Is Your Company Ready For The Next Ten Years?

I still remember the day I decided to master traffic generation and online marketing. To be fair I was a very early internet user, logging onto BBS’s and racking up my parents long distance phone bills on my 386 dx2 computer and ridiculously slow modem. I was still in elementary school, and I feel very lucky to have been the first generation of young folks diving deep into technology as the internet became commercialized in the mid-90’s.  Back to my story, I was vying for a job that needed an experienced SEO consultant, but my knowledge at the time didn’t go further than knowing directory submissions helped out. So, I convinced the company I was interviewing by to give me two weeks to master the industry. I started off with Aaron Wall’s SEObook, and worked my way through seroundtable.com and stuntdubl.com as followed their links to discover the whole search industry.

My First Impressions Was… “WOW, This Is WAY TOO MUCH TO LEARN, and THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE WHO KNOW ALL THIS STUFF ALREADY!”

I was ready to give up, I was overwhelmed, and feared I would always be behind the Rand Fishkin’s and the Eisenberg Brothers. Than a light bulb went off in my head, and I made some anecdotal calculations. At the time there were hundreds of millions of internet users. So what if I was behind a few hundred, or a few thousand, or even a hundred thousand. I would still be ahead of the other 99.9% of internet users.

Today, there are close to 2,000,000,000 internet users, and another 5,000,000,000 who are poised to adopt it over the next decade or so. (hopefully!)

One of the things I spend a a lot time thinking about is what the future will look like. This is one of the reasons I enjoy working in the search engine marketing industry so much. I enjoy watching the changing tides, seeing companies come and go… and most importantly doing everything I can to say ahead of the curve.

In a world where bitcoins, crowdfunding, and a sharing economy are gaining traction you can no longer ignore. In a society with excess capacity markets, and the internet of things emerging. With Apple rolling out ibeacons delivering in store coupons targeted to where in the story you are standing, you have to wonder what the world will have in store for us in the next ten years.

Luckily for us, there is one soldier who has been predicting the internet behavior for a long long time,  Jeremiah Owyang!

He has been blogging about web strategy and has insights too clear to ignore.

Luckily for us he put together a great presentation that talks about what you need to do to remain relevant for the next ten years.