By Rex Hammock, CEO
In the mid-1990s, I was asked to make a lunch presentation to Nashville’s Downtown Rotary Club. My assigned topic was, “What is the Internet?” No kidding. To begin the presentation, I asked the club’s 300 members to raise their hands if they had an email address printed on their business cards.
Fewer than 10 people raised their hands.
A couple of years later, the club asked me to make a follow-up presentation. Again, I asked the same email address question. This time, the vast majority of the audience raised their hands.
For me, those two presentations to a room filled with civic, business, government and other community leaders served as a personal tipping point that continues to remind me how technology, media and content repeat themselves. How the journey toward the future never ends.
Access to talent, content, media distribution channels and new discoveries will keep adding to our capabilities to turn all companies into media companies that better serve—and grow—their businesses and organizations.
In the past, we’ve written about the phenomenon first articulated by the late scientist and futurist Roy Amara. Called Amara’s Law, it is an adage about forecasting for the short-term and long-term effects of new technology: “We tend to overestimate the effect of new technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” he observed.
What that means for savvy, long-term marketers: Over time, your content and media success might be radically impacted by some of the trends you first hear about in 2020. But that impact may not be felt for years.
In the meantime, here’s some advice: Look carefully at what community leaders are adding to (or taking away from) their business cards.
Image: Getty Images
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