Success = History + Communication + Infrastructure

Recently I was invited as a speaker for DDMA’s iLounge: Gouden (golden) Tip 2010. Honestly I must admit that the thought of speaking in front of a crowd of professional marketeers as a non-marketeer made me a little bit nervous.

Nontheless, they’ve asked me to tell them how we all can be succesfull in the times ahead. And this is ofcourse something I can do. Although it’ll always stay my point of view and not necessarily pure marketing related (and maybe a little too abstract after all).

To calculate success there is a simple formula:

History + infrastructure + speed of communication = potential success concept

Let’s look at the separate elements in further detail. During each era there is general development offering great success to those who see the chance. I also belief that if we look back at how our culture developed itself during all ages, we can pinpoint amazingly accurate what the next success criteria will be. These success criteria are forged by several elements with the available infrastructure and the speed of communication being the most important factors. Infrastructure enables people to communicate at a certain speed, resulting in new opportunities to gain advantage and create new products/services. Amazingly each historical age is also related to a certain infrastructure and new ages arise with new infrastructures. Keep this in mind and let’s have a look at history!

During the stone age we cannot really speak of a clear infrastructure as we know today. People were moving in small groups of nomads from one place to another collecting materials and hunting for food. Communication was slow since people often had to travel for days or weeks on foot to reach other tribes. Success in this age was determined by how well physically you were developed to cope with hunting and traveling long distances.

In the bronze/iron age people developed better tools and gained valuable experience to mount horses and travel greater distances in shorter time. This also resulted in an improved transport system since horses were great to move larger quantities of goods from A to B. Success in these time was in hands of merchants who cleary understood how to make use of the new transportation methods to ship goods fast and therefore communicate faster with their customers.

Not very long ago mankind invented steamengines and quickly thereafter the railroad was introduced resulting in the industrial age. This huge change made it possible for large groups of people and goods to travel from A to B. No longer limited to the horse carts merchants could ship industrial amounts of materials to nearly anywhere in the country. The railroad infrastructure made it possible to centralize product manufacturing in one area while delivering the produced goods to the far reaches of the country. Settlements grew faster to large cities, and the first success stories of the Industrialist age came into existence. These entrepreneurs found success by utilizing these new ways to ship enormous amounts of materials, centralized mass production and low productions cost prices. Hand made products, previously only available to a selected few, came within reach of the masses and at low prices.

There is one stop left before we arrive at our current age. You probably already guessed: the computer or information age. Since the rise of the computer in the early ’80′s we have seen a massive growth in worldwide communication and disappearing of “physical” borders between countries. The computer and later the internet made it possible to automate repetitive processes and communicate in an instant with others all over the world. Why would I still want to buy a certain machine part here in The Netherlands if I could buy it for less then 50% in China? Or should I wait for the movie to become available in my local movie rental store or just download/buy it right away on iTunes? The consequences are still visible today: we the consumers are educated and raised to find the best offerings our selves instead of limiting our world to my local neighborhood. At first in the early ’80′s (computer age) and later the second wave in the mid ’90′s a few entrepreneurs understood this development and took the chance to build new businesses on top of this new infrastructure.

As you can see the infrastructure in each age supported the rise of new industries, new entrepreneurs and new success stories. Each time these infrastructures enabled people to communicate and deliver goods/services at a new high speed record. Also the dependance on your immediate surroundings rapidly disappears (hunting nomads, farmsteads, cities to worldwide reach). Knowing this, we can also pinpoint (as promised earlier) where our new successes will be waiting for us.

This time and for certain the next 3-5 years the infrastructure will be a p2p one, widely called social networks. The speed of communication is blazing fast and faster the this is hard to imagine (at least till now it is). We’ll call it real-time. We already have the companies who’ve build these infrastructures for us: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter et al. They are logically the first to gain success from this new age (like the railroad and computer companies), however the great power lies in its use.

Companies offering products will have to start utilizing this new infrastructure, embrace it, and adapt their business to it. If they don’t the result will be simple: the rise of new, young and small competitors who will pick up the left potential and eventually become the new market leaders. You don’t have to believe me, just do some research in history and see for yourself how companies were left who didn’t fit in the new changes. The next years to come will once and for all mark the power of the individual consumer. This consumer will not have a number anymore in a fancy market research report, but will be known by name and personality. This individual is demanding custom made services and will reward companies for doing so or punish them otherwise. They don’t want to wait longer then a few hours (minutes?!) to get a satisfying answer or else they’ll just ask a friend for it, making you lose potential leads in a matter of minutes.

We now know the infrastructure, we know the speed and the kind of communication, then what can we do to use these elements and gain this success? As a company offering products and services we want to enable customers as easy as possible to communicate with us. We want our company to be where our customers (and potential customers) are: within their trusted social networks. Companies have to gain insight into each individual person, talk to them, listen to them and learn from what they really want. Essentially you will be building a relationship with each and everyone of them.

But the way companies are currently managing their online “personal” presence, makes this scenario quite impossible. Many communities are currently managed by hand let alone strategically analyzed at the individual level with thousands or even millions of fans. They’ll need the right software to intelligently automate and analyze these interactions simultaneously across all major social platforms in order to react and act real time. And in this case I’m not talking about just reactively monitoring conversations. No far from that. I’m talking about actively managing your own community with real persons inside with who you ideally all build a sustaining and personal relationship with. Regardless the time, country or social platform. And when the timing is right (read: real-time), you can offer them your custom made service, exactly they way they like it.