Newspapers defending Newspapers

One of my favourite Twitterers, @dburrows, pointed out a very interesting article appearing in The Times today.  The basic premise is that the Internet is not  terribly noteworthy in the grand scheme of things and certainly shouldn’t be considered as a defining technology of our time.

David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London, is quoted as saying “The Internet is rather passé . . . It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

Like speech as well, then, presumably.

The Professor quotes Steam Power and The Wheel as more fitting examples of revolutionary technology.   These are, after all, technology that spawn other technology – they’re solid and tangible and can be banged with spanners.  Communication, on the other hand is obviously far too much of a wishy-washy social science subject for the eminent professor to consider important.  Of course, one might note that neither steam power, nor the wheel would have existed without communication, as, indeed would no other technology.  But communication isn’t something an Engineer is an expert at.  Especially not this particular one, I fear.

It might not be engineering, but the societal impact of communication is beyond measurement – society simply doesn’t exist without communication.

So, communication is kind of important.  Revolutionary, in fact.  Dare I say it, very possibly communication is the one factor that defines humanity above all others.  Certainly not something worthy of the dismissal it has received in this article.

Without the wheel, I daresay the invention of the hovercraft would have come more quickly, but we’d have had to live without rollerskates.  Without steam power, well, we’d probably be pretty much where we are now, with a few tweaks and changes to our power plants.  Without the complex communication we capable of, we’d likely be extinct.

But within the sphere of communication, can we truly describe the Internet as revolutionary?  Isn’t the point the Professor is making is that the Internet is just a progression beyond what has already been established?  Does it really propel us beyond where the invention of the printing press took us?

I say it does.  The Internet is the only medium to be as accessible and as instant as speech, but provide a truly global audience.  Unlike speech, it can be referenced and archived.  The moment I publish this (free) blog entry, it is available to everyone across the world to read, use, comment and expand upon.

The table below captures the attributes that make the Internet so revolutionary in terms of communication media.

When the wheel was first invented, one can only imagine how long that knowledge took to disseminate and improvements iterate via the channels of communication then available.  The Internet makes it possible for any idea to disseminate and iterate at the speed of light.  To aid this process, unlike speech, radio or television, it can be referenced again and again, instantly, universally, democratically. If that isn’t a technological revolution, then I don’t know what is.

Medium	Barriers to entry		Distribution
	Cost	Regulation	Speed	Range
Speech	None	None	Instant	Very local
Print	High	Low	Slow	Local/National
Radio	Medium/High	High	Instant	Local/National
TV	High	High	Instant	Local/National
Internet	None	None	Instant	Global

Beyond this, the article goes on to quote another eminent professor, Clive James.

“After Lehman Brothers crashed,” he says, “The Wall Street Journal carried an analysis that is still the best thing I have seen on the subject. But the story needed half a dozen qualified financial journalists to put it together, and masses of research that no lonely blogger could possibly do . . . This throws into relief the intractable fact that the liberty which the web offers to the individual voice is also a restriction on group effort.”

Hold on a second.  Did I read this right?  It is intractable fact that journalists can’t work together on the Internet?  Collaboration is only possible when the output is destined for printing presses?  I assume this means spurious crap becomes intractable fact when a newspaper columnist tells you so.

I’d be very interested to know where that group of half a dozen qualified financial journalists carried out their ‘masses of research’.  Which library of printed materials had so quickly amassed so much data?  And how did that group of journalists collaborate, exchanging ideas and thoughts quickly?  Did the WSJ fly them in from all corners of the world to sit and work together in a single room?

Of course, the group of journalists used the global, instant, free communication medium of the Internet, drawing on and iterating knowledge already pinging around the world.  They used the same medium to collaborate their efforts as they packaged their Internet research, before WSJ published it in both digital and paper form.  Had Mr. James wished to, he could have read this interesting piece on WSJ’s website long before his antiquated, dessicated tree hit his doormat.

Mismanagement and Fear

Recent news shows ITV making sweeping cuts across their business, and citing reduced TV advertising revenue as the rationale.  They blame a shift in spend to online as the root cause.  All makes sense so far… except one of the budget cuts they are making is to offload ‘Friends Reunited’, the social networking site.  They are divesting of their online assets in order to deal with a growth in online…. what?

There’s more to this than meets the eye.  Online has indeed eaten into traditional media spend, but most savy offline media bought into online at a time when it became clear this would happen.  ITV bought one of the first (and financially most stable) social networks long before the social networking phenomenon became the big business it now is.  They were ‘best placed’ to be enormously successful, but somewhere down the line this prize asset, the grandfather of social networks, was allowed to dwindle and become insignificant in the fastest growing market in online.  Mismanagement and fear.

And it continues elsewhere in the big ‘brands’.  Speaking to marketing types dedicated to digital, they are all seeing their budgets slashed this year.  So, not only is spend in traditional media being cut, but, rather than divert budget to an accountable, measurable media like online, they make the cuts across the board.  Shortsighted behaviour.  Mismanagement and fear.

Upmarket Supermarket Social Market

I noted in the news that Waitrose are leveraging their customer database, trying to promote their social network, myWaitrose.

I don’t know where to begin with how wrong this feels.  Perhaps I’m missing something.  A social network for people who shop at an upmarket supermarket chain?  Having to drive people to the network?  Since when did supermarket brand qualify as a common interest?  More importantly, what is it trying to achieve?  Supermarket users are, on the whole, very loyal already; Waitrose customers particularly so.

I’m a Waitrose customer.  Are enough of my social circle customers to ply me away from Facebook/Twitter?  And will my friends move?  Or am I likely to want to reach out and converse with other Waitrose customers simply because they shop at the same store as me?  Or perhaps they feel that they’ll succeed where Facebook and Twitter have failed, persuading the remaining offline socialites to move their activities online?

Sometimes it feels marketers see a social phenomenon and, rather than look at how they can embrace it, they allow jealousy and vanity to seduce them into believing they can recreate the phenomenon in a way that they can control and own.  They want to play God.

Waitrose could manage a Facebook group, or have a Twitter presence, and use these as channels to share offers, information and love with their online customers.  They could have their communities and save their budgets.  Instead of adapting to their customers, they are asking their customers to adapt to them.  Is it any wonder they’re having to work hard to get anyone at all interested?  It isn’t going to happen, and budget and goodwill will be expended in the process of finding out the obvious.

The Age of the Innovator

Even with a global depression, new rich web technologies continue to open up new possibilities and opportunities in new media, constantly changing and evolving our understanding.

For marketers, the Internet used to have some clear boundaries; email, usenet, irc provided communication, while the web was for media content.  In order to make sense of this emerging world, we followed the rules of offline media.  Marketing communication on email mimicked direct mail marketing, while advertising on the web was an extension of the advertising already being done in print and TV.

Web technology has moved on, however, and has become dynamic in a way that simply doesn’t fit with any offline model.  Content and communication have blurred into social media, and marketing has to move on also.  In this new world, new approaches are required that are as dynamic and interactive as the world they occupy.

For technologists, too, this emerging world  presents a unique challenge; one where, once again, the expected rules no longer apply.  The market has low barriers to entry, and the winners are not those who consolidate, but those who can stand out through innovation. This innovation does not necessarily require money or even experience; as with marketing, it requires creativity and dynamism.

What becomes clear is that in this exciting environment, the skills and techniques required to succeed as a marketer are the same skills and techniques required to succeed as a technologist.  The edges of either discipline have entirely blurred and as such, they can be considered at least co-dependent and at most, one and the same.

Technology and marketing must create and exploit markets in unison.  There are plenty of examples where one has led the other; Twitter’s technology has created a vast market, but as yet Twitter have no cost-effective method of monetising it.  MSN and Yahoo!’s  paid-for email storage products made sense from a marketing perspective, but the technology wasn’t innovative, and simply couldn’t create enough market when Google’s free Gmail service launched with a more innovative business model.

So there is the key to great product; creative and dynamic innovation should be the goal in both technology and marketing, with both efforts balanced and synchronised.