Messaging News - October 2008 - (Page 11)

geting the by Stephanie Jordan he popular myth goes “one human year equals seven dog years. While this has proven inaccurate (Wikipedia says the first year or two years represent some 18-25 years, and the ratio varies with size and breed), the point still works for technology. Five years may not sound like a long time, but consider this: FaceBook, the well-known socialnetworking Web site, did not exist five years ago. Today it has more than 70 million members. In The Economist’s report: The Digital Company 2013: How Technology Will Empower the Customer, the Economist Intelligence Unit—drawing on a wide-ranging survey of over 600 senior executives worldwide, as well as several in-depth interviews with business leaders and independent technology experts— expected technology innovation to have the heaviest influence on their business in 2013. The report notes that “the bursting of the dotcom ‘bubble’ early this decade seemed to herald a period of slower change in information and communications technology. Few if any ‘big bang’ technologies akin to the mobile phone have emerged since. Network speeds are nonetheless considerably faster, storage capacity substantially greater, and devices decidedly more functional and robust than just five years ago.” Technology-Wise Customer The Economist report goes on to point out that while businesses have slowed when it comes to innovation, customers have not slowed in terms of their adoption of technology. Dave Lewis, newly appointed CMO for Message Systems agrees. “If you look at the way direct marketing has performed online in many respects all we have done is transplant our ‘batch’ methodologies—our ways of doing business in the offline world, to online. It is not just the channels or diversity of channels through which you have to reach people nowadays, but also how. It is a realtime world. If you look at how things have performed, even around email marketing, so much of what you are seeing is batch methodologies being adapted to a different medium and that is simply not efficient. We are going to have to think in terms of real-time data exchange and realtime data integration, because that is the customer expectation.” Also seeing this shift is Stephanie Miller, global markets catalyst for Return Path, Inc. She recognizes that it is because of customers that the online world is changing. “The world is shifting from a commerce environment to a community environment. We as marketers need to keep up with that and it is not just a technical challenge. It is a philosophical challenge. Online marketers talk about trust—building trust and building loyalty. Today, we are moving from commerce, where trust is in the marketer, to community where I trust other customers—who are complete strangers to me. In fact, I trust them more than I trust the marketer. If we went down the litany of challenges that online marketers talk about today – it all comes back to this.” In Forrester Research’s Relationships Write the Next Chapter for Email: Lessons Learned From SlowerMoving Email Marketers, Julie M. Katz discloses, “More than a quarter of online consumers have submitted a rating or review of a product or have contributed to a discussion board, community sites proliferate, and consumers trust their friends and family more than other sources for information. Email marketing is starting to take advantage of this trend by including polls, surveys, and consumer stories in newsletters and other messages.” Indeed it is not businesses that largely drive the multi-channel approach, but the customer. As Miller points out, “Customers B2B and B2C are buying and learning about us through multiple channels.” The Economist report says that as organizations look forward to 2013, “such communities will generate ideas not only for consumer-facing companies. Business-to-business firms will make use of similar platmessagingnews.com 11 T http://www.messagingnews.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - October 2008

Messaging News - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Targeting the Technology-Wise Customer The Insider Threat: The New Era of Disaster Recovery Making Collaboration Tools Pro-Knowledge Sharing Botnets Go Marching On Dissecting Email Forensics Next in Messaging News “On Message” with Ben Gross The World is Not the Center of the Universe, and Filters Don’t Stop Email Spam Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - October 2008

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