For Business That Still Doesn’t Get the Web

How the internet has changed since 2002.

The infographic below from Bestedsites shows the remarkable changes of the web over the past decade.

People Online

Time Online (Daily Usage)

Number of Websites

As I said in an earlier post, the web is now the dominant medium, at least here in Australia. Everyone from 16 to 60 now spends more time on the web each day than they do watching television.

This is where the people are, it’s where things are happening, it’s where the growth is, yet most businesses haven’t woken up to these facts.

Ignoring the digital age has already caused many big international companies to go bankrupt and disappear such as Kodak, Borders, Blockbuster Video, Tower Records,

Embracing it has caused others to become the biggest businesses in the world – Google, Facebook, Apple.

Remarkably, many marketers and organisations don’t realise the world has changed and that their old sales and marketing methods no longer work, according to both Bill Lee and Jim Dickie writing in the Harvard Business Review

“Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they're operating within a dead paradigm.”

- Bill Lee

 “Customers’ buying processes have evolved in our world of ubiquitous, instant, global communication, but companies’ selling processes have for the most part stayed the same.”

- Jim Dickie

They remain trapped in old ways of doing business. (Why does Gerry Harvey spring to mind?)

As I said in another post, those businesses that don’t learn to swing with the times will end up as dead meat.

Your choice: swing or fall.