Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog has a post about “The impact of the internet on customer behaviour.” It presents further discussion about recent studies showing the internet to be twice as influential as TV and eight times as much as print media.
I don’t find this surprising at all and here’s why.
In what is now called “traditional media” interaction revolved around stuff. We watched stuff paraded across our televisions, heard it paraded across radio and flipped through it as we looked at magazines and newspapers. And while that mentality is present on the internet – banner ads, contextual ads, etc., the internet is about us.
When we are online, we are much more likely to be active than passive. We are searching, responding, creating content and any number of other things best described as interacting. Because we are in this mode, we naturally interact with “stuff” too. If your like me, when I come across something new online I immediately seek out what others I know are saying about it. Which is why studies are showing the internet to be influential.
But it’s not the internet. It’s people. It’s us, just like it’s always been. All the internet has done is make interaction easier and we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Marketing online is not difficult if you keep this in mind. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the hype, it’s always about people.
