Predicting the Future

In the next few months, this blog will become a location for predicting the future. What does that have to do with marketing, you might ask? If you want to create the future for you and your organization, it will become more important than ever to understand what's coming around the corner.

One of my favorite videos on YouTube has been Peter Schiff taking a ton of verbal abuse for predicting the demise of the housing market and its implications for the rest of the economy. How did he get it right when so many others got it wrong? Why was that the case? As this blog grows, we will provide an interactive tool on an old idea - the case study - to see where decisions made by organizations have gone right and wrong.

Some time around 2003, the creation and implementation of web-based tools started transforming websites from advertising to creating a community of passionate users. At the same time, marketing has started to transform itself from an exercise of convincing the public through advertising, brand messaging, and broadcasting a single message to a networked, organic conversation between both user and creator and other users.

Many have blogged about this before. It's now at the point where customers are closer to the organization than ever before. Peter Kim, a long-time blogger and social enterprise entrepreneur, opined that it's time for business to transform about 18 months ago. What's happened since then? This idea has made its way to the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal this month. And they say change in Washington, DC is slow!

We agree it is time to transform, but this means we don't have to blow up every notion ever held about business. Business will always be business - we innovate and we build markets to sell what we innovate. But when we had to get blood out of stones to achieve ever-growing, never-retreating profits, we did it in a certain way. With the new tools we have over the web, business doesn't have to keep the same model of profit maximization anymore because there are social tools that create better products and services, incentivization models in place to reward creators, and social networks to market these efforts. Most importantly, there's plenty of profit to go around.

This blog will continue to watch each of those three things and we hope to have some fun with it in the near future. Stay tuned.

Making the Commitment

In the next few weeks, I'll go through the process of certification from Google on Google Analytics and Google AdWords. I'm really looking forward to it.

Will keep you posted and will be happy to show off my shiny new official badge from Google on the home page.

Also, I wanted to state the following for the record. Honest Conversation.com does NOT focus on marketing that is known as shilling, stealth marketing, infiltration, or spam. We are a "white hat" search engine optimization (SEO) outfit.

Our Mission Statement

I was having coffee the other day with a friend and, during the course of conversation, it dawned on me that what we do stands out from the vast majority of web design, marketing/public relations, and similar organizations. For lack of a better term, this is our "mantra" - why we do what we do.

We fundamentally believe the following:

1. Content is still the most powerful tool to have in your organization's interaction with the world. When learning about SEO a million moons ago, I was taught that "Content is king." It's still true today, now more than ever.

2. That content must convert others toward action. This generally means an accepted swipe of the card of choice. But when your customers have the means to tell the world about you, action now means positive word of mouth about your organization.

3. The converted are your best sources of driving value. Two reasons why. Honest referrals from your best customers bring in more business and achieve goals. Additionally, customers as trusted partners can help drive costs down.

This is what we do at Honest Conversation.com.

HTML5 and it's benefits

Here at Honest Conversation, we help customers get their message out using the latest and most affordable means. This generally means leveraging the web for the highest return on investment.

We are making the commitment to delivering the value of HTML5 (the next major version of the HTML standard) to our websites as soon as it is finalized. Technology is cool and we are convinced that HTML5 is going to rock, too.

More importantly, from what I can tell, there will be very powerful ways to help bring in more business, deliver more value to customers, and generally achieve business objectives faster and with richer information thanks to HTML5.