Looking at the pattern of posts on this blog over the last few years, I would appear to be a bit of a ‘Winter blogger’. I have a couple of theories for this…

The first is that I am a bit SAD – by that I mean being prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder – but other meanings could be equally applicable 😉 – and therefore presumably I feel the need to rant and rave during the winter months and then start to lighten up a bit when the sun finally decides to appear again.

The second is that my rants and raves during the long winter months set the brain cells working furiously and by the spring I have figured out how I wish to spend the rest of the year and remain focused on that until the nights draw in again and the dull winter weather reappears.

Now that the days are getting longer again and the sun is making an occasional appearance, I feel my need for winter ranting subsiding but I can’t let spring arrive without at least another big rant 🙂 …

So, what better occasion than the UK’s technology fest for marketing (TFM) that heralds the end of winter each year and the fast approach of spring? 🙂

You don’t have to go far along the show aisles these days to spot a ‘virtuous circle’ or two explaining how this or that technology fits into the process of attracting and retaining customers or, more than often, reckons to be driving the whole process. The virtuous circle is an appropriate way of depicting the ‘Holy Grail’ of marketing – targeted promotions or – as it has been described from the outset of the marketing discipline – getting the right product, to the right place at the right time.

The thing about these ‘virtuous’ or ‘perpetual’ circles is that they don’t just apply to the marketing mix, a particular technology or process but to the marketing industry as a whole – which appears to be in a ‘perpetual circle’ of reinvention that is speeding up as each year passes.

It’s probably a sign that I have been doing this stuff for far too long now but with each event I attend these days, I get more and more of what I would call ‘Ned Ryerson’ moments. Remember Ned from the film Groundhog Day? That enthusiastic sales guy who keeps on coming at you? Day after day…

To paraphrase one of Ned’s classic lines…

“Are you doing social media, James? Because if you are, you could always do a little more, right? I mean, who wouldn’t? But you wanna know something? I got the feeling… [whistles] … you ain’t doing any. Am I right or am I right? Or am I right? Am I right?”

When I see the same characters popping up at these events year after year and are running the same old scripts with the main subject line swapped out for the latest ‘fad and fashion’ I feel like poor old Phil Conners (Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day character who is cursed to re-live the same day, over and over). Like Phil, there are times when the repetitiveness of these conversations makes me feel like planting one on the nose of the ‘Ned’ or ‘Neddess’ in front of me.

Recently, a former colleague and friend posted a link on my blog during a healthy debate we had on the pros and cons of social media which describes a state of ‘misleading vividness’ with regard to events that have happened in the past and how they influence your thinking in the future. It did make me question to what degree I was imagining past events and their relevance today so, in preparation for some spring cleaning, I have looked back at some of the reference materials and work I was doing back in the 1990s.

During the mid to late 90s, I was attending quite a few conferences on web development and this culminated in me producing a ‘web strategy’ report during the last few months of 1998 for the company I was working for at the time. This encapsulated all of the learning from attending events, talking with other practitioners and hands-on experiences from pushing forward the company’s web developments in very fragmented and rapidly changing circumstances during the previous few years.

I still have a couple of copies of this report, as well as a lot of the research materials its content was influenced by. There are 2 pages in particular that stand out 12 years on and they are captured in the images left. The first summarised the learning from the background research and the second emphasised ways in which that learning could be applied within the company to improve web marketing and the customer experience. During the following 2 years, a lot of progress was made in these directions but then things ground to a halt as the dotcom bubble burst and bankruptcy loomed large for many. Ten years on, the type of capabilities expressed in the document can be seen in the latest manifestation the original NTL sites that now carry the Virgin Media brand.

Even though the ambitions of that original strategy were stalled as boom turned to bust, the company I joined subsequently had already done a lot of those activities and was investing sizeable chunks of money to do even more. Most of these core web ambitions were achieved by the time I left that company in 2003 and they still provide the fundamental foundations for that organisation’s web presence today.

So when I see today vendors and analysts speaking about the need to move websites beyond being ‘brochureware’ and ‘engage’ with users it does make me wonder where all the people are who sat alongside me at those conferences in the 90s and early part of this century when exactly the same things were being said?

Perhaps I should assume that if they are not ranting about the same things then either they made it so big during the first dotcom boom that they never had to be bothered with the web again or perhaps they missed the gravy train the first time and are now onboard leading a new generation of web utopians along the same tracks as before?

So having established the premise for this rant, here is the rant itself…

I love the William Gibson quote from 2003…

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

I believe that within the first 10 years of the web becoming established, much of what we experience today was already being developed and experimented with. It wasn’t as slick or as fast or as mass adopted, but the essence was there from the earliest days.

A further 10 years on, we have more ‘Technology for Marketing’ than we know what to do with. However, the weak link in the chain remains as weak as it was 10 years ago. The weak link remains us – the human implementors and operators of this technology. This weakness manifests itself in a number of ways…

1. We are genuinely unable to assimilate the new abilities the technology offers us

2. We struggle to adapt other systems and processes around the new technology

3. We sabotage the technology in order to protect ourselves from becoming obsolete

4. We are not prepared to invest the time and effort needed to make the technology work properly

5. The technology becomes an excuse for our lack of ability and other failings

The problem is, if something takes a little bit too much time and effort we feel the need to add even more technology to the mix in an attempt to compensate. However, technology simply isn’t a panacea for not doing a job properly in the first place. And when things start to take a bit more effort than we hoped or imagined, that’s the point we start to wallow in the ‘trough of disillusionment’

OK – rant over!

As I commented in one of my first posts on this blog I have seen the hype cycle play out many times now over the last 25 years. Social media, as it is termed today, will find its place on the ‘plateau of productivity’ but we are, at best, just starting to crawl up the ‘slope of enlightenment’ and can slip back down into that trough very easily when high expectations simply aren’t met.