Mediaboss Marketing

People are increasingly becoming aware of the emerging internet monopoly.

Companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the other (local) social network and media sites are becoming so large and powerful that they can dictate the use of their services in such a way that people lose control over their own information and their participation in these networks.

The services offered by these networks are very appealing, and they are an enormous contribution to the way people can communicate with each other. And, although we can point to some excesses in customer behaviour, by far the majority of users are responsible and greatly appreciate these new methods of communication.

Lack of a permission-based approach

While we did not foresee the arrival and success of these specific services, for over a decade I have been talking about permission-based marketing. We understood the potential of a combination of the internet-as-a-service and broadband as an access technology; and we knew that the combination of these developments would lead to an explosion in the digital economy and digital media activities. However, a decade or so ago we did not know how this exactly would take shape.

These digital media developments certainly did happen, but they are not founded on the permission-based principles that we at BuddeCom advocated during all those years. We envisaged that the digital advantages should appeal to the users and that they would embrace these services; and we also envisaged businesses being able to make use of these developments, as this would allow for personalised and interactive marketing rather than the shotgun approach of broadcast advertising.

Customer experience

We also believed that customers could benefit greatly from these services, as they would be able to receive messages that interested them, rather than being bombarded with a multitude of messages that were of no interest to them. That was going to be a win-win situation. This would lead to a much better customer experience and, given the technical attributes of these services, organisations could start building lifelong relationships with customers, based on personal and interactive communication facilities.

The internet of things

In our internet of things (IoT) reports and analyses we also mentioned the enormous advantages of linking databases together and providing better services to the users in relation to large number of issues such as weather, environment, events, shopping, travel information and so on all targeted at individual users, based on where they are and what they do again, fantastic applications and very useful, but also needing to be permission-based.

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TECHNOLOGY SPECTATOR: Social media's monopolies