As budget cuts, media confusion, and the baleful world economy wrack our incredible shrinking advertising world with round after round of staff reductions and pay cuts, we all worry about tomorrow.
But today, I attended an Omnicom DAS seminar where Jonathan Nelson, co-founder and chairman of Organic. addressed the current situation and how social media will reset the marketing game once again, with the same sort of revolutionary impact as Web 2.0.
He provided resonant insights and perspective on our changing business but one anecdote hit me like a ton of bricks. Back during the dot com bubble of the early 90’s, Organic had 1280 employees. Then the bubble burst, and within twenty-four months, Organic shrunk to 160 employees. In other words, nine out of ten employees lost their jobs. Moreover, of the thirty-nine web development agencies back then, only five survived.
Now I remember the dotcom bubble being bad from a general viewpoint, but I had no real empathy for just how bad that must have been until today. Our troubles loom large; very good people have already lost their jobs and industry stability still seems out of reach at the moment. Yet as Jonathan tells it, this bitter experience taught digital agencies how to expand and contract better than their traditional counterparts, which can be a real advantage in a scary marketplace.
But taking the upside, more than anything this anecdote reinforces that business flows in cycles; even the crappiest craptastical crapfest of crap-crap-crapellicious times eventually passes. And you can quote me on that.
Though you might want to rephrase that last bit if you have kids…
So, just to get my lingo down, is social media no longer considered a part of Web 2.0? I thought the interactivity and social nature of wiki, digg, facebook, etc. was the whole 2.0 thing.