Charles Lau dot Com

It is always the case of internet marketing that it is personal. It voices down to the individual persons who are working for any companies. Corporate branding is only for functional usage. It’s the staff inside that makes everything personal. It’s no longer about CEO representing the company to make comments. In the internet world, everybody is equal.

A very good example is with Google. They have individual representatives talking about various products. I don’t see the CEO or the founders doing all the work. Whoever is in charge of working in that field, he will be the representative. And he don’t have to make public presentation. A blog will do the trick.

However, it is not a very acceptable move in many multi-national companies. Big companies have a lot of people working inside to make any major marketing decision such as this. They have not been exposed in the Internet world as much. We can’t blame them after all since the real birth of the Internet should be only 5 years old. 10 years ago, websites were still portrayed like a very important corporate branding in many big companies’ eyes. Building a web portal is the next natural move of every company. If everybody wants to be a one-stop portal, how many stops we have to visit?

The old marketing way of spending lots of money in advertising is the natural move for all big companies since they have a budget to spend on. The new marketing way is somehow too “cheap” for them to spend on although they didn’t realize that internet is more for individuals than for the mass. Individual advertising is only for people who only get to see the website when they type in the url themselves, or when they click it. Mass advertising is build with the intention to interrupt you to see what they have to offer.

And by the way, making spelling mistakes is an acceptable thing to do. If you were to do it in a corporate, you would probably be making a “grave” mistake. That’s because individual writing their point of views are just being themselves naturally. Though they might be representing their organization, they are in one way or another representing themselves as individual point of view. And whatever point of view they have, shall not be represented as the companies’ point of view. They are just employees working there whom everyone of us would just want to know how they are doing.

It is not easy for a huge organization to make such a drastic move since it involves a lot of parties. Hence, it can only be done one step at a time at a very comfortable zone. Big organization tends to have a very stable flow of income and expenses. Hence, any drastic move is definitely a losing situation for them. However, they would still want to improve their situations in the Internet world so that they wouldn’t lack behind. That’s why we have to make calculated moves every time which everybody is comfortable with. Not easy, but worth the challenge to change.