Would you choose a bricklayer to design your house instead of an architect? A film processor to design your company’s marketing materials?  I guess not.  These people are specialists, and whilst they represent important stages within a process, they are not the overall architects or designers of the bigger projects at hand.  So in beginning this first RedSheriff internet column for the NZBT, I feel the first thing I should say is what this is NOT. 

It is not a tech column. Seems obvious? But of course it does, for the internet is a communications, marketing, and sales medium.  Yet over the last few years it is clear that it has been the bricklayers designing the houses and telling us how we should be living in them.  Technological widgets have overrun basic facets of website usability, or worse yet, basic tenets of successful business models. The result?  Well, as consumers and managers we’re still learning just how to use these new websites and net services being designed for us, and having to cope with the myriad of design flaws which can occur from this back-to-front development. In sum, getting the internet “to work” for our businesses isn’t just a case of getting internet users to upskill enough to use us, to get more confident about buying online, and so forth, but also about today’s marketers understanding it to the same degree that we already understand other media usage habits.

So what would be lesson number one in understanding the internet marketplace?  Perhaps a key lesson is that the internet slow-down experienced last year does not indicate that the internet is flawed, or that the technological capabilities promised to us will disappear, but rather, that the net populace is simply just playing “catch-up”.  Imagine just getting to grips with a tin-can telephone and then being presented with WAP?  That’s what we’re asking Joe-internet-user to do everyday.  It’s only natural that uptake in some areas will be slow, and not just in technological terms but also in rewiring generations of habitual behaviours.

And here lies the rub.  We all know that internet usage is increasing, and RedSheriff research has confirmed that the net has truly become, for most users, the extra resource we happily turn to for routine transactions, information and product searches, emails and so on.  Internet users are logging on for shorter, yet more frequent sessions and it’s becoming just another fixture in our households – like the microwaves, VCRs and mobiles few of us had 20 years ago.  So is it now full speed ahead with all the bells and whistles we’ve got stored up to grab these people?  Not necessarily.  For our research has also shown that with the broadening of the online population, and especially the late adopters only recently coming online, has also come the predictable reduction in general understanding of the web and the hardware being used to access it.  The onus is thus greater than ever before for those wishing to maximise their web presence to fully research and understand who their audience is, what they want, and how they want it.

Jonathan Dodd