In my roles with Twelve Horses over the last 8 years, I’ve been involved in a lot of client strategy meetings. These meetings are usually about achieving some specific goal online and the tactics and technologies we can use to make this a reality.

When I first started as a bright eyed ambitious developer in 2000, most of the time I was pushing hard on automating this or integrating that. Since the commercial web arguably started as a marketing endeavor, most these conversations ended with the VP or Director of marketing looking at me cross eyed as the talk turned back to target audiences, focus groups and the 4 P’s of marketing (In case you’re wondering: Product, Pricing, Promotion, and Placement). This wasn’t all bad since my degree was in advertising and this conversation came as natural as the technical ones.

In 2003, talk turned to outbound marketing via email. In the previous 3 years, the coolest apps we could get marketers to agree to fund were those around customer acquisition (read: can I have your email address please?). Now after a few years, they had CSVs, databases, and sometimes Outlook Address books full of customers’ and prospects’ email addresses. Outbound marketing became very hot.

By 2005, more and more savvy marketers were coming to us saying things like, “yeah but my contacts are stored over here” or “can you connect to our CRM?” Obviously, internal IT projects had been launched and marketers were now endowed with the secrets that player tracking systems in casinos had known for years. Information technology could store more valuable consumer information than just email addresses.

2006 was the first year customers started to ask us about search engine optimization (SEO) - prior to that, it had always been us bringing it up. For marketers, search engines dictated how successful you could be online.

2007 was all about blogging and social networking. Discussions like, “I want to have a two way dialog with my customers and prospects” or “I want to go to where they hang out online.” Also, these techniques didn’t hurt SEO either.

My prediction (and what I’ve seen in the first quarter) for 2008, VIDEO! Broadband now proliferates the homes the way you used to have to go to work to get. Video online is becoming more compelling than that found on your TV. Anyone can create and publish it, and it’s surprisingly engaging. Video use cases have just started to scratch the surface of what we’ll see by the end of this year.

I would love to hear how your experiences with the web have changed from the prospective of a web developer, marketing person, or innocent bystander. Please comment below. I’m sure you can fill in many changes I didn’t describe above.

-Josh

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Blog, Current Affairs, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.