Traditional marketing and communication is about getting people to do things. Web marketing and communication is about helping people do things.

“If you don’t like a particular ad on your screen, just throw it in the bin but if you found it interesting or useful, why not share the ad with your other friends – this seems to be the new advertising formula for Digg and now Orkut,” writes Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration in June 2009.

“The traditional banner ads and even contextual advertising (like AdSense) is not really working on social news sites so web companies like Facebook and Digg are trying more innovative ways to get the advertiser’s message across to their users without actually annoying them,” Agarwal continues.

According to a July article in Revolution magazine, “In the UK 68 per cent of internet users were found to trust online consumer opinions, while only 58 per cent said they trust brand websites.” The article also refers to a Harris Interactive poll which found that “46 per cent of US internet users say they ignore banner ads, with just one per cent finding banner ads helpful in making a purchase decision.”

A recent Nielsen study found that, “Personal recommendations and opinions posted online are the most trusted forms of advertising among Internet users around the world.”

Advertisers and publishers are really struggling with the Web. They can’t seem to make it work. These web ads just aren’t as effective as TV, radio and print ads. Is that really the problem? Perhaps the problem is that modern advertising and communications are a house of cards that the Web is pushing over.

Why? Because the Web is measurable. For the first time, we can really see how effective advertising and communication are. Didn’t an advertiser famously say that half of their advertising worked; they just didn’t know which half? Now they can know. Maybe they will find out that much less than half is effective.

Organizations are trying to come up with new ways to advertise and communicate. New ways to disrupt, interrupt and annoy. New ways to grab us by the arm and shout in our ears about how wonderful they are and how much we need their products and services.

Marketers and communicators are trained to think like dog trainers. The dog is the customer and needs to be made do what the master (the organization) wants it to. That’s old school marketing and communication and it doesn’t work so well on the Web.

To succeed on the Web we need to change our mentality from seeing ourselves as a master to seeing ourselves as an apprentice. The customer is the master and we need to learn about what they need to do right now, and help them do that. The web customer is purposeful, directed, action-oriented. They are on a journey and we need first and foremost to help them get to their destination. Then and only then have we any chance of introducing to them the idea of taking a new journey.

Good web marketers and communicators apprentice themselves to their customers.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

Of all the things that make the Web different from print, linking is the most important.

Are we tool-making animals or are we animals made by tools? It’s an old question. How much did the quill shape our minds and worlds? We invented the printing press which then invented a new society, a new way of thinking.

“Scribal culture could not sustain the patenting of inventions or the copyrighting of literary compositions,” Elizabeth Eisenstein writes in her book, The Printing Revolution In Early Modern Europe. “It worked against the concept of intellectual property rights. It did not lend itself to preserving traces of personal idiosyncrasies, to the public airing of private thoughts, or to any of the forms of private publicity that have shaped consciousness of self during the past five centuries.”

And what of the Web? We invented the Web. How is the Web re-inventing us? What makes the Web different from print?

We need to carefully answer this last question because otherwise we are in danger of approaching the Web with our print-thinking and print-techniques. We are in danger of saying: ‘This is what quality writing is,’ when really what we are saying is: ‘This is what quality print writing is.’

Here are some of the ways the Web is different from print:
The Web is about links
The Web is about tasks
The Web is about finding
The Web is about permanence
The Web is a process
The Web is about the customer

The Web is about links. Print is about units of content. A 500-word article, a book, a magazine, a report. Print writing is often a solitary task. The Web is about linking. We’re linking one piece of content to another. We’re linking the consumer of the content with its producer.

The Web is a functional, task-oriented place. We come to the Web to do, and we already have the context when we get to the website. Print lends itself to length and because print is physically going out to the reader, it tends to have lots of contextual language. The Web is bare, hermetic, pared-down—an ugly but useful place.

The Web is about the customer trying to find the content, rather than the content trying to find the customer. The Web turns much of advertising and marketing on its head. You must know the words your customers use when they search. Otherwise you are lost.

The Web is about permanence. Over time, most print content degrades, dissolves, disappears. Try finding that brochure you published in print in 2003. But if you put it up on your website, it’s still there. This is the great blind spot of web teams. Review and remove.

The Web is a process. Print is an event. You get it all together and then you publish. And then it’s over. Job done. On the Web it’s job begun. The print and IT culture of launch and leave is a ruinous strategy on the Web. Great websites involve continuous improvement of your top tasks.

The Web is about the customer. It is not about the control of elites. It is about the wisdom of crowds, the collective intelligence. At the center of the Web is the customer, not the organization. It is about the things the customer wants to do, not the things the organization wants to do to the customer.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

The answer is nothing. Nada. Absolutely nil. I can’t conjure up one measly scenario in which the Web can’t be of guidance in some way or another.

You can educate yourself. You can socialize with people you know. You can socialize with people you don’t know. You can buy tangible things, like cars and planes and houses and iPods. You can buy intangible possessions. Like failing stocks. And Facebook gifts. You can learn to build things that break things. Conversely, you can break things and build new things. Some of them are called mashups. (And some mashups are pretty darn cool.)

5-10 years ago, I could name a few things the web and various affiliated inventions couldn’t help you with. Like the act of streaming HD films and television shows with interstitial advertising at no cost other than a broadband connection which you may or may not put your own cash toward. Or call somebody in Damascus from Des Moines for days and not pay a penny. Or broadcast things called tweets on something called Twitter to people called followers like you’re some kind of micro-messiah. Or share screens across oceans in real-time. Or mix music with multiple people. Or mix video. A decade ago you couldn’t grab a ticket for a concert to see in real time and/or stream it online, also in real time, to your mobile phone, and save yourself the aftershow hearing problems and traffic rage.

But now? Heck if I know what’s impossible with the web at hand. It’s a little frustrating to come up empty on this question, quite frankly. You can use it to become the President of the United States of America, for Pete’s sake.

With that I close by saying: we heart you Internet. You can be a real pain in the patootie with all the spaminating you help unleash on us. But you’re a godsend for everything else. Seriously, everything else. I challenge you to come up with something those darn tubes can’t give you in one way or another. Help with giving birth? Yep. Drugs both legal and not? Oh yeah. Play sports? Duh. Mess with chemistry? Refer back to the drugs. And how about chemistry and the ability to look at your own personal biology, courtesy of 23andMe and others like it? I’m telling you folks, the Internet is just too good. Isn’t it so annoying?

Here we are in 2008, more Web-connected than ever. It’s pretty great, right? You betcha. The ease, the speed, the mobility. To quote a famous young lad, “Please sir, can I have some more?”

It’s good to take a breather once in a while, though, and to have a look up and down the Main St of this media-rich, socially-enhanced cloud we live a good part of our lives inside. One item I often think about on such occasions, this time triggered by a post by Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide, is the manner with which we manage our online relationships; whether they’re synonymous with the physical realm, whether they’re vastly different, or whether they’re somewhere in between. I pay particularly close mind to how people communicate.

Let me say for the record that I don’t find anything terribly wrong with how Web users interact with one another today. It’s become quite ordinary in my eye, to be honest. I’ve definitely become accustomed to many of the things that make up Internetspeak, so most all of the unique characteristics and nuances portrayed in blog comments here on Mashable and places elsewhere, as well as in venues like Twitter and instant messaging services and webmail, translate fairly easily in my mind. Apart from some alien OMG-like terminology, I can work my way through the typical message or thread of messages without hardship.

But there’s still a tendency I have to do things proper. I know that if I happen to spew grammatically disastrous text when conversing via email or IM with friends or family members, the recipient will get my meaning. This comes with social familiarity with one individual or another. But I still try to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’ Unless I’m lazy (which I too frequently am) or rushed. In those cases…well…come what may.

I know this is pretty common behavior, because I observe it happening everywhere. But I don’t think it’s because people don’t care. To put it far too vaguely, it’s just the way of the Web. It’s the lingua franca of the Internet age. So my question to you is this: do you find yourself consciously or unconsciously fighting the tide? Have you partly or completely abandoned the ‘Shift’ key, the question mark and other utilities when speaking with associates? And if so, does your usurpation (big boy says big word) of long-lived standards feel wrong? Do you know you’re doing it? Do you care one way or another?

Going back to Laycock’s notice, she echos social media manners voiced by Beth Harte, who directs Internet users to be real, be nice, be respectful, listen (then talk), give (then take), be consistent, apologize for errors, give thanks, not to “broadcast,” not to “stalk” others, etc. A pretty sensible set of tips, if you ask me. But how the average Web user checks off that list is a relatively open matter. Do you go with emoticons, profuse exclamation points, tons of LOLs, or do you take it long-form? Is it conditional on who you’re speaking with? I’m sure you could answer yes to all of those questions to some degree.

Thus, it seems to me that we can all generally accept that it would be exceedingly difficult to reverse the trend toward more and more common informalities. Looked at differently, it might even be counterproductive. Who’s to say that the way things used to be was in fact a better reality? You might feel that there is considerable value in the way language has evolved with Web use and the rise of social services. After all, you would likely prefer Web 2.0 to what we now think to be Web 1.0, yes?

As I said from the start, it’s interesting to contemplate how this space has developed over the years. Language is constantly being altered to fit whatever the speaker intends for it to fit. A Twitter update is immensely different than a full-blown opinion piece. The same with a Facebook status change, or an email with a parent, a sibling, a close friend, or an employer. And as much as I try keep with the Lynne Truss diet, I can state with certainty that I go rogue more often than not nowadays.

And you know, I kind of like it. Free-form has its advantages. Dare I say it makes us smarter? If nothing else, it shows just how creative people can be. Give someone a brush, and that person might paint you something great.

(Image source: (top) Keusta.net; (bottom) Arthurmag.com)

By Ryan Paul | Published: October 15, 2008 – 09:08PM CT