If Charles Dickens will allow me I’ll hijack and invert a quote of his. Companies who are successful online are successful in different ways, whereas companies who fail, all fail in the same way.

I am asked regularly to audit organisation’s Digital Marketing Strategies and have noticed similar issues across most of the organisations who’s digital marketing strategies are stuttering or have plateaued.All of these organisations tend to make the same mistakes and these mistakes are conceptual as opposed to technical.

The first and most common mistake is a conceptual one in how people approach the medium in the first place. The web differs form the other media channels in one important and very significant manner. TV, Radio and Print are publication and presentation based media channels. The Internet on the other hand is an interactive medium. People do not go to the web to read, they go to interact, whether that’s with your business or with each other.

The web is not a presentation medium, its an interactive one. Campaigns and strategies that respect the manner in which customers use the medium are more likely to succeed as they understand that people are not a rapt audience in the same way that they are in the their sitting room in front of the TV or in their car listening to the radio. The Internet allows a level of user control that is unheard of and deeply important. And the number one thing people choose to do with that control is to interact with other people.

The most successful websites in the world are the ones that facilitate user control and allow and encourage user interaction. Think of EBay for example, i can sell what ever i want, when ever i want in any way shape format and ship it anywhere in the world and the number one way I express all of that user control control is by interacting with other people, ( i sell, they buy).

Similarly for Facebook. Its not just publishing photos videos, comments opinions and and anything else i want but its that fact that all this control is being expressed through interaction with other people. Think about it the only time facebook makes the news is when they change their terms and conditions or functionality in way that hampers user control and user interaction. So the most effective websites are the ones the ones that get out of the way of the user, in a sense the websites that win are the ones that disappear.