I love these talks they are really worth while and of a very high standard. Today our speaker was Grant Leboff an entrepreneur who has bought and sold company's and has a true understanding of what the future holds for business in regards to marketing and the world wide web.
The whole lecture was in layman's terms and I totally related to everything he was saying. Most other attendees are grey suits with old established company's and they struggle to get their heads round the web and what it means for their business and their marketing campaigns.
I am a sucker for stats and he had some great ones such as...when Bill Clinton became president of the US in 1993 there were only 50 sites on the WWW. When he left in 2001 there were over 3 million. This kind of growth is really unfathomable but we all just accepted it and got involved. He compared it to when print was invented and that in 1450 there were no books and in 1500 there were 25 million printed.
We forget to easily that we only really were first ever online in 1993 (what did you first do? i searched for jokes!... in 1999). He also reminded us that in 1990 only 1 in 60 people had a mobile phone (no one texted until '92), there was only BT to choose from for our home lines, no low cost airlines and only 4 channels on TV. Things have changed so fast and we are presented with so much information and we find that we are now tempted towards a product or a business by an 'experience' there are so many products that they have become dull, we want more.
He talked about how in the past sales was all about shouting the loudest to be noticed and gain sales. Now it is the opposite and business wait for people to come to them, via information sharing, blogs, Facebook, twitter. We get annoyed now when we get bombarded or 'shouted at' by organisations, because there is so much information out there too digest. One of the reasons Google are so successful, because they filter information for us - Same was at the World Festival Network will filter information on festivals.
There was much food for thought from Grant, he was an excellent speaker and I thoroughly recommend you see him if you can.
