The purpose of this is to cover some of the history of the Web, and how it impacted me personally. Hopefully you’ll find this story entertaining, if you lived the experience then you know it, but if you’re younger you’ll see how things were in the dark ages.
Back in the late 80s I had recently been discharged from the army, and went to work doing general labor where my father had worked. This was grueling work, and after working there for a few years I knew it was something I didn’t want to do for the rest of my life. At the same time, this thing called the Internet was making some inroads into the college campuses, and the geek world via bulletin board systems (BBS). I was majoring in business at a local college and would connect to the school’s VAX system and browse through Archie, Veronica, Jughead (yes, these were actual tool names we used to find information on the Web), using the Lynx browser. This was all text based, and wasn’t very visual at all. Eventually visual web browsers came out, and back then the king was Netscape which started up 1994.
Once I saw a web page being loaded into my Tandy XT computer, I was hooked. I knew this wonderful medium was going to go somewhere even though it was still just a few geeks that entertained themselves with this thing to find information using the various tools that I mentioned.
My entry to the online world was in the early 90s of the BBS days, and then moved on to online services like Prodigy, and PC Link (which I quickly found out was AOL). A modem was something that hooked into our telephone lines and you could hear the data traffic making this screeching sound of connectivity that was like a symphony to the ears of many geeks.

So did I bore you? The idea that I want to convey here in that in the beginning of the Web, it was more for information sharing. In the late 90s however, that all began to change with the advent of newer and faster modems. These faster modems allowed for the transfer of visual data instead of just text. With pictures, and streaming video folks began to see another purpose for the web, and that was visually presenting information, and ultimately marketing information.
At first it was primarily just providing folks with a catalog about their company. And that’s one of the reasons, when I ask folks if they have a digital strategy, and they say “We have a website.” my response to that is “Welcome to the 90s!” Websites have been around for a quite a while.

So you have a website? That’s so 1990s!

Once websites were up and running, folks started recognizing that the web was more than just presentation of data, it could also be used for collecting information, and presenting dynamic information based on user input. Sites like Yahoo started appearing, back then all Yahoo did was provide links to websites in a directory like structure. Nothing more than that, in fact most of the major search engines today all started out just providing a way to find other websites. 

I also go involved in writing directories, and that’s how I started my web career. Back then I was working at a box plant and going to college at the same time. I decided to start up a site on the box industry and use it as a networking tool. My plan was to major in business administration and get into production management at a box plant and use this cool new tool called the World Wide Web to help me build a professional network. I was social networking before the term was there. So I built a site on the college’s VAX system which was mainly a directory of resource sites that were related to the box industry.

After a while of running this site, I moved it over to my ISP, built some Perl scripts added forums, and developed my own directory much like Yahoo. Folks could submit sites, and network with others in the box industry. The site became popular because at that time there were no sites for the industry. It won several awards, including the Dog Pile Award, and the Industry Magnet Site Award.
Eventually a publisher for the box industry wanted to start their own site for the industry, and during the process were soliciting advertisers. The problem they had however, is every time they’d go for sponsors, they would reply “Why would I pay to be on your site when everyone goes to Santry’s site?”

So the publishers engaged me to work with them on a new site called the Packaging Intelligence Network, and my career as a Webmaster began. I would go to various conferences for the Association of Independent Corrugated Convertors and talk about how the Web can enable their business from getting the supplies to the warehouse to shipping final product. Problem was, back in 1996 most folks didn’t see the potential of web-enabled applications, and I got some yawns. So I went back to saying, “Get a website!”
During this time the web grew right along with me. E-Commerce became something folks wanted to do, with no sales taxes (ah the good ol’ days), and easily being able to get what you wanted shipped right to the door, companies like eBay, and Amazon were there to take the lead. Both companies started about the same time I was doing my thing in 1995. The mid-90s were the time for the Web to have folks taking notice that this was more than just a hobby for geeks, commerce could be done.

My career flourished, I wrote a few books (yes, I’m on Amazon.com), and got into consulting. Computing was still reserved to just a few folks that made the investment into a PC. So the Internet market still had a long way to go. I compare it to TV, at the beginning of TV hitting our culture, people had one TV per household and a couple channels. So it was the same for the Web, a few folks who could afford it had one computer in the household that they all shared. Laptops were still reserved for the business folks, and even only a few of them had laptops.

I continued on focusing on web, and started to write. Being in consulting with a focus on Microsoft technologies, my first book was on FrontPage 98, followed by another book on Microsoft’s web server, Internet Information Server (which is in the Library of Congress). In addition, I started an online community for Microsoft web developers. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Internet continued to become a place where like-minded people could meet. Dating sites, online communities, like my packaging one, and the developer one grew at a great rate. If you could find a niche, and there weren’t any resources out there on the subject, your community would do well (see chapter 10 on building communities).

As part of my participation in my community, and Microsoft’s own online community, I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for four years in a row. This award was for folks who dedicated a good amount of time in online communities helping others, as well as other contributions that promote Microsoft products. As you can see, Microsoft provided recognition to those who participated, and it wasn’t just a fluff award, it came with plenty of perks; free software, Microsoft logo gear, and an invite to their Redmond campus.

Community sites were popping up all over the Web enabling people to exchange ideas, and information. The communication was primarily driven by forums, eventually web blogging came into play which allowed people to contribute content to the community sites. This is known as user generated content (UGC), UGC can provide a site with constantly being updated with relevant content. The more rabid the community, the more content being added to the site. This benefits a site in many ways, and we’ll talk about this more in the Community chapter of this book.

This was how portals came to be. A portal was a place where you could put pieces of information together on a webpage. It went beyond communities and was the beginning of personalization. Websites enabled folks to get to information quickly and from one location. It was still primarily aimed at small apps like weather, or news. We would find out a decade later that personalization will become more of a push rather than user configured.

With the growing popularity of community and portal sites, some enterprising folks decided to capitalize this and create broad horizontal community sites. Basically people could become members of these sites, express their interests and meet others who had the same interests. Instead of one website you go to view a certain niche, you could do and participate with others who had the same interests, and participate in multiple communities since most people are interested in more than on topic. This started sparked the beginnings of social networking.

MySpace was launched in 2003, and provided people with a means of creating a profile, but instead of the site being niche focused on one a particular topic, it was focused on the individual. Social sites are very different than community sites. Online communities you have individuals that can build a persona and stand above the fold and build leadership within a community site. At some point they gain trust of the owner of the site and may even have moderator privileges, and so on. Social sites are all about the individual, there is no elevated access. You create your own voice on a topic, you broadcast, and maybe someone will find you interesting and friend, or follow you.

However, in the early days of social networking people were still trying to figure it out. MySpace was primarily building up content for MySpace. Yes, it allowed people to have a voice, but really what value did it have for the business?

With bandwidth increasing, and the cost of PCs coming down, YouTube launched in 2005. YouTube followed the same model as MySpace, basically allowing people to have a voice via video, and build content for YouTube. Still businesses really didn’t latch on to this social networking concept.

Around this time my family decided to take a trip to Disney World, and some small obscure band called the Jonas Brothers were playing in the park. My daughter really liked the band. So when we go home a few weeks later she came up to me and asked how she could make some money. I told her she could do what I do, find a topic she was passionate about and we’ll build an online community on that, and put up some Google ads and maybe generate a few bucks.

At this point I was building a social strategy on how all social networks could be used to drive traffic to the primary site. Essentially what I saw as just an outlet for a few folks could be used to link back to the main site and increase traffic. Since MySpace allowed for finding folks of like-minded interests, we blasted folks with links to this new fan site aimed at the Jonas Brothers. My daughters teamed up (her sister joined her when she saw the growing popularity of it) and created a YouTube channel, and were some of the first vloggers, and what did they vlog about? The Jonas Brothers.

As the Jonas Brothers grew so did the site. At the site’s peak in 2008, there were over 300,000 registered members, it was ranked as one of the top 5000 sites of all web sites with millions and millions of fans visiting a month. It garnered more traffic than the band’s official fan site. The site gained notice from the band’s father and really another person I consider a visionary in the digital space, Kevin Jonas Sr.

At this time, the focus was on driving those rabid fans to build UGC on the site, and then use all the social networking outlets to drive more traffic to the fan site, and everything complemented every outlet. No content was repeated, but written in a way that still had one primary goal, to grow the site, increase ad views, and generate more revenue. We also awarded the community members by having contests that gave away autographed items from the band, and those contests were geared to increase visibility to the site. For example, we had YouTube contests where people would post something that promoted the site, which would extend the site’s reach further into their network of friends and followers.

During this time, my daughters also gained a considerable following. Their YouTube had grown to over 50,000 subscribers, millions of views for their vlogs, and their Twitter accounts had over 15,000 followers each. They made it on MTV, USA Today, TV Guide, Parade Magazine, and many of the popular tween magazines.

As you can see from this personal example, a collaboration of community, social networking, and the right content, can build a site exponentially. The site, and the band had symbiotic relationship. We became unofficial promoters of the band, they provided us with access, and we became their conduit to the grass roots community. This was a new concept in the music industry, as this was usually accomplished by street teams. Street teams are a group of fans that promote a band. Street teams still had a use at the early stage of a band where they primarily play locally, but when a band wants to expand, the fan site model works exceptionally well.

All the while this was going on, I was still doing my day job of working as a Corporate Webmaster for a large chemical and aerospace company, and participating in online communities to help build the largest open source content management system (CMS) on the Microsoft stack called DotNetNuke (DNN). DNN was originally considered a portal, a place for widgets to be posted to make up a site (more about CMSs in the technology chapter). I was a busy guy, so much to do on the Web, and so little time in a day.

So I mentioned that I help build a content management system, and what is a CMS? A CMS enables a business to update content usually via a web browser without having to install any software on the client. You could be at the local library, open up Internet Explorer and update your site. As part of my participation in this community, I learned about everything I needed to know about what it takes to build a CMS, from developing plug-in modules like directories, e-Commerce, to security & authentication, syndication, search engine optimization (SEO), analytics, basically everything that you needed to run a website, and centralizing those tools within an application like a CMS. With this background, it was pretty easy for me to get a site up and running like that Jonas Brothers fan site, and really gave me insight into how the Web worked.

Doing my day job, my career expanded to focus on digital strategy, the whole “digital” realm really hadn’t been part of a career vocabulary back in the mid-2000s, but that’s what I did. I developed e-Commerce sites, worked with companies on how to best use technologies to build business solutions. Interfacing with marketing, line of business, HR, executives, and others to build these digital solutions.

Mobile started to really hit the scene with the advent of smartphones. Smartphones were actually out for almost a decade with Microsoft, and a few others delivering them to the business, but it wasn’t until 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone and made it cool. This was the dawn of the consumerism of IT. Information technology was no longer the realm of the business, but the consumer could always be connected as well. But what this did mean to the business was it needed to start developing strategies to take advantage of a new audience of connected consumers.

Smartphones created a whole new outlet for communication. Kids embraced the technology, no longer were they restricted to communicating with their friends using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) on their parents PC, they could take their communications on the road. Twitter was launched in 2006, one year before the iPhone, and if it were later than that you probably wouldn’t be limited to just 140 characters. The reason Twitter limits you is when it was launched smartphones weren’t the way people communicated via text, they used SMS or texting, and at the time texts could only be 140 characters long and you could text a tweet. I wonder how many people text a tweet nowadays?

With the launch of smartphones, it changed how companies have to deal with the “web”. It was no longer about having a website, there were many ways a consumer can interact with your data. It could be a smartphone, text message, the web, via third party social network outlets, or even directly to your business logic using web services. So it’s more about building a digital strategy than focusing on just the website.

In my career, I took advantage of all this experience I gained over the years and did more consulting. At this point I went to consult for a joint venture the Jonas Group were doing with AOL and that was a website called Cambio.com. I had a gained a lot of experience in the digital realm and the teen entertainment industry, so they contracted me out to help build this new online venture. In that role, I focused a lot on analytics, and how analytics has to drive the digital strategy. One thing I learned from my grad course work in marketing, that’s marketing should be driven by data. And the best thing about the web is we can track every single action or behavior the visitor to our website does. In addition, many companies out there provide industry level analytics to give us insight into our competitors website, and what people are searching for, and how their getting to their ultimate destination.

Being able to track this information is opening up new avenues for marketing. I talked about portals and user personalization, now with the data we can push marketing to people based on their online behaviors. Not only via the web, but via mobile, text, email, and have all those mediums work synergistically to target marketing to a consumer. So personalization now becomes pushed rather than pulled.

Summary

So what did I do? I found something that I wasn't just interested in, I was passionate about it. It was also about timing, the Web was just beginning, I found it, recognized the opportunity and focused all my energies in learning more about it. I made sure to take advantage of every opportunity available to me. Wether it was a book or magazine writing opportunity, getting some certification, I was going to do it. Thinking production labor work was where I was going to end up and retire like my dad did really helped to motivate me. Having something that seems like a dead end will motivate you. And if a kid from the projects can end up having a book in the US Library of Congress, then you can do anything you want to.