The internet has revolutionised commerce. Its power has to be harnessed to drive business improvement across all areas of customer engagement.
Frequency – requires responses at a very rapid rate.
Key participants – increasingly all staff.
Leadership rating: Leadership7
For too many ‘the web’ began as and remains an electronic billboard – slightly more sophisticated, but essentially static and unidirectional. There are very few – notable well-known exceptions are perhaps Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter – which have really unlocked the power of the web to make it dynamic and interactive. Despite its power and ubiquity, many use Google, for example, as an accelerated ‘look-up’ directory, and even though YouTube has democratised the power to broadcast it remains essentially one-way.
The marketing opportunity presented by the web is to find, engage and interact with customers in wholly new ways, to change the customer’s place and role in business structure and, perhaps most of all, to transform marketing mindsets so that customers are no longer seen as being on the receiving end of communications.
A paradigm shift is taking place in the use of media technology (see table overleaf).
Your objective is to recognise this paradigm shift for what it is – a fundamental rebalancing of relationships between producers and consumers.
Old media | New media | ||
• | Static | • | Dynamic |
• | Broadcast | • | Interactive |
• | Point-to-point | • | Mobile |
• | Producer-led | • | User-generated |
• | Closed target community | • | Open target community |
• | Regulated | • | Liberalised |
• | Producer sets terms of trade | • | Consumer sets terms |
• | Producer controls communication tools | • | Consumer has same tools |
• | Communication skills in ‘closed shop’ | • | Communication skills owned by all |
• | Producer selects target market | • | Consumer opts into market |
The world is now divided into digital natives and digital immigrants:1
Such a bold distinction – insightfully radical to some, wilfully simplistic to others – describes a major cultural, behavioural and attitudinal shift. It depicts a wholesale generational shift in the way consumers expect to receive and transact information and entertainment. With it comes a paradigm shift in who controls and has access to data, and who understands and uses enabling technologies.
As the number and power of digital natives grows, many organisations will be forced to respond to this generational change with teams most likely largely made up of digital immigrants. This does, or will, require organisations to undertake major educational programmes to learn about new technologies and new consumer behaviours.
Quite simply, you need to know who your digital immigrants and digital natives are, and to shape your response to this paradigm change by being realistic about where your overall team sits on the native–immigrant spectrum.
The biggest single challenge you face is to get your team to confront change. You have to find ways of enabling them to face the enormity of the paradigm shift being experienced.
One approach is to present a series of change facts. For example:
What these facts highlight is both the scale and the rate of change. You have to stress how the change facing your organisation is big and fast.
In the face of a sea change, you must be bold enough to change the terms of debate within your team. You must adopt an interrogative style, demanding answers to a whole new set of questions.
New question | Old question | ||
• | Who are the competitors I haven’t thought of? | • | What are my competitors doing? |
• | What are the technologies I haven’t heard of? | • | How do I apply technology X? |
• | How do I create new products and services using internet technology? | • | How do I apply internet technology to existing products? |
• | Who are the customers I have never thought of? | • | What do my customers think? |
• | What information about me does my customer have? | • | What information shall I let my customer have? |
• | How would a 17-year-old digital native tackle this issue? | • | What does my experienced team think? |
• | What industry am I in? | • | What is the industry consensus about change? |
• | How do I reshape my business from scratch? | • | How do I make incremental changes? |
• | What is my new business model? | • | How does the internet affect my business model? |
• | What fundamental changes will take place in the next six months? | • | What changes do we expect in the next three years? |
As with any paradigm shift, your role is to embrace it, not hope it will go away – to become an active insider and not remain a passive outsider. No leader can expect to have the answers to all the questions, but you can make sure the questioning happens.
The risk lies in the leaders who think changes don’t affect them, their teams or their organisations. Those who stand in the face of such a shift may find themselves outflanked. Consider for example:
These two examples are real lessons about change defeating complacency. Today you must be prepared to confront the uncomfortable and sometimes downright scary. Telltale signs of resistance are:
Many leaders can’t be digital natives – but they can admit their existence and ensure that their insights are valued.
1 These terms were coined by Marc Prensky in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (MCB University Press, 2001).