The next decade is going to be an exciting one for networking. With new technologies and devices emerging, how we connect will change dramatically. Here will explore how networking will evolve in the next ten years. We will also see how businesses can prepare for these changes and take advantage of their present opportunities. So, without further ado, let’s look at the future of networking!

1. Increased Security

One of the biggest concerns for businesses with networking is security. As more and more devices are connected to the internet, the risk of cyberattacks increases. This is why we expect to see a big focus on security in the next decade. Businesses must invest in robust security systems to protect their networks from attacks.

2. Faster Speeds

With the proliferation of high-speed internet, we expect to see much faster networking speeds in the next decade. This will significantly benefit businesses as they can quickly communicate and transfer data. This will also enable new applications and services requiring high bandwidth.

3. More Reliable Connections

Another trend we will see in the next decade is more reliable connections. This is thanks to technological advances that will make it easier to connect to the internet in more places. This means businesses can stay connected even when on the go. Jordan Sudberg believes that the future of networking lies in its ability to connect people and devices no matter where they are.”

4. Greater Flexibility

As networking technology becomes more sophisticated, it will also become more flexible. This means businesses

4. IoT Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to devices that are connected to the internet. This includes everything from smart TVs to fitness trackers. In the next decade, we expect to see a

4. The Rise of IoT

One of the most exciting trends in networking is the rise of the (IoT). This is the growing number of devices connected to the internet. In the next decade, we can expect to see more devices connected to the internet as businesses take advantage of this technology. The IoT will significantly impact how companies operate and open up new opportunities.

5. Increase in Wireless Networking

One of the most significant changes we will see in networking is the move to wireless technologies. With the advent of fifth-generation (or “five-g”) cellular networks, we will finally have the speeds and capacity needed to support wireless networking on a large scale. This will be a game changer for consumers and businesses, allowing us to connect to the internet without needing cables or other physical infrastructure.

6. More Affordable Access

According to Jordan Sudberg, the future of networking is bright, and he is very optimistic about the next decade. He believes these are just some trends we can expect to see in networking in the next decade. With so much change on board, it’s an exciting time to be involved in this field. Businesses must stay ahead and be prepared for these changes to remain competitive.

So, what does the future hold for networking? Exciting changes will revolutionize how we connect and the world around us! Businesses that can adapt to these changes will be the ones that succeed in the next decade. Are you ready for the future of networking?

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Home is where the heart is… and the office

It’s obvious that feeling secure and comfortable with a work environment is paramount to a happy and productive workforce. But keeping employees at home has an inherent financial incentive. As brick and mortar offices begin their descent into obsoletion, more employers are transitioning to remote work as the advantages present themselves. Infact, According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 23 percent of employees in the US did part or all of their work from home. That’s almost a quarter of working citizens sipping tea with their kittens on the clock.

Freedom does not equal laziness

At first glance through the lens of traditional business this doesn’t make sense. Employees aren’t meant to be productive with such freedoms afforded to them. What would you do if you were given 0 oversight and left to your own devises? I’m assuming you answered something along the lines of “Watch netflix and crack open a beer” and I wouldn’t blame you. However recent studies have shown that, with proper training, remote employees can not only survive but thrive.

Having the choice to do what you want keeps you motivated and inspired to pick up new projects and test new directions.

Therein lies the key to successfully transitioning to remote work: proper training. Employers considering the shift have to define their expectations and best practices moving forward. When I was hired on by SME I was told that I had 100% control of my schedule and to work only when I felt inspired. At first I was blown away with the level of freedom I now had but sooner than I expected I found myself working even more than I had with my previous employer. Having the choice to do what you want keeps you motivated and inspired to pick up new projects and test new directions. On top of this the work I was doing was more qualitative as I actually cared about what I was doing. Getting your employees to care can be invaluable and the first step is to give them the freedom every human being craves on a primal level.

Training the pajama marketers

Onboarding for this type of work is a mixed bag. For a marketing agency you’ll have to define expectations and core goals. Your goals have to be precise and open ended to keep your employees both accountable and inspired. An example would be telling your employees you expect $30,000 in new revenue from advertising before the end of the year. This allows them to find new channels and tools to reach this goal while simultaneously giving them a number to strive for. An open ended structure sparks creativity, passion and a drive to try new things which is what you need to keep a remote team motivated.

When I first came on to SME I was a bit overwhelmed with the freedom at first. You sit down to your computer each day and feel a surge of motivation when you realize you can do whatever you want to make the company great. However after just a couple weeks I was starting to notice a pattern in my working habits. I would start off energized and excited but begin to trail off a bit after a few hours. The way I was able to work around this was by keeping a highly organized calendar and todo list. You have to become your own boss which means structuring your work life a bit more than you’re used to. Use tools like Trello to become the ultimate pajama marketer.

The tools you’ll need for the road ahead

Here at SME we use a wealth of tools to make remote work feel as natural as possible. Here are a few we can recommend when designing your remote workspace.

Sococo – The Virtual Office to keep your team connected.

Team Password – For sharing passwords across your entire workforce.

Hootsuite – Helps you schedule social posts across multiple channels as a team.

CoSchedule – The most full featured content calendar we’ve found built with collaboration in mind.

Slack – For team wide chat when E-mail is just too slow.

The future of work is upon us

Adjusting to this brave new worklife will take time. We can’t expect employees to ‘get it’ over night. However with a little patience and a bit of training remote work will begin to take on a much deserved surge in popularity. Nullifying the unnecessary expenses of office spaces and supplies will allow new lean businesses to pop up across the globe giving thousands of marketers the chance to do what they do best despite their physical location. It only makes sense that an equally skilled & experienced marketer from Idaho get’s the same opportunities as one from New York. This is the next step of globalization and we all have to do our part to become a part of it.

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So why did we tackle this project in the first place? Well let’s just say we kind of care about our followers… a lot.

You deserved a simpler user experience

Our primary goal was to improve navigation and user experience for our audience. This new layout has received outstanding feedback on our agency site for a while now, so we knew it would be an improvement for our blog readers, too.

You deserved a more modern design

Our previous design was eight years old. It didn’t perform to our standards for mobile or search. We needed to make sure you’d have a great experience however you reached our website. We also needed to ensure that you could find our great content on Google without having to dig through a pile of outdated links. This design is intended to give new users a chance to experience as much of our content as possible. The sleek condensed approach is optimized for sharing our articles in a streamlined and accessible format. We hope that this will ultimately make it easier to navigate our site and understand what we’re about right from the get go.

You deserved clarity and transparency

Even after three years, we were surprised to find people were still unsure about the relationship between Social Media Explorer and SME Digital. The new design gives us a cohesive brand, and makes it explicitly clear that Social Media Explorer and SME Digital belong to the same organization. Having a connection between brand and blog is extremely important and we implore other agencies running a blog to take a step back and decide if they need to do the same. Readers want to know the story and humans behind your blog.

We hope the new design achieves all these goals. The only way we can know for sure is for you to tell us. If you have a minute, we invite you to give us your opinion of the changes in this survey. We want Social Media Explorer to be your straight-talk source for ideas and inspiration. The only way we can make this site perfect is with the help of our amazing followers like you.

We still believe there’s still a lot of ground to cover and new territory to explore in social media. Thanks for joining us on this exciting journey.

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At the time the idea didn’t feel right. The technology was getting there or was already there but that didn’t mean everyone was adopting it right away. Fast forward to 2011, and most people will find out about this blog post through someone’s lifestream on Twitter. Our imagination tends to outpace our ability to invent. And something can be invented long before it’s a conventional part of people’s lives.

So we must separate the bells and whistles from the nuts and bolts.

Creating a strategy focused on measurable business goals will help you develop a filter that helps decipher flash-in-the-pan technologies from the sea changes. (How to develop this type of strategy is an entirely different post topic).

But instead of focusing on the technology side of the future, focus on the human side. Human behavior is a more consistent bet than technology. If we prepare our website for the future with human nature in mind, we will put our organization in a good position regardless of how the flood of technology leaves things.

5 Future-proof ideas for websites

If we bet on technology, we can either be really right, or really wrong. But if we bet on human nature, we can count on consistency and know that our website is going to be well-positioned for the future. Besides, there’s no prize for beating your audience to the future (unless you’re the inventor).

The website of the future must be:

1. Simple
2. Portable
3. Fast
4. Human
5. Useful and/or interesting

1. Make it simple

People value simplicity

Every day, more than 100 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook. More than 90 million Tweets are Tweeted. About 50,000 new blogs are created to get stacked on top of the 150 million+ that are already out there. As you read this, some of the 294 billion emails that are sent each day are being written.

We’re in an era of information overload. Our audience members are busy people who are overcommitted *outside* of their Internet lives. It’s a small miracle each time they make it to our sites so we shouldn’t overwhelm them once they get there.

The first step in preparing your website for the future happens offline. Websites are often a reflection of the organization that created them. If our organization is disorganized, silo-ed, and poor at communicating, our website will be, too. Design by committee often results in a battlefield of compromise where your visitor is the casualty. As an organization, we must go through the difficult task of truly answering some basic but powerful questions:

1. What kind of person is my audience member?
2. What’s the one thing they actually want from me?
3. What one action do I want them to take?

There are no Swiss army-knife sites (except for maybe Google). We need to simplify, specialize and stick to our core mission or risk becoming irrelevant.

If the future of the web is simplicity, here’s how you can prepare:

• Boil down your organization’s core offering
• Conduct a 5-second usability test (fivesecondtest.com)
• Conduct a website audit: check for competing initiatives on your own site
• Check your analytics to see where you are losing visitors

2. Make it portable

People value convenience

The world is going mobile in a hurry. You’ve heard the stats. By 2015, 48% of U.S. citizens will browse the mobile web. Nearly 150 million people will own smartphones and mobile traffic will increase 26-fold.

Mobile isn’t a trend. Mobile is the trend.

But the web isn’t just going to mobile devices, it’s going to any screen that can present the internet. Think kiosks, augmented-reality digital signage, screens we haven’t thought of yet. The web is going to be portable: found wherever a digital screen exists.

When you’re creating a mobile version of your website (which should be your priority over running out to create a mobile app just to create one), the simplicity you gained in step 1 (“Make it simple) will help pave the way for you to create a simpler menu that satisfies your audience members desires on your site.

To prepare your site for mobile:

• Start thinking now about how you’d simplify your navigation menu and site content
• Discontinue developing Flash elements into your website, focus on HTML or JavaScript
• Focus on mobile-friendly first, and then app (if it makes sense)

3. Make it fast

People hate waiting

Nobody likes to stand in line. Waiting is tough for people. That’s why 40% of web users have abandoned a page after 3 seconds of loading.

Taking the steps to making sure our sites load quickly will have benefits to user experience and SEO. People are more likely to click through more on quickly-loading sites. And Google has mentioned that they take load speed into consideration in their algorithm.

Remember, simple sites load faster. And this is even more true (and more important) in mobile.

To get your site sped up for the future:

• Check site load speed
• Run Yahoo’s YSlow
• Run Google’s Page Speed Online
• Create a checklist of tweaks to apply to your current (or to be created) site

4. Make it human

People crave human interaction

We’ve heard the statistics on social media. And to be fair, a lot of organizations are at least trying social media. But the humanization of your website shouldn’t be limited to your social media pre-approved channels.

Social media – or the human element – should be a layer across your digital presence, not a channel-based silo. Humanity evokes emotion from people. Showing the human side of your organization can have many benefits.

For instance, during the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund donation drive, an A/B split test was conducted to see which donation form was more effective and generating donations. One form had a photo from Haiti, the other did not. The one with the photo – the human – element – converted 10% better and resulted in $1 million more in donations.

The social side of your organization can come out anywhere you have content. Your email subscription thank you, your administrative copy, your error messages can all incorporate the human element.

For instance, this error message was written in a more human-friendly way and decreased the bounce rate by 66%

If the future of the web is social, here’s how to prepare:

• Take inventory of your social media outposts: are you acting like a logo or a person?
• Investigate where your audience socializes online (Try CubeSocial.com)
• Start monitoring social media to keep tabs on influencers and your audience

5. Be useful or interesting

People love a good story

An article this long has to include the cliché “content is king” at least once so here it is: content is king. In a recent survey, 73% of people said they preferred to learn about organizations through articles as opposed to ads. Content is 61% more likely to drive someone to make a purchase than ads, and content can live forever on your website.

The power of a good story is strong.

And content can pay dividends down the road for your site. A Tweet or Facebook post usually only lasts for hours. A blog post can last for years.

The future of the web is storytelling, so start generating content that captivates your audience because it’s useful or interesting (or both!)

If you want to prepare for the future of the web, focus on human nature. Make it simple, portable, fast, social, useful and interesting you’ll be ahead of the race.

This post was the blog version of “The Future of Websites,” a presentation given by Andrew on September 15th for the Association Media & Publishing “Lunch and Learn” series.

The original presentation:

(Special thanks to Jackie Roy for patient help on this presentation.)

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If you’re kind of lost, like I was reading the article, here’s a summary:

The National Science Foundation awarded a $2.5 million contract to BBN Technologies in May to lay the groundwork for a replacement for the Internet as we know it today. What we use, basically the rudimentary network of academia computers established in the 1960s as ARPAnet with trillions of dollars of add-ons, is becoming obsolete in its functionality and performance. The key driving factors behind the computing thinkers of the world and the federal government includes several factors. One of which is that the cost of identity theft from credit card phishing exceeds the estimated value of drug trafficking in the U.S. (Frankly, I vote we put more money to fighting drug trafficking, but that’s just one dumb guy’s vote.) Interestingly enough, in the age of streaming video and audio, poor quality is singled out as a reason as well. Another factor giving cause to the infrastructure re-thinking is the monsters behind the 34 spam emails I received in the last hour alone.

The NSF believes the best way to rebuild the Internet is to start from scratch since the current web was designed with 1950s-thinking and was never built to run the way it does. They’re calling the new project GENI – Global Environment for Network Innovations – which, according to the article will take $350 million over 10-15 years and 1 million beta testers before we’ll see anything.

Our new Internet will supposedly be available everywhere … wirelessly. Telephone, television, etc., will all stream over it (or so I gather) and information will find direct pathways to end users instead of routing through servers and ISPs. One big-brother-ish suggestion in the article (which is treated as such) is that each human being would basically possess a unique IP address and our Internet will come with us wherever we go. (Please let it be on a device. Implants give me the heebie-jeebies.) One allusion in the piece, however, is to a networked pacemaker than will notify your doctor when you need attention. That critical information would be prioritized and sent over this new Internet directly to your doctor as opposed to funneled into a data stream to fight the bandwidth war with the teenagers sitting next to you watching YouTube videos at Panera Bread.

Apparently, BBN’s Kristin Rauschenbach is in charge of formulating all this jazz. She’s supervising the initial construction of GENI’s physical network and it is her new test lab project. Man, I hope she’s smart.

If you’re flying on Southwest Airlines this month, you should read the whole thing. Coffey is a strong writer and my summary certainly can’t do it complete justice. And a tip of the cap to Southwest Airlines again. I love their blog. I dig their airline. And their free magazine is now more to me than a cumbersome carrying case for four Sudoku puzzles.

The big question for me is whether or not this thing will even happen. Will the corporations benefiting from the current Internet structure (hardware manufacturers, network solutions providers, etc.) be accommodating to the new way of life or lobby to cut funding to protect their livelihoods. Yes, they will likely profit from making the new equipment, but will the new hardware alienate some component of the current stuff, pissing off some sector of business? Will entities such as phone, cable, satellite service and radio providers no longer be needed? I’ll have “Telecommunications Lobby” for 1,000, Alex.

The future is intriguing and exciting. It is also frightening to think that our world will one day be ruled by technology, even more so than it is now. Technological advancements certainly can make life easier, but it can also complicate things … privacy for one.

There are hundreds more questions to be answered before we can trade in our Internet for a new model. Does this make Robert Scoble and the semantic web folks crap their pants? Will we need microchip implants in our brains? Will the new Internet give us some strange new cancer? Never mind our personal health, will it be environmentally friendly?

These are my initial questions. What are yours?

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. Philoctetes Roundtable: The Future Of Technology
2. Lifestrea.ms Is Attempting To Build The Future Of Life Online
3. The Future Of The Internet Is Your Desktop
4. News.com Talk: “The Future Of The Internet And How To Stop It”
5. NSF FIND Working Meeting

IMAGE: Spirit Magazine cover, December 2007. From Spiritmag.com

[tags]Internet, future, GENI project, GENI, BBN Technologies, ARPAnet, technology, privacy[/tags]

The post Someone Is Building A New Internet appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Human nature can be volatile, inconsistent and even frustrating to predict. Just ask anyone in the marketing or advertising business about it and theyâ€ll roll their eyes. All the statistics in the world couldnâ€t have predicted people would flee the real world for their laptops and IM each other from across the Starbucks. Perhaps the only thing you can predict about human nature is that it will be volatile, inconsistent and frustrating.

When I see marketers blog about what truly engages and reaches people in a social media setting, the bottom line is normally a human connection. One person reaching out to another with like mind or common interest and sharing information: thatâ€s networking. Not social networking, not online community networking, not Myspacey, Facebooky, Twittery non-celebrity fan club-ism, but real human interaction.

Thatâ€s why Web 3.0 (or some increment with an unnecessary decimal point and geek zero added – Does Bill Gates get residuals for the use of “point-oh”?) looks mighty glum to me.

I see the downside of the bell curve where people turn away from their LCD display and say, “I havenâ€t had a meal with another human being in six months.” Theyâ€ll call their worried mothers, knock on the neighborâ€s door to see if they need anything from the corner store and carry on a 20 minute conversation with the check-out clerk.

Weâ€re human beings, not machines. We need other human beings to prove this.

So it is my contention that the next big thing will be the site, company or brand that figures out how to take the online community offline and inject human interaction into the experience. No amount of Second Life enthusiasm, no degree of Facebook addiction and no delineation of Twitter feeds can make a person feel real.

For the record, I hope I can be the one to figure it out first. I donâ€t realistically think Iâ€m quite that smart. But I sure am going to have fun trying.

What do you think Web 3.0 will look like? Do you think the pendulum of online networking fascination one day swing the other way?

PHOTO: “DSC_0393” from Jeff Pulver’s Flickr.

[tags]social media, social networking, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web 5.0, networking, human nature, sociology, psychology, human behavior, future[/tags]

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