Paula & I just changed plans to visit our daughter in Dallas because of the high price of airfare and the lack of direct connections. A friend who's a retailer at Tahoe tells me he expects a terrible July 4th weekend because of the high price of gasoline. Another friend--in a Fortune 100 company tells me that travel budgets are being zeroed out as a cost cutter.
There simply is no dispute about it. Habits are changing because of fuel costs. Those habits, I think will also impact the economy, not for the short time but for a long time to come.
Even as a social media evangelist, I have often and repeatedly noted that nothing replaces face-to-face meetings. In almost every major city of the Western world there will be at least one meet-up tonight between people who have already talked to each other and built relationships online. The number of conferences related to social media continues to rise.This is because we still need to see and talk to other people.
Most everyone prefers to buy goods that they can see and touch and a brick and mortar store is clearly a better venue for it than a virtual space. There are exceptions we all know, plane tickets, books, music have all become easier, cheaper and faster to buy online. And stores that used to sell them are slowly disappearing from the landscape.
But now, fuel costs are starting to change more--a lot more than would have been the case if the price of a barrel of oil had not double each year for the last two years. By not flying to Dallas, a hotel and car rental place loses a sale. Several restaurants lose sales and so on.
I think we are seeing the beginning of some longterm trends, many f which will increase the use of the Internet in general and social media specifically:
- Conferences designed to attract national and international speakers and attendees will wane next year. There will be fewer of them and they will be smaller. This reverses the trend of the last three years. Instead, there will be more online conversations using a variety of tools. A big winner will be the virtual conferences that use a variety of tools to get attendees and presenters to see, hear and interact online.
- Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate. But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.
- An increase in video. Online video is already on the steep end of the well-graphed hockey stick. But it's use for online conversations, such as Skype, Mogulus, Kyte.tv and Qik are offering are about to explode I think simply because seeing each other as you converse is better than just texting and a lot more convenient than flying.
There are probably a lot more examples. As much as I advocate social media and online commerce, I am not so happy to be looking at this one. It will be a long time before the Western world loses it's addictive dependence on fossil fuels. Until that happens our lifestyles are going to be more restricted.
I'm thankful for the Internet and broadband because without them we all might be heading loser to lives in the little house on the prairie and that would not be a good thing.
- Online communities.
