In the late 90’s and well into the millennium, Enterprises only saw the Internet and therefore their landing page as a static information page, mostly about their company brochure.Today, we have crossed into a world that has been under attack, either from easy access to the web, total access to each other via mobile phones and now a sharing ethos that has never existed before, the Social Network.Many of my generation will reflect on the fact that there is nothing we will be able to tell our offspring about using these technology changes, we can suggest caution as a self preservation order, even engage as a co user, but above all else we cannot stop the change, as it has already happened.
So what of using this change to drive business and access to the immediate world of online customers, well if there are 28,274,505 hours being spent in a totally virtual world called Second Life and there are real people making money, 64,000 to be exact by straddling reality with Virtual, does this signify that we have totally lost our senses? No it is the oldest human mode of operation, supply and demand, sell and purchase. Practice Commerce!
As usual the change occurs where there is less form of resistance and free usually does this, I saw this when in Microsoft we decided to keep (because we failed to get real money) Hotmail free and IM free, this grew to 372 million people across the globe, having real or delayed collaboration going on every second of the day. Today, the consumer facing networks of Myspace and Facebook, add that private portal in the form of profile pages, communication continues and the info is as up to date as the creator wants it to be. What does this mean as the profile page is king and it sees no boundary, whether seen from a PC, Xbox, Smart Phone, I-Pad or the latest Internet TV set, the connectivity is no longer confined to the day time and the need to advertise/sell becomes absolute.
Why?
Nothing is for free, something has to pay for these services and in today’s case, advertising is the model of choice, how long for, depends on how quickly we realize the need to take back control! When I first got my new Credit Card (1978), I felt like I had grown up, unfortunately when I had it taken from me by a burglar, panic set in as to how much I could lose. The same said of my first ‘brick’ Motorola mobile phone, taken from my car and so on. Who is helping the users of the 24 hour day/7 days a week to make sure their data is locked down and they will not feel the panic from being abused in the ‘Cloud’?
At this point I can see no one, Facebook and co need to drive revenue, lock down is un-cool, security not easy, but also not transparent, which makes for a better user experience. Once your personal or business profile has been stress tested, categorized, scheduled for some form of approach, legal or illegal, the speed it happens is today’s soft underbelly!
Today, I was supposed to be presenting the idea that the ‘Social Networking Revolution’ and the SIMcard industry have co challenges and therefore in my belief co responsibilities to help this course of events, a much bigger natural authority than I, called Volcanic Ash, has stopped it in its tracks. But with the idea that Social CRM, Social everything is now upon us, the chip that is either in your credit card or in your mobile phone, always there 24 hours a day, should be able to play a role and help keep the profile data that is so valuable, under our own control in our own private ‘Lock Box’ and able to interact with the real time world in the ‘Cloud’ and especially when we instruct it to and not in an unconscious way!
Responsibility is the phrase that should never go away in this new paradigm, we should have integrated services that make ‘Identity Management’ part of not something that comes after the event.
Bob Pike
- login or register to post comments
- Add to a social bookmarking site
