Jeff Korhan: Looking long term

Working across the green industry in the future is going to be a new experience for all of us.  I personally work in many industries and the common viewpoint is this: Significant changes are to be expected. As always, customers are often a good source of what’s coming next.

Redesign Your Business Around Social.  At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the comment that in the next five years every industry will have to redesign itself around social. This is a bold statement that I believe holds a great deal of merit, especially when you consider the next generation to enter the workforce literally grew up on Facebook.

What does this mean for the green industry? Like many others, we are an industry of thousands of small businesses that are disconnected from each other. To succeed as an industry we need to be more social. We need greater connectivity to achieve more sharing and collaboration to provide what our customers collectively want.

Social networking and other communication technologies are allowing customers to share a great deal of information – and in real time. Consumers not only have a voice, but they have a shared and common voice. How are we prepared to respond? Like many other industries, not very well.

Social Search Will Change Everything. What Zuckerberg was implying is that what most businesses and the industries they represent have to say is becoming irrelevant. What matters most is what our customers are saying about us. Social interaction is the new marketing – customers marketing to friends and other customers.

Contextual data is being shared among friends who are your customers and it is all being indexed. And what is indexed is searchable. Search is what drives the Web, and how that works is going to change dramatically when the social search engines of sites such as Facebook go head-to-head with Google.

Buyers Have the Advantage. Whether your business is large or small, you have to realize that buyers have the advantage today. Get in the mix with them and learn what they want. My suggestion for any business that wants to stay ahead of the market is to ask a simple question: What is not being done that customers consistently ask for?

Talk to your industry colleagues.

Look at other industries for clues. People are talking, and Facebook, Twitter and Google are listening.

Are you?