Opinion: Cloud busting

The first time I heard the term 'cloud computing' in a business meeting in late 2006, I felt the slight panic of a man approaching his forties; too old to impress anyone with knowledge, and too young to feel sorry for. Like policeman Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon I thought, "I'm too old for this s….". How did I manage to miss an entire generation of technology without noticing? So I kept nodding my head 'knowingly', and made a mental note to become a cloud expert. An hour of googling later, I understood the Cloud was the Internet, and with that realisation came a sense of relief that perhaps my time had not yet passed.

The idea of cloud computing actually pre-dates email, which turned 40 late last year. In 1962, JCR Licklider joined the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and conceived of an intergalactic computer network from which people could access programs and data from anywhere in the world. Nice vision. While you read this on your smartphone in rapturous awe of how rapidly technology evolves, for me its a sobering thought that its 50 years since the Lick first pitched his idea to the Brass, roughly half the time since the first commercial air flight in 1914. HTML has its origins in Generalised Markup Language, invented by IBM in 1969. Have we really come a long way in a short time? Putting a man on the moon in under nine years, now that's an achievement.

Back in the late nineties, I ran a technology company that took the giant leap of offering its software 'hosted on the Internet'. Now I could claim undue credit for being a visionary, but the reality was that accessing a program over the Internet was simply an obvious way of finding a new market. Back then, we called it the Application Service Provider model, a name which didn't last because apparently alliteration is sexy (Cloud Computing, Software as a Service). When selling the idea of hosted applications to clients, we did use a cloud to represent the Internet on our Powerpoint slides. We just didn't realise that confusing matters by reinventing the lexicon could be turned into a sales virtue.

Director Woody Allen once said, "the Universe is simple, it’s the explanation that's complex" and I tend to agree when it comes to technology marketing. Making sense of nonsense should be a core competency for every marketer. That, and having a robust BS detector. Last year we had these beauties: Zero Moment of Truth (brought to us by Google), cloudsourcing, SoLoMo, app versus WAP, and the silliest one of them all, cloud marketing. I don't know who introduced that one, but it’s in Wikipedia, and as far as I can tell it means digital marketing. All terms designed to induce that feeling of paranoia that you're now too old and too slow, and you better change you vendors (sorry, I mean partners) so as not to be left behind (or should I say find the synergies between customer needs and brand touchpoints to enable your company to stay ahead of the curve and prevent you from being wrong sized).

The reality is that innovation with words is a lot easier than innovation with real products and services. Business success has a simple measure called financial results, and it usually comes when you create some value for customers. No amount of verbal illusion can change the fact that marketing exists purely to support this process. Certainly, the digital marketing landscape has changed in the last 10 years, but it’s not as complicated as it would appear. Ensure your web properties are usable for your key customer types (persona experience optimization); help new customers find the property in the cloud (SEO, SEM, targeted display ads); pull together your customer data assets and analyse to gain some insights (know your customer); use the marketing channels your customers respond to in a timely and relevant way (multi-channel marketing). Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in 10 words (which I'll talk about further next month); so here's my 10 word digital marketing strategy for 2012:

    ▪    mobile website

    ▪    social advertising

    ▪    lifecycle emails

    ▪    integrated database

    ▪    analyse data

My final pieces of advice on this matter in a rapidly-changing wordscape come from an ancient Chinese proverb and author Douglas Adams. 1) The ox is slow, but the earth is patient; 2) Don't Panic!