If I look back at my first online experiences in 1993 I will admit that I was excited for all the wrong reasons. In those days it was hard to do anything online and if you weren't a geek you couldn't. Fortunately for me, I knew a lot of geeks, and they were all very interested in showing me how they ran around the Internet. I was a marketing/advertising/communications professional, but not technical. It was hard to navigate using CompuServe and Delphi and the others, but I could see the tremendous potential of using it as a marketing tool, and here is the real joke: I figured NOBODY else would be able to use the Internet to market because it was so hard to use! Little did I imagine what was going to develop.
In late 1993 Mosaic launched the first browser to really make it possible to "surf the net." It suddenly became much easier, but it was still unusual for people to know what you meant when you talked about the Internet. More and more of my clients were willing to be guinea pigs and let me allocate part of their advertising and marketing budget to reach whoever was out there online. It worked though. Major hotel and destination clients were able to get reservation requests by email. They were amazed and wanted to understand it. There was no such thing as booking engines and credit card security was a big issue. But it worked. I began to realize that the real magic was the marketing. Listservs Newsgroups, Databases, the Web... magic marketing tools.
That magic is still in the Internet today... Blogs, podcasting, video streaming, live feeds, RSS feeds, communities, and of course the whole web interface. What is the appeal? It is marketing magic and that is what drives real business in the real world. It is the magic of sending 3 million visitors to a web site for a destination and being able to track the return on investment in surveys about when they came, what they spent and if they will be back. It is the magic of experiences on the web, or what we call eMotionality to drive destination traffic and visitors. It is magic and it is morphing itself into bigger and better marketing tools and opportunities. Hope you will join me and post to my blog. I have a lot of friends and colleagues across the world and this will be one of the places we share our passion for Internet marketing. Join us.
My first web site:
