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At last the internet lives up to its early promise
Since then, we’ve been having lots of fun creating masses of content for this beast, it has enabled more open access to information and there is no doubt that it has helped save a lot of people a fair amount of money on their car insurance.
But has it lived up to its promise?
Arguably no, because although the Internet has allowed everyone to become a publisher and a spectator, the collaborative element has been very much the poor relation. While there are social networking sites and intranets which do, to some extent enable two-way interaction, the difficulty is that these are all micro conversations happening in splendid isolation.
Good business, medical science, research and project management of course do not run like this. The conversations need to be linked, decisions made on sound judgement and a clear intelligence trail left behind should steps need to be retraced. While there are many technologies that do individual bits, like TelePresence, online conferencing and networking groups, these hoover up precious time rather than creating it.
But the virtual solutions created by 6Connex finally address this issue. They bring all of the communication and social networking tools together in a single, easy to use interface that mean at last the idea that Tim Berners-Lee had nearly 20 years ago of transparent collaboration is now a reality.
The best things are always worth waiting for.
Virtual has been reality for ages
Changing attitudes is hard. Particularly when people believe that what you are talking about could really shake up the status quo.
When we talk about how groundbreaking technology can fundamentally change business practices we get a variety of responses:
- Event management companies look at the virtual technologies, compare them with their live offering and are generally dismissive, despite results from our recent survey saying that 80% of event directors/managers/organisers think that virtual events represent a real opportunity for the events industry.
- Corporates who are already using or building different forms of virtual communication technologies can’t quite believe that the technology is as advanced as it is, and are entused by its simplicity and capabilities.
- Business leaders listen politely, technology isn’t their thing, then they suddenly realise just what can be delivered across their entire enterprise.
Virtual events and connective marketing are not just concepts. They are business changing reality and they are available right now.
People have been doing things virtually for a very long time already: from pilots trained in flight simulators to buying your train tickets online; building virtual farms on Facebook to checking out health symptoms on NHS Direct; we don’t even question the process. Twenty years ago the insurance agent came to your house to arrange your car insurance, now you gocompare. Was that so hard?
It’s time to embrace virtual technologies to create collaborative communities that make a real difference to the way the world does business.
