Fragmentation

Posted on | August 28, 2007 |

How do you keep track of the changing faces of the Internet? It is becoming more and more difficult for me to keep up to date with what all these new things do - Wetpaint, Fotolog, Oddcast and many, many more. The second question for me becomes, out of all these which ones should I pay attention to?

Hi media buys Fotolog for $90 million before I even know who they are - I need to come up with something - fly under the radar - just before I can start to make money with it - cash out for millions. Sounds like a plan.

If it is confusing to those of us in the industry just think what our prospects and clients are thinking. In most cases they rely on my telling them new directions and ideas for the next 6 months. When they tell me what they have been told by other practitioners it makes me wonder and shudder.

Maybe there will be more and more of a digital divide and it may not be along age lines. I was speaking to an executive MBA class not too long ago and the question came up about where the Internet might be going over the next year. I went over a number of things and then asked how many were on Second Life. Funny thing happened - not one of them had any idea what I was talking about. Surprisingly less than half had much knowledge about Facebook. These are the ones going to lead us into the future and they were uninformed about the direction of the Internet - the one media that will have the most impact on their future - probably.

If you are wondering, this was a university outside of Philadelphia not one in the middle of nowhere. It could be argued that a school in the middle of nowhere might have more to gain by embracing the new technology - just a thought.

So where am I going - with all this new technology and at a more rapid pace each day - unless we find a way to keep more folks on board the train we play with fire. The divide between the haves and the have nots will be repeated in a different way. The news yesterday was that only 20% out of the top 100 retailers were using optimization effectively - warning, warning.

On the other hand - yes it still means much opportunity for those jumping on board - which train - we can only guess and each train becomes more fragmented depending on your needs. If you don’t have a person you trust keeping you up to date, what do you do - FIND ONE.

Here is just a wild thought - do a bit of many things; blog, do video, write articles, release optimized press releases, optimize the hell out of your website, get incoming links (the right way - whatever that is) and spread out your story. You mean treat the Internet just the same way you would do more traditional marketing - yes just using the new media more fully - just a wild idea.