For those of us old timers who rode the dot.com rollercoaster, an era some people have retroactively labeled Web 1.0, today’s notion of digital offers up some serious déjà vu.
Just as digital does today, the web represented a new way for companies to connect with their customers, as well as a call for a better connection between customer-facing groups in the enterprise and the technology back end.
Of course, there are important differences between digital today and the good old Web 1.0 days – most notably the rapid global ubiquity of mobile technologies plus the penetration of social media into so many aspects of our day-to-day lives.
For digital professionals, social media obviously present numerous channels for interacting with customers. It’s no wonder that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the others are top of mind, especially for digital marketers.
However, social media have affected all of us in subtle ways beyond the obvious – and the effects are particularly important to digital marketing. Each of these secondary effects makes sense in and of itself, but putting them all together in one place reveals some important lessons.
The Facebook Effect
The World Wide Web was much simpler back in the day. You built a web site and published it on the web. Everybody who visited your creation saw the same site. If they wanted to load different content, they would click a link, and the page would refresh accordingly. Those were the days!
Then along came Facebook. Now, the notion of one page that looks the same for everyone is suddenly a thing of the past. Everybody has their own personal site at www.facebook.com – billions of them. And sure, you can click links, but even if you don’t, the content updates automatically.
In other words, Facebook is fully personalized and asynchronous – and because Facebook is so pervasive, now we’ve all come to expect the same personalization and asynchrony from every other site. Whether we like or use Facebook or not, it has forever spoiled us.
Personalization has been with us to some extent since the Web 1.0 days – but not like Facebook. Now, everybody’s Facebook page has unique content – different from everybody else’s, and different from moment to moment. It’s no wonder Facebook (or other sites that follow the same pattern) are so addictive.
The Amazon Effect
The Amazon.com ecommerce site has similarly spoiled us – although in this case, the Amazon effect is most dramatic in the business-to-business (B2B) world. It doesn’t matter if you’re shopping for electrical equipment, automotive parts, or aircraft – now everybody expects the ease of use, performance, and features of Amazon.
Recommendation engines? Check. Reviews? Check. Communities of sellers? Check. Similar or alternative products? Check. In fact, these “social metadata” are every bit as important as your product information itself – if not more so.
In fact, the Amazon effect is an important influence over the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend. Because people want to use the same devices at home and at work, they want the same types of experiences in both environments. If purchasing/procurement is part of your job, therefore, it only figures that you would want an Amazon-like experience, regardless of the device you use.
B2B marketers must be especially creative to take advantage of the Amazon effect. On the consumer side, there is only one Amazon, but in the commercial and industrial worlds, there are numerous specialized marketplaces for everything from machine parts to cloud computing services.
Not only do you need to make sure your products and services are listed in all relevant marketplaces, but you must also insure that you have the appropriate social metadata around those products, just as Amazon does.
The Wikipedia Effect
The Wikipedia effect is also most dramatic in the B2B world, as well as for B2C for companies whose products or services are complicated – for example, fishing gear or high-end stereo equipment.
If you’re selling such gear, or if you’re providing just about any B2B product or service, you might spend hundreds of person-hours and piles of money to build out the informational parts of your web site. Page after page of spec sheets, instructions, and detailed solutions that you’re hoping customers will identify with and leverage to make their purchasing decisions.
Only where do they go to learn about what you have to offer? Wikipedia, of course. Everybody knows Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it’s more likely to have an impartial perspective on your product category than your web site.
Many Wikipedia pages for product categories conveniently list vendors who sell such products – so clearly you need to be on such lists. But don’t go overboard with your Wikipedia editing, as the secret Wikipedia Gestapo frowns upon heavy-handed commercial content.
Keep in mind that just as the Facebook and Amazon effects are not simply about Facebook and Amazon, the Wikipedia effect similarly goes well beyond Wikipedia. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling or how complete and detailed your own web site is, your prospects and customers will do most of their research about your products on other sites.
In fact, you could think of the B2C version of the Wikipedia effect to be the Yelp effect, as an increasing number of consumers use crowdsourced rating sites like Yelp for their product information.
For marketers, the Wikipedia effect is downright chilling. How can you expect to communicate your value proposition to your audience of potential customers if they’re more than likely to simply ignore you, instead choosing to get the information they need to make purchasing decisions from third-party sites you have little to no control over?
Sure, you can frantically run from one third-party site to another, editing a Wikipedia entry here and responding to a Yelp comment there. In the end, however, you’ll quickly realize that there are simply too many places for people to go for you to have much control over the information they find.
The Intellyx Take
The three examples of social media secondary effects above should get you thinking: what other such effects are out there? Clearly, the immediacy of Twitter, the ephemeral nature of Snapchat, or the anonymity of Yik Yak promise numerous such effects. What about Instagram, Pinterest, or the hundreds of others?
For digital marketers who still believe social media are little more than a new way to issue a press release, such secondary effects are yet another wakeup call that there’s more to digital than meets the eye. Even for the savviest of digital professionals, however, there are still subtleties to the practice of digital that bear careful attention.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
