From a marketing point of view  businesses are increasing looking at the Internet to increase brand awareness, communicate and get closer to their customers and increase service performance whilst lowering overheads.

The Internet marketing mix covers everything from website design, search engine optiminisation (SEO), to blogging, banner advertising, Internet video to online social technologies such as Facebook.

For many businesses at the moment many online social communities feel a bit like small islands or countries seemingly not connected or if they are, the migration (visa rules), are not seamless/ user friendly/ aware.

In the future we will see a move from this individual island perspective ("I'm on Facebook" and "I'm on Twitter" statement) towards a greater seamless integration (interoperability) of adaptive open social technologies - ie single user login and unified messaging portal - many devices > one login > multiple feeds (in and out).

With that will come greater contextual advertising, derivative information and aggregated services, the linking of similar communities and interests and consequently a market rationalisation of base platforms.

Innovation will move up towards higher value services, more effective communication for the time poor and greater creative quality expression.

In the technographics ladder we will see the user type distribution curve move up as users become more technology conversant and literate ie "technacy"

For businesses now it means allocating resources and experimenting with these new communication channels.

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Quality Rises to the Top

Last month we mentioned a great video from a Sony/BMG conference in Rome 2008 about the exponential develop of technology - the articles also showed a 1957 RAND computer promotional video, the key point the core messages about technology growth are the same.  

Anyway, the old link was broken but happily the video reappeared today via a viral email - such is the fundamental principle that quality content and production tends to rise to the top - by that I mean it engages with the audience (builds brand), informs (WIIFM for the viewer/ consumer) and motivates action (ie Seth's megaphone/ Forresters Technographics - to consume to create).

If it was Sony that put the video out into cyberspace then well done - this is clever thought leader branding.  

I should point out that the raw content is based on a slide show called Shift Happens

Some points

• China will soon be the #1 English speaking nation in the world
• Todays learner will have 10-14 jobs....but the age of 38!
• The top 10 in demand jobs did not exist in 2004
• There are over 2.7B searches on Google each month
• There are more then 3,000 new books published every day
• The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years
• By 2010 it is expected to double every 72 hours
• By 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computation capabilities of the entire human species  (note: see creative economy) 

The facts are we adapt, the Y gens of today will be considered the dinosours of their grand children and so on.  One thing that stays constant in the world of change is the human connection - friendship, wisdom, trust and creativity.

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.

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Today's blog starts off with a long but really good TED clip featuring the PC guy from the Apple Ads talking about Love and the Universe.  We'll come back to Apple again later.

Then watch this clip (sorry I don't know how to embed this one)  http://tinyurl.com/6s8l3k- It was put together for a Sony BMG Senior Executive Conference in Rome this year and is based on the "Shift Happens" slide presentation below. 

I picked up this video link up this morning from Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester's Research guy on Twitter this morning (more on Twitter later)

After looking at these two clips then watch the clip featuring the old 1960's UNIVAC - you'll laugh but it's funny how much stays the same. 

You'll see that there is a consistent message through all of this - from technology perspective nothing much has changed over the last fifty years - computers are always getting faster, smaller, cheaper and the central driver is about communications and the impact on people and society. 

Shift Happens

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sociology future)