Confidential to Everybody in Business: We Need to Whip The Web Before It Whips Us

I've always had a crush on the internet. Ever since I first laid eyes on its complex, complicated character and unique ability to do all things at once, it was love. No question. Its capacity, abilities, and the fact that it's not committed to any one device or type of content. It's so sophisticated and sexy. Surely if it were a movie character, it'd be James Bond.

Of course, this means it can either help or harm whatever's around it.

Luckily, when it comes to the web, the outcome is entirely our choice - at least for now. The problem is, if we're not aware of what it is and intended to do, the ability to control what happens becomes increasingly difficult. Just ask the music industry. Like retail business before it, it had a choice regarding how things would play out. Instead of recognizing the requirement (not just need) to marry its business to the internet's platform, it fought against it with enormous loss. Other markets need not suffer the same fate.

The thing about the web is, regardless of how long we'd like to take we will eventually have to learn how to migrate our business to its channel. It's here to stay and is going to do what it will do. Period.

It will wait patiently for us to get to this point. If allowed, it will dismantle models and kill revenue in the process. But, as I've said earlier, it's at least somewhat up to us. The web is meant to do specific things and has always disrupted industries on a fairly expected course.

I build my entrepreneurial projects, theories and ideas along it. There have been a lot of proof that it's been accurate.

I believe it's the key to surviving the changes and chaos it presents. We're in a basic industrial revolution-sized movement of an entire society from four specific communication/information systems to one: the web. It affects specific industries in specific ways as this transpires. Knowing these two things can be a little like having a secret map of what's going to happen next.

How the internet will wreck havoc in your market also depends on many factors. Trying to apply a single strategy to all will not work. There's already been plenty of examples of this.

Yet, a lot of decision makers, advertisers, bloggers, journalists, etc. - those who control the levers - don't make moves that suggest they have this type of understanding and perspective. They stare solely at what's on the "front end" of internet business - other websites, trends, etc., ignoring the more important backside that holds the road map.

I believe more conferences, media articles and corporate efforts need to center around the basic purpose and intentions of the web, with insight to how to create a strategy for each unique market from there. The future of our world and economy depends too much on it to approach it as many have been.

As I said, it can either help or hurt us. In the end, the need to adopt and adapt to it is not optional. How long it takes and how difficult is entirely up to us.