Search with Design

It is becoming more clear every day that big corporations simply aren’t equipped to keep up with the pace of the internet at large. Yes, they may have access to all the latest hardware and software, and the ability to hire some of the best talent, but their implementation strategies leave much to be desired.

Not that it’s anything new. Since the early days of the web, corporations have struggled to find their place among the throngs of people browsing the web. But like the Amway salesmen at your backyard BBQ: they’re all push, no pull.

This irreverent look at the internet in 1996 helps to set the scene for how far behind major companies are and will be (go ahead and read that page through, ‘karjalae’ does a great job of lampooning the cavemen of the internet age).
The inexorable march of progress hasn’t made things any better for the heavy hitters in the commercial world. As any tech-savvy person knows, giving tools like Flash, Actionscript and SQL to the technologically un-evolved CEO of a major organization is like handing a monkey a flamethrower: it’s funny until he turns it on you.

Once the craze of just having a webpage was over, the tech-leaders began blogging. And although it took a few years for the bigwigs to catch on, catch on they did. This time, WalMart got caught up in a scandal, hiring a marketing agency to ’spin’ the idea of a couple who RV across America, staying overnight in WalMart parking lots. The outrage of internet users was surpassed only by the absurdity of the PR firm “that truly gets social media” (Edleman) being called out by BusinessWeek (whose web team doesn’t even have a proper www to non-www redirect working).

So WalMart gets another point in the ‘evil’ column and the internet continues to find new ways to entertain millions, and confound commercial entities.

The latest attempt to substitute corporate dollars for internet know-how comes to us from the Spice Girls, the quintet of British harpies, based on ‘diversity’ and backed by a marketing engine that would make Ferrari whimper. If anyone could leverage social networking into a crowd of screaming fans, they can, right?

Yes and no. Corporations are just now finding out that fan sites make money (a trick internet marketers discovered right around the time the iMac was released), and that you can ask people to vote for where they want bands to appear (how much exposure has Eventful had already?). Meanwhile, internet users are congregating at places like Fark, Digg and Reddit, and web designers and internet marketers are running ahead of the pack, trying to create the next social empire.

So when Big Spice asks folks to vote for what city they should play in, of course the internet’s equivalent of punk-music is going to suggest no other city than Baghdad, Iraq (Fark.com always runs the risk of being NSFW, but the first screen seems sterile).

But when the other shoe drops, we all need to remember that money talks, and in that conversation we’re playing in the corporate sandbox.

The bottom line is that the Spice Girls are going to play any venue they please, whether or not social networking votes them on to Mars.

But it doesn’t mean that they “get it”.

(On a side note, I came across this little gem during my research. Thanks, Dan!)