Internet Marketing and Digital Media Strategy Sydney Australia

The week that was!

An "interesting" week in the wide world of the web -

• Sensis (Yellow Pages/ Telstra) concedes defeat dumping it's search engine for Google search results; 
• we sat in on the Australian Broadband Conference and learnt more about the Australian National Broadband Network NBN shamozzle;
• there was a US Presidential Election (smiles) - the first tech savvy President!
• we had our first CLIVE Sales Partner conference and
• we tapped into the Web 2.0 Conference in San Fransisco.

How are the events related?

During the week Internet marketing guru Seth Godin, wrote a piece on "marketing lessons form the 2008 Presidential election."

One of his points "Influencing the Influencers"  

Seth writes,

Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted. The unheralded success factor of Obama's campaign is the get out the vote effort. Every marketer can learn from this. It's easier (far easier) to motivate the slightly motivated than it is to argue with those that either ignore you or are predisposed to not like you.

To get a deeper understanding of this we need to take a few steps back and understand

1. The evolution of society and economy from nomadic to agricultural, industrial, informational towards the Creative Economy (see HP's Phil McKinney's presentation)
2. We are currently transforming from an industrial based economy to informational (see Morgan Stanleys Mary Meeker Web 2.0). Key points are
   
   1. An 81% correlation between GDP and advertising growth.
   2. Undermonitezed social networks/ VoIP and Video which is driving powerful usage growth
   3. Facebook and Youtube gained 500 basis points of relative share while Yahoo and MSN lost share over the last two years
   4. Focus on BRICS (Brasil, Russia,India, China and South Africa)
   5. Companies with cogent business models that provide consumer value should survive/ thrive.  consumers need more value than they have needed it in a long time and the Internet should be the best place to find it
3. An understanding of Groundswell - Internet user technographics - from "inactives" to "creators"

 So what does that mean for Australia?

Australia is currently looking to implement a National Broadband Network (NBN).  One needs to understand that the Creative Economy of the future is based on the broadband infrastructure of today.  The challenges of an aging population (e-health); skills shortage (e-education); green (carbon reduction); economic (global service export) are underpinned by a world best practice broadband infrastructure.

With the basic world class broadband infrastructure in place, innovation will prosper.  Australia has the opportunity to take a global leadership position in the development of the Creative Economy.