Every few months it seems yet another “Internet revolution” changes the way people live, work and communicate online. With that in mind, business owners must actively look ahead and see the trends that will impact them, for better or worse, in the year to come.
TV by Doug Richard
Doug Richard expects the greatest change online to be in video media. Television, cable and satellite are evaporating, to be replaced by “new media” which has an entirely different set of economics. Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon and other businesses are making the world’s library of film and television available globally. New business models emerge for entertainment and education emerge daily.
“Video is also becoming a standard component of all social media and marketing content”
And they are ranging from “Will It Blend?” experiments filling up Facebook pages everywhere, to the incorporation of video into dialog on sites like Reddit & Digg.
What does this mean to you? If your business is in the business of education or entertainment, it must leverage this “disruptive activity”. Market giants with established businesses and many contractual obligations are not in a position to leverage many of these changes. New businesses can take full advantage of them to find customers and build market share.
Think about how you can quickly and cost effectively leverage the easy creation, deployment and distribution online. What content can you create that your target absolutely has to have? How will you get it to them.
Search by Joost de Valk
Google knows everything about everyone. Of course that’s an overstatement of the truth, but not by much. Google tracks every searcher whether or not they are logged in, and for those that are logged in (whether it be on Google, or Youtube, or Adwords, or Google Docs, or any of a hundred other services) it stores that data. It also analyzes that data and it tailors your online experience based on it. Not everyone sees the same page you do when you search for a topic like “schools” or “movies”. You see what Google thinks you want to see . . . and what it wants you to see.
This has a profound impact on how people perceive the Internet and the world around them, and it means that you must “master Google” in order to thrive.
“Your business depends on Google and it is your defacto business partner for what looks to be several years ahead.”
They can drive customers to you, they can help you support them, they can also steal them away.
Google knows everything about your business. They know everything about everyone’s business. Many, many searchers now see pages constructed by Google that drive traffic to businesses. When you search for “Plumber” or “Toy Store”, Google brings up Google Places which a map of all the local resources. Some people are displayed on the map. Some are not. These locations are presented in response to a search . . . but the data displayed is a venue that sets businesses apart. It is not enough just to have a web page anymore. Local business must be registered with Google to be found.
Google knows all about everyone’s products as well. More and more searches for a given product like “cardigan” and “kilt” are showing lists of products for sale constructed by Google. Google is specifically driving traffic to those resellers and producers over others in their search database. This represents and interesting challenge for people who sell things online. How do they get their products into those listings, and how do they (as a real-world and online store) get people to come to them rather than searching Google for what they want.
If you are not already carefully tracking Google’s behavior online, now is the time to start. Monitor their press releases, follow their new service releases, leverage the tools they give you. Now it is easy and cheap to use things like Google Places . . . that may not always be the case. History shows that “early adopters” are favored by Google as services change.
The Internet is Becoming Local by Andrew Davis
The world wide web has been exceptional at connecting people around the world. London stores now find suppliers online in China routinely. Engineers in Korea routinely connect to engineering companies in Saudi Arabia.
“The Internet has made the world smaller. . . And now it is going to make your local world bigger.”
There are tens of thousands of people around us every day and we know few of them. We don’t know who goes to our coffee shop, we don’t know who frequents our deli. Location-based Networks like Rumble, Foursquare and Meetup put people together in the real world for both business and social purposes.
Need to build new relationships with your customers? You can meet them face to face at Meetup.com meetings. Rumble can connect you to community volunteers, which is a great way for many local businesses to become more visible in the towns they work in. Foursquare helps you connect to friends who happen to be in your area, and introduces you to businesses you may not have worked with in the past. When your cell phone is enabled with Foursquare you suddenly “see” all the metadata associated with businesses around you. You know that a block from where you’re standing a cafe is having a poetry reading, and just around the corner there’s a restaurant that caters to kids. Foursquare participant businesses issue badges and points which can be redeemed for products and services. That encourages repeat business from registered members.
Every business owner needs to tie into these location-based networks because no matter how important people around the world may be to your business . . . people right next door are usually in a position to be be even more critical.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?