Image via CrunchBase
One of the annual fire drills in many businesses is the creation of THE FIVE YEAR PLAN. For my money, it’s one of the biggest wastes of executives’ time out there and since, as we all know, stuff rolls downhill, that loss of productivity extends to their staffs.
There was a release this morning from comScore which made me think of this. It’s their annual U.S. Digital Year in Review report and let me tell you why the rant about five year plans came to mind.
If you’re interested in the report, you can download a copy of it by clicking this link. There are all kinds of fascinating tidbits such as:
- 90% of U.S. Internet users visit a social networking site in a month, and the average Internet user spends more than 4 hours on these sites each month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes on-line is spent on Facebook;
- The search market grew 12 percent, driven by increases in both unique searchers and in the number of search queries per searcher;
- Social networking sites, which now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions, were a significant driver of growth in the display ad market in 2010.U.S.;
- In December 2010, the average American spent more than 14 hours watching on-line video, a 12% increase from the prior year, and streamed a record 201 videos, an 8% increase;
- Smartphones reached 25% of mobile subscribers and 3G penetration crossed the 50% threshold. Approximately 47% of mobile subscribers are now connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications or downloaded content), up 8 percentage points from the previous year.
I think we all probably could have intuited a lot of that from our own behaviors. But here is the point: you would not have predicted most of this 5 years ago. I can guarantee you would not have even thought of some of it 10 years ago when mobile Internet, much less mobile video, was not an issue and streaming video via broadband was available only to a tiny fraction of homes. In fact, barely half of US homes even had a computer and Internet access was only available in 40% of homes. More school-age children used computers at school than had access to them at home. No one did their banking or most shopping on-line and social networks wouldn’t happen for years.
Had you been an executive writing a five year plan, how would you have accounted for these changes? You wouldn’t have. And that’s fine. In my book, when it comes to digital, especially in the areas of marketing and media, a five week plan is normal and a five month plan makes sense. I’m all for looking forward and running your business with a map. But five years? Puleeze…
Thoughts?
Consult Keith 