Trends change; ideas provide insights into change.

Without insight, we are reduced to trial and error or trend-jumping.

Clinging to strategies (and the ideas that underpin them) which no longer map reality guarantees declining results.

The global economy is entering an extended era of unprecedented turmoil.

Those without insight into the generational, technological, material and financial forces will flail and then fail.

The process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Every business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process and within the situation created by it.
Joseph Schumpeter

The Web is revolutionizing competitive forces in ways which have yet to be fully conceptualized. While much has been written about supply-chain efficiencies, the next wave of competition that will unleash creative destruction is marketing and customer relations.

The standard models of advertising and marketing will produce fewer and fewer results as they fail to map the profound demographic, technological and financial trends which will dominate life and business for decades to come.

But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of (price) competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization--competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.

Weblogs are perceived as part of that competitive advantage, but without a conceptual understanding, their advantages are lost in the slapdash miasma of websites, wikis and other web technologies that constitute "Internet strategies" for most firms. Understanding and implementing those advantages is the heart of The Power Yet To Come (TM).


What Lies Ahead


The wrenching demographic, financial and cultural changes which will dominate the decades ahead have long been visible to those with a grasp of history, but they are just now entering public awareness. Every firm's prosperity--and eventually, its survival-- depends on adapting forcefully and insightfully to these profoundly disruptive global trends:

1. Demographically, the nation-states of both the developed and developing economies cannot fund the pension and medical care entitlements which have been promised to the enormous Baby Boom generation.

2. The Baby Boom's retirement nesteggs will suffer dramatic declines in value as major asset classes experience sustained losses (real estate, stocks and bonds). As they exit their peak earning years, Boomers' spending power will plummet.

3. The global "glut of savings"/low-cost borrowing which fueled global asset bubbles has ended, heralding a generation of reduced spending and borrowing on a global scale.

4. Essential commodities (petroleum/water/food) are entering a long cycle of uncertain supply and volatile pricing which will act as a global tax on consumer incomes.

5. Government's ability to borrow and raise ever-larger sums from taxation will decline even as demands for entitlements increase.

6. Globally, public health will be under increasing stress from both persistent current trends (obesity, particulate air pollution, resistant bacteria, etc.) and disruptions or outright shortages of food and water.

7. Secondary effects of the above trends will transform tourism/leisure, urban design, housing, finance, consumer products, transportation, energy and indeed, all industries and trade in unexpected ways.

8. The Baby Boom generation's susceptibility to mass marketing will fade along with their purchasing power; the next generations' skeptical worldviews will confound standard-model (reductionist) advertising and marketing.

9. What constitutes status and prestige will undergo substantial transformations as scarcity of essential commodities collides with overabundance of manufactured consumer goods.

10. Expectations (i.e. inner maps of the future) will be destabilized globally. Trust in institutions which have disappointed/failed will plummet.

11. Media decentralization and digital distribution will continue disrupting heirarchies and monopolies.


Connections and authentic communication--with customers, employees, suppliers, agencies--will be a key competitive advantage. Weblogs are an underutilized competitive advantage; their power has yet to be full realized.

I can help you realize the competitive advantages inherent in weblogs. E-mail, websites, social networking and wikis also have advantages, but they cannot duplicate or replace the specific powers unique to weblogs.


What I Offer

Here is a chart of my own weblog's growth. I have noted several characteristic phases of weblog evolution:

This experience has led me to investigate how and why weblogs--corporate, personal or organizational--attract, grow and engage audiences. My research suggests that all blogs with expanding, avid readerships share specific traits. These characteristics enable any business or institution to profoundly impact its mission/goal at a relatively low cost in ways the Standard Model of Marketing/Advertising/Communication cannot.

The effectiveness of reductionist mass marketing is already diminishing; its decline has been masked by the global asset bubble/debt-based prosperity of the past decade. Weblogs are uniquely able to make the powerful connections which constitute competitive advantage in the era ahead.

Weblogs aren't for everyone or every business. But a surprisingly broad array of organizations from sole proprietors to global corporations (as well as churches, community groups, artists, advocacy groups and agencies) will find a successful weblog uncommonly effective in engaging customers, members, users, employees and would-be clients at a comparatively low cost.

The vast majority of weblogs, individual or business, attract few loyal readers and therefore have limited impact. This report, and my consulting, address the principles which underlie every successful blog, regardless of the audience, business or purpose.

Even if you vehemently disagree with the above analysis, I believe this report offers great value simply by forcing you to question and defend your current marketing/sales/communication/Internet strategy assumptions, budgets and strategies.

Report Topics include:

1. Two models of history:
    A. Goal-directed (Greek: telos), entelechy (Greek: entelecheia); Hegelian
    B. Cyclical (Kondratieff, etc.)

2. The Politics/Shaping of Experience
(simulacrums of authenticity and community; irrationality, image projection and direct experience)

3. Connection vs. Consumption
(alienation, ennui and the devolution of ownership)

A. Passive consumption and reductionist mass marketing (the factory metaphor)

B. The innate desire to connect/establish relationships in a fragmenting world
(seeking a connection but settling for distraction/diversion)

4. Weakening power of propaganda
(failing models of manufacturing perception/context)

5. Connection and authenticity/Artifice vs. authenticity
(a critique of reductionist pseudo-sincerity)

6. Inherent limits of "branding" and "staying on message"

7. Overproduction of both marketing and consumer goods

8. The experience of status and prestige
(yearning for uniqueness in manufactured abundance)

9. Experience, dialog, resolution, trust: for employees and customers alike

10. An ecology of personality: the anthropological/psychosocial view

11. Opening a clearing for honest reactions

12. Image symbolism and limbic connection

13. Trust, curiosity, interaction, surprise

14. The limitations of statistical/heuristic/algorithmic/focus-group marketing

15. The necessity of patience; models of weblog audience and participation

16. Human scaling and the limits of scalability; "local" vs. "global"

17. Sample applications of these concepts

Additional consulting is available at $250/hour plus expenses.

For the complete report Weblogs: The Power Yet To Come and an initial consultation, please email me.

                                                           

copyright © 2008 Charles Hugh Smith. All rights reserved in all media. No reproductions in any media without written permission.