Livin' my dream by running the social web agency 
Ignoring the online/offline divide
3.31.2009 | tendencies
So there’s one reason I tell people I do social marketing instead of social media marketing is that I have been living my life as an IT-person ignoring the online/offline divide. Why is the ignoration of the online/offline divide important ?
Because I have also lived with the feeling that the divide would become less and less significant as the internet became more and more mainstream. I hardly feel that there is a divide anymore. Is there ? and if there is – where is it ? The divide might actually be the computer as the portal to the internet, but that is going away too with continously upcoming peripheral devices and transitional web apps. =)
4.01.2009
A few thoughts:
Imo, the divide is still there. And it’s primarily cognitive & epistemological in nature, and, thus, to be located in the mind of the (non)user.
Blaksmark’s got a few good insisghts in this article about (lack of) media integration (i.e. online & offline), see esp. the last two paragraphs:
http://whywebattle.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/medieintegration-battle-and-bounce-positionering/
(The article is in Danish, but somewhat google-translatable).
Thomas Rosenstand’s got a interesting piece that illustrates that many leading Danish companies could optimize online presence quite easily (and his perspective is primarily & limited to SEO)
http://www.thomas-rosenstand.dk/digitalt-tv/
Similar examples are legio, which seem to illustrate that except for first-movers and very media/tech savvy people, the onine / offline dichotomy is still very much there…
/Kasper
4.01.2009
Hi Kasper, thanks for your pointers – I know that the divide is still there – I just tell clients and people increasingly to ignore it – well parts of it, and from a marketing perspective I think it can really ignored. Of course there’s some things that you don’t teach everybody and there some barriers – but they are disappearing at slow pace these days. Maybe it’s a sign ?