The world and technology change quickly and so the world of marketing the WEB has seen a drastic change in the last five years. Not so long ago (in the late 90s) a WEB presence meant having a website with static information about the company and it’s products and services. It was a place holder of sorts providing information in a non-changing environment. The Company bought a domain name (hopefully related to the business name) and hired someone to build the Company website. The cost could be exorbitant. It housed information about the Company, the products and services that were offered. Out-bound marketing continued to be used to brand and to connect with the customer. Marketing campaigns engaged in television, radio and print marketing. Direct mail campaigns were used locally to get the word out about who the Company was and what the Company was offering. The newspaper was the most productive local tool to communicate about the Company’s products and services.
The website was rather like a business card, static in nature. Companies had to have one but it was just one spoke of the wheel. It was put in place and left there as an official statement about when the Company was founded and who the executive management team was. It was a PR spin if you will. It provided information on products and services, usually written by PR firms. It would change occasionally with new product announcements and promotional offers but the changes were few. PR firms were used to brand for the Company and to create their marketing campaigns. The small business owner could not play the game.
The evolution of the WEB from the late 90s to present day is rather staggering. It has changed our culture and how we perceive the World. It leveled the playing field to some extent between large business and small business. Even in those early days, with the personal computer entering our homes, the Consumer started to go to the web for information. The ringing of the telephone began to slow. That one thing started a ripple of effects that would change the world and how the Consumer got information. That one spoke of the wheel for marketing started to become important. The Consumer wanted to find the Company and to be able to see who owned the company and how they presented themselves.
My husband, David Gendron and I had our first website in the mid 90′s. We built it ourselves and spent the next 3 years learning and changing it. Products became available that provided HTML editing and made the task so much easier. The home computer was now a standard and the world began to change. The Consumer was going on-line to learn and get information. The Dot-Com boom and bust came and went and Web 2.0 came about. MySpace and Facebook arrived on the scene to mixed reviews.
This Wiki article provides a chronological history. Below is an except from it on the crucial period of development that would change the world of marketing.
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Beginning in 2002, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as Weblogs and RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange, primarily featuring DIY user-edited and generated websites, was coined Web 2.0.
The Web 2.0 boom saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a new, democratized Web. Some believe it will be followed by the full realization of a Semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the Semantic Web as follows:
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize. – Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
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The semantic network is still a dream but we continue to evolve toward the concept. With more and more social networking sites that offer information, knowledge and the opportunity to engage, we have become empowered to connect and to communicate.
Let me introduce Doug Englebart, the father of interactive computing. He is most noted for developing the the Mouse. His thinking went so far beyond the Mouse. My husband David Gendron was fortunate to be part of the Bootstrap Institute, founded to implement Doug Englebart’s visionary thinking. David worked with Doug to create a complex presentation that provided a visual representation of many of Doug’s models. Doug used the presentation for many years until it was retired. Recently, David provided an old historical copy of it, so that a new presentation could be developed. Doug is a visionary person and our professional lives have evolved around Doug’s thinking. Doug saw things on a global level. He saw that technology would hold the key to solving so many problems for the World. Our work has always been on a practical level and cellular in comparison. We now are able to conceive of the computing power that would be needed to implement Doug’s models on the global level. That is a very powerful realization.
So as the WEB has evolved and Web 2.0 arrived, we have seen the power to develop our own web presence move from “The Developer” to the individual business owner. We are no longer held hostage by “The Developer”. Just as “Big Business” became ruthless so has the world of software development. The concept of “behind closed doors” became a policy for development companies that wanted to hold their clients hostage with code developed in such complex ways as to discourage the ability to change or move your business to a different Developer. With these new changes to the WEB, we can easily see that type of business ethic going away. The hope of the future is for the client to own and manage his own development projects and content. Products like WordPress and Joomla offer ownership to the business owner. It’s real and it’s available right now. The Developer will still be in the game, but the business owner will understand these development environments enough to have ownership and the ability to manage the content. This is a huge leap forward in empowering the small to medium business owner. You now have a powerful means to be found by the Consumer.
This new capability frontier that allows the freedom to develop our own websites, will support the ability to create and sustain “Dynamic Knowledge Repositories” (DKRs) a term coined by Doug Englebart. A DKR is a storehouse of knowledge. It is dynamic in nature (changing). A Blog could be simple example of a DKR. The term organic becomes a relevant term. As things change and evolve, it is mirrored in the DKR. Our websites and blog sites of today are dynamic in nature. The are successful when they are content rich and changing to reflect a more organic perspective for the Company as a whole and the community that it supports.
Another phrase that was coined by Doug was the “Networked Improvement Community” (NIC). A NIC is a self-organizing technology solution that helps groups evolve and develop quicker by sharing and engaging in an improvement infrastructure. Doug’s vision was a global vision and hopefully one day we will see his dream in existence. It’s practical use in our world today is within organizations to build performance improvement and to plan effectively for evolution in business development. If we have effective performance improvement systems in place, then business planning and business development are only a natural for change and evolution. A larger opportunity exists to collaborate out to a larger community that supports the Industry we do business in. Even with our competition, collaboration holds an opportunity to improve the Industry as a whole. We then move our concept out to a global model and we begin to see Doug’s vision. Being open and transparent provides opportunity for improvement on all levels. Collaboration is key for the future of business and the world.
So with the concept of Web 2.0 and providing the Consumer with knowledge-based information about your products and services, a new level of connection began to emerge. The blogosphere has called this connection transparency. It is about representing to the Consumer, who you are on a moral, ethical and personal level. It becomes interesting that the Consumer does want to know. The static website is dead. Websites that do not have a blog component miss the market for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Only in these last five years has SEO evolved and become the main criteria for judging how well a website is in attracting the Consumer. Page Rank and SEO have become the key elements in measuring the ability of your website to be found by the Consumer.
Static websites will seldom be found. Providing your website address is the only viable means of providing the Consumer access to your website. The game changed and while you can still achieve results by publishing your website address and paying for “Pay per Click” advertising, the current and most effective means is to combine those efforts with “Organic SEO”.
Blogging has become a powerful way to market your service and to connect with the Consumer. The most critical aspect to what has changed would be the CONSUMER. They have access to vast amounts of information and knowledge and they are smarter and better informed. They can now do their own research and determine who they want to work with. Transparency and a policy of knowledge-based products and services along with excellent customer support is the model they look for. They find the products and Companies they want to work with on the WEB. They read the website and explore. They refine their search terms for exactly what they are looking for.
An example would be someone looking to sell their home which is a beautiful but a unique property. They search the WEB with a search term that is local and describe what they want in a real estate agent (a Realtor who markets the WEB). They find a number of results and go through them to determine who has a strong WEB presence and does indeed market real estate pervasively on the WEB.
The steps to how they found their real estate agent are simple. Their search term included the area they were interested in and then the main criteria they wanted (a Realtor who markets the WEB). Once the results appeared, they were free to explore and see whom they felt a connection with. The power of Blogging is that it allows you the opportunity to express to the Consumer who you are and how you do business. Having a strong dynamic WEB marketing presence for your business will become key to your future business development.
Interesting statistics in real estate confirm these assumptions. 90% of Buyers search the WEB for properties and value information. 37% of Buyers buy the home they call the Realtor to view. This example is a power statement about the Consumer and how they are choosing to do business. They no longer watch the commercials on TV. They now have the ability to fast-forward (DVRs) through the commercials, they no longer watch the News and they don’t read the paper anymore. The print newspaper (now thin and getting thinner) is now augmented by News Websites that will become our News Channels.
Companies like AT&T and Verizon…the big dogs will in time feel the pressure of their company policies. Bank of America has been a very public example of how their policies and service became very prominent in the news and the Blogosphere. They put out a strong PR campaign for how they have changed and for damage control. Only the future will tell if it is sincere and they have indeed changed their policies.
In summary, I will conclude by simply telling you how excited about the future I am. We see the world new and it becomes exciting. My husband, David Gendron and I have always developed software products to help organizations with performance improvement. The nice thing about the changes that have come about is that the development world is no longer a scary place. The business owner has wonderful opportunity to communicate directly with the Consumer and the markets they play in. The transparency of who you are and how you do business has become ever increasingly powerful. “Walking the Talk” was always an oxymoron when we could not play the game. Now the WEB offers us development environments like WordPress and Joomla, that empower us to offer a wide and diverse set of options to the Consumer. When you do it right, you will be found right at the top of the page and your page rank will be based on the content you provide.
Need a little bit of help getting started? We can help you market the WEB pervasively.
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Jeanean Gendron, the Marketer
530 276-7417
David Gendron, the Developer
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Information on Doug Englebart. I’m providing rather lite versions of these concepts for our discussion here. Links are below if you desire to read further on Doug Englebart and his work. It makes for excellent reading. Google Doug Englebart for pages of links.
Doug Englebart Institute, formerly Bootstrap Institute
