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.