Are You Ready for Qwiki Business Decisions?

By Mike Gauss on | January 28, 2011 | Comments (0) | Share

Just a generation or two ago, a good push strategy was all that was needed to make a company a success. Henry Ford, an advocate of consumerism and innovator of Fordism (mass production of inexpensive goods at high wages) is quoted as saying: “People can have the Model T in any color--so long as it's black.” Try that concept in the marketplace today and you will be out of business quickly.

In the past 100 years, consumers have taken control. The most successful advertising and marketing campaigns are no longer about what a business has to sell but rather, what the consumer wants to buy. A testament to this theory, Groupon reports $800 million in revenues and more than 50 million users worldwide at end of its second year in business.

Last year, the PBS Frontline special report on The Merchant of Cool: Teens, Culture and MTV valued teen buying power at $150 billion and predicted it to surpass $200 billion by 2011. In June of 2009, Entrepreneur magazine reported, “there are 75 million mothers, all of whom influence 85 percent of their household purchases. That's about $2.1 trillion per year in spending, according to the Marketing to Moms Coalition.”

Not a consumer focused company? Ah, but we all are. We may be a step or two removed from the consumer, but consumer driven businesses are either our clients or our clients’ clients. This means consumer behaviors affect our companies as well.

So What is Qwiki and Why does it Matter?

Qwiki is the latest information system on the internet. Using videos, slideshows and voice-over storytelling, information searches become a multi-sensory experience. I would call the Qwiki the next generation web encyclopedia. My prediction is: Qwiki will become the first place K-12 students will go for school research in less than 2 years.

As we all know, where kids go moms follow. With the spenders of more than $2.3 trillion (teen and moms) accessing Qwiki information, this is going to be the next marketing hotspot. Currently, there is no advertising on Qwiki. That will probably change. Even if Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier, co-founders of Qwiki, can create a sustainable business model absent of advertising revenue, not having a company Qwiki entry will become the equivalent of not having a webpage.

Qwikis in the Office

We are about three years away from Qwiki content showing up in boardrooms and marketing presentations. The frontline information gatherers in most companies are the 25 and under crowd. That means high school juniors this year are our college students/office interns in 2014. These are the people who will be assigned to gather information about company or client X. If they use Qwiki in school as I predict they will, they will use Qwiki at work. Just look at our interns today as they tweet, text and facebook their way through the day. Like the ever-growing pull on non-consumer companies to have a presence on Facebook and in other social media, the Qwiki usage of the twenty somethings will draw us all into a Qwiki web.

The twenty somethings pull is strong. Peter Shankman, marketing pundit for several national and international news channels including Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, recently blogged about AARP going Web 2.0 social. We already have buds of Web 4.0, and 3.0 was in full force during the last presidential election. Marcus Cake, technology investment banker and software entrepreneur, explains the socio-economic side of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 in an October 2008 post.

Why Get Ready for Qwiki Now?

Google is only 12 years old, and it brings in close to $28 billion in revenues. Facebook is 7 years old and collects $1.86 billion in ad sales. Mentioned earlier, Groupon in 2 years has $800 million in revenues. The viral incubation period is getting shorter and the dollar amounts at stake are getting larger. Being a day late these days will cost you more than a dollar. Millions to billions of dollars are at stake.

At the core of the need to be Qwiki ready is that the nature of computing and web usage are changing. Cloud computing, the new web code standard of HTML5, and the ever-expanding variety of devices are changing the world of websites, SEO and social media. We need to plan our electronic media strategies today to be included in tomorrow’s viral wave. This is what the Articulon team means when we say Never Stop Moving Forward.