Tech Notes with Mark Easby

May 8 2008 by Mark Easby, The Journal

WHEN the web was starting out, brands really didn’t understand how it was going to change their world forever. And nor did we unsuspecting consumers.

Surfers – as we were called way back then – with our 56k dial-up connections, were impressed by everything.

A world of opportunity opened up seemingly overnight and, ever watchful for opportunities to sell more products, business owners took heed.

Arran islanders, producing and selling their famous wool sweaters in small farm shops to tourists, suddenly found themselves on the doorstep of Texans, Muscovites and Londoners.

When faced with this new medium, website owners and marketers saw no reason to change how they marketed their products or spoke to their customers.

But in the background people started to use the internet in a new way. They sent messages to each other via forums, and people on college campuses and in homes around the world began to use the web to connect with one another.

At that tipping point, consumers started talking to each other outside of the influence of brand and content owners. They created their own websites, hosted their own debates, shared their experiences, likes and dislikes, just as we have done for millennia whenever people gather. This new phase of the web is about people. It is they who now define and shape the landscape of the internet.

Names now familiar to us, such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Wikipedia and Facebook, among others, are the early iterations of those tools that are intrinsically Web 2.0. The technology that powers them creates value as a side-effect of their use and clever people are leveraging the data to create new markets and territories.

But there is a warning to be served here too.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, a seminal piece of thinking on the end of business as usual, suggests that markets are conversations between human beings.

Brand and content owners would do well to bear this in mind.

They must accept they no longer own their brands, which are now in the hands of real people, with real issues and needs – and they want to talk about them.

So brand owners, you must join the conversation, listen to what’s being said and let customers see the real you. You’ll be surprised by their response.

Mark Easby is director of leading Middlesbrough-based brand agency Calm Asylum