Tech Notes - Featured in The Journal and nebusiness.co.uk

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Surfers – we were called way back then – with our 56k dial-up connections (Dit, dit dit dit, shwesh, shwish, deet deet deet etc.) were impressed by everything.

A world of opportunity opened up seemingly overnight, and, ever watchful for opportunities to sell more products, business owners took heed and shouted through their new websites: “Look at me, buy my stuff”.

Arran Islanders, producing and selling their famous wool sweaters in small farm shops to tourists, suddenly found themselves on the doorstep of Texans, Muscovites and Londoners. “We’ve got an order from Dallas, what do you think the cost of postage would be to there?”

When faced with this new medium, however, website owners and marketers saw no reason to change how they marketed their products or spoke to their customers.

They owned the experience; they dictated what we saw and what we could buy. The future, in their eyes, would remain solely their domain.

But in the background – ever so quietly at first – people started to use the internet in a new way. They sent messages to each other in obscure news groups and forums, and people on college campuses and in homes around the world began to use the web to connect with one another, to discuss, to debate, to divulge.

At that tipping point, from which there is now no going back, consumers started talking to each other outside of the influence of brand and content owners. They created their own websites, hosted their own debates, shared their experiences, likes and dislikes just we have done for millennia whenever people gather together.  

The first phase of the web was about commerce. Web 2.0 is about people. It is they who now define and shape the landscape of the internet.

Names now familiar to us, such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Wikipedia and Facebook, amongst others, are the early iterations of those tools that are intrinsically Web 2.0. The technology that powers them creates value as a side effect of their use and clever people are leveraging the data to create new markets and territories.

But there is a warning to be served here too.  

The Cluetrain Manifesto, a seminal piece of thinking on the 'end of business as usual', suggests that “markets are conversations” between human beings.

Brand and content owners would do well to bear this in mind.

They must accept they no longer own their brands, which are now in the hands of real people, with real issues and needs – and they want to talk about them.

So, brand owners: you must join the conversation, listen to what's being said and let customers see the real you. You’ll be surprised by their response.  

• Mark Easby is director of leading Middlesbrough-based brand agency, Calm Asylum - www.calmasylum.com