The Benefits to Slowing Down the Internet

“It's Sort of Like Drinking From a Fire Hose”. 
Too much information, too many locations, too fast to manage.

Many business owners, managers and other organization leaders have expressed their frustration with the transitory nature of the internet.  They have tremendous new ways of communicating with their audience of contacts and customers, but the resulting communication becomes scattered within emails, social media pages, blog postings, text messages, etc.  And none of this communication sticks around on the surface for very long.

Facebook, Twitter, blog postings and other social media sites have an ongoing media stream. Some media streams flow fast and some flow slow. For example, a Twitter posting containing a link to an article published in a blog, will likely only have a lifespan of a few hours before the posting is bumped down to make room for other postings in the users Twitter feed.

A blog on an organization’s site has a slower flow, but in time, postings invariably disappear off the user’s screen as new blog postings are added by the organization. Commenting on, and social sharing of the article effectively stop when not on the front page.

The only manageable takeaway an organization gains from all this communication effort, is a contact list of some individuals that have crossed its path. But how useful is that today?

For some time, contact lists have been beneficial for organizations. But with anti-spam legislation being implemented and the public’s general scorn for spam, the contact list has little to offer.

What organizations need today is a way to not only capture these contacts, but also give them an environment to develop and manage relationships that span greater lengths of time. This “slowing down” of the Internet can benefit organizations as they learn tremendous insights about their community’s interests and demographics as they have the time to engage with their community.

This environment must be inviting to the community, and it must be manageable by the business.

To be inviting to users, this new environment will give the user choice as to which vertical market subjects they subscribe to, and how they wish to be communicated with (ie. via email, text messaging, or social media sign up). The user will be able to engage with the organization and other users, sharing knowledge, images, videos and more in a two way communication environment that observes respectable dialogue.   In turn the organization will be able to “chair” discussions, provide information in multi-media form, ask questions and gauge responses to ultimately generate informative metrics on their community’s likes, dislikes and interests.

Managing all of this will be within a single secure cloud location that acts as a time capsule for the organization’s engagement with contacts, whether that engagement results from blog postings, social media sites, emails or other published content. The organizations community engagement will all be centralized where the organization can analyze and extract beneficial knowledge to better the organization.

Slowing down the Internet gives an organization countless opportunities to learn what works and what doesn’t work when engaging their on-line community.

Read More »