If anything, you have to give the Purple One his due because he does know how to make splash. In an interview with the UK Mirror yesterday, Prince announced that "The internet's completely over…" Not surprisingly, this was immediately tweeted, digg'd and shared from one end of the internet to the other. The consensus not surprisingly was that the little purple dude had completely taken leave of his senses.
Or did he?
In marketing, we have a tendency to be always looking forward. Our clients don't just expect great work from us, they also expect us to always be one wave ahead of them, sniffing out trends and changes in the market before they can impact their brands. But sometimes the best way to sniff out where the market is going is to look back at where it was been. And this may be one of those cases.
Back twenty years ago (a couple centuries in Internet years), the web and the Internet were synonymous. Putting aside for a moment the parallel universe of email, you accessed the Internet via a web browser. You went to websites. You traversed blue hyperlinks, which seems so curiously archaic at this point as to be almost laughable. It was a more simple time.
The hint that maybe this could be something more was the arrival of Pointcast in 1996. For the first time the web came to you instead of you having to go to the web. Granted, the product was apparently created by a bunch of drunken monkeys and it quickly was banned from corporate networks due to its insatiable appetite for bandwidth. But even back then, a seed of a concept was planted. Was the Internet a destination or a backbone?
At first this was an irrelevant distinction. Processors were slow, modems were slower and if you wanted to access the Internet, you could only use a computer. But then things started getting faster, the pipes started getting bigger and the platforms started to expand. And the tipping point was when suddenly more mobile devices were accessing the web than computers. Suddenly the game has changed, and maybe His Purpleness is on to something.
Imagine the following scenario. Someone is walking down the street. Their Blackberry beeps. They have a Facebook message. They stop, read and respond. Exactly where in this digital ecosystem are they? They are not on the web for certain. They are barely on Facebook for that matter. They have dis-intermediated the entire experience into the interface and user experience they want at that moment in time. For this person at this moment in time, the Internet is not a destination; it's a utility.
We have been hearing the "Internet as a utility" chant for years now, except now it is coming true. Dis-intermediation is coming at us with multiple levels. First someone is on the web. Then they are on the web but via Facebook. Then they are communicating directly via Facebook and leaving the web out completely. We have people going from Twitter's web page to now interfacing with the threads from HootSuite or TweetDeck.
We look at this as the inevitable march of technology, but what does it mean for us in the world of marketing? How do the metrics of time on page or impressions work when suddenly the very nature of impressions is changing? How can we track repeat visitors or loyalty when we have no idea what virtual door the audience is going to walk through?
The next time a client tells you "we have to be on the web," a little education may be in order. And here are three simple questions you can ask them to help figure out what they want.
1. Where do you want your audience to live? In a world where your audience can be anywhere, there has to be a home base, or you will fragment the community to the point where context is impossible. Having parallel communities on your home page and on Facebook is a recipe for disaster; one of these channels has to lead to the other otherwise the multiplier of dis-intermediation will break the relationship completely.
2. Speaking of context, is your content "portable" or fixed? In the Facebook example above, your FB thread has to be independent of its location or that mobile user will be lost. So don't reference a video or a blog, because they aren't there and they can't see it.
3. We use the math shorthand at Palmer of Community plus Context equals Conversation. If you addressed community in question 1, and context in question 2, you are almost home. Now comes conversation. Again, think of Facebook. When someone makes a comment to a FB thread, you get the notification on FB…and in your email…and on your mobile device. It's the same experience across the channels. Are your conversations equally portable?
So the next time a client tells you they want to be on the Internet, explain to them that the Internet is dead…and then bring it back to life for them.
Or did he?
In marketing, we have a tendency to be always looking forward. Our clients don't just expect great work from us, they also expect us to always be one wave ahead of them, sniffing out trends and changes in the market before they can impact their brands. But sometimes the best way to sniff out where the market is going is to look back at where it was been. And this may be one of those cases.
Back twenty years ago (a couple centuries in Internet years), the web and the Internet were synonymous. Putting aside for a moment the parallel universe of email, you accessed the Internet via a web browser. You went to websites. You traversed blue hyperlinks, which seems so curiously archaic at this point as to be almost laughable. It was a more simple time.
The hint that maybe this could be something more was the arrival of Pointcast in 1996. For the first time the web came to you instead of you having to go to the web. Granted, the product was apparently created by a bunch of drunken monkeys and it quickly was banned from corporate networks due to its insatiable appetite for bandwidth. But even back then, a seed of a concept was planted. Was the Internet a destination or a backbone?
At first this was an irrelevant distinction. Processors were slow, modems were slower and if you wanted to access the Internet, you could only use a computer. But then things started getting faster, the pipes started getting bigger and the platforms started to expand. And the tipping point was when suddenly more mobile devices were accessing the web than computers. Suddenly the game has changed, and maybe His Purpleness is on to something.
The Internet is dead. Long live the Internet.
Imagine the following scenario. Someone is walking down the street. Their Blackberry beeps. They have a Facebook message. They stop, read and respond. Exactly where in this digital ecosystem are they? They are not on the web for certain. They are barely on Facebook for that matter. They have dis-intermediated the entire experience into the interface and user experience they want at that moment in time. For this person at this moment in time, the Internet is not a destination; it's a utility.
We have been hearing the "Internet as a utility" chant for years now, except now it is coming true. Dis-intermediation is coming at us with multiple levels. First someone is on the web. Then they are on the web but via Facebook. Then they are communicating directly via Facebook and leaving the web out completely. We have people going from Twitter's web page to now interfacing with the threads from HootSuite or TweetDeck.
We look at this as the inevitable march of technology, but what does it mean for us in the world of marketing? How do the metrics of time on page or impressions work when suddenly the very nature of impressions is changing? How can we track repeat visitors or loyalty when we have no idea what virtual door the audience is going to walk through?
The next time a client tells you "we have to be on the web," a little education may be in order. And here are three simple questions you can ask them to help figure out what they want.
1. Where do you want your audience to live? In a world where your audience can be anywhere, there has to be a home base, or you will fragment the community to the point where context is impossible. Having parallel communities on your home page and on Facebook is a recipe for disaster; one of these channels has to lead to the other otherwise the multiplier of dis-intermediation will break the relationship completely.
2. Speaking of context, is your content "portable" or fixed? In the Facebook example above, your FB thread has to be independent of its location or that mobile user will be lost. So don't reference a video or a blog, because they aren't there and they can't see it.
3. We use the math shorthand at Palmer of Community plus Context equals Conversation. If you addressed community in question 1, and context in question 2, you are almost home. Now comes conversation. Again, think of Facebook. When someone makes a comment to a FB thread, you get the notification on FB…and in your email…and on your mobile device. It's the same experience across the channels. Are your conversations equally portable?
So the next time a client tells you they want to be on the Internet, explain to them that the Internet is dead…and then bring it back to life for them.
