scoring systems encourage businesses and marketers to build wide networks to foster reach and create the perception of influence.

But does this kind of influence actually deliver results?

Digital Ubiquity is a farsighted concept that ties together many threads throughout the featured technologies.

Says author Adam Greenfield on the topic, “It’s really the emergence of a computing without computers, where information processing is almost imperceptible, but everywhere around us; smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing, and even smart bathtubs. Networked street signs and self-describing soda cans. Gestural interfaces like those seen in Minority Report. The RFID tags now embedded in everything from credit cards to the family pet.”

What will this surreal computing environment be like? How can we prepare businesses for it?

Videos and photos have become the primary content form of the mobile era, replacing text with easily communicated ideas and shared experiences  From infographics and pictures on smartphones to increasingly visual social networks (Instagram, SnapChat, Pinterest) and video chats, developing visual creative is becoming a new challenge for communicators.

Hear  TechCocktail executive Jen Consalvo discuss this burgeoning trend.

Updates, emails, webinars, meetings all provide small insights into our customers lives. Together, they provide a composite picture that allows us to target market and nurture leads through automation technologies.

Yet as companies move to automate the sales funnel and better harness leads throughout the process, consumer privacy concerns loom. Further, in an automated algorithmic world will we become homogenized?

Andrew Keen, author of Digital Vertigo and Cult of the Amateur, will examine how the big data movement challenges society, businesses and individuals alike in this closing keynote.