Web Brands - Power Shift

What Fantastic Claims Were Uttered As Rome Began Smoldering?

Reuters - Amsterdam - January 26, 2007 - A consumer poll suggests Internet companies are becoming more important to people than traditional companies. Google retained its title as most influential brand and video sharing site. YouTube and Wikipedia were in the number 3 and 4 spots according to a survey by online branding magazine brandchannel.com.

Brandchannel's survey is controversial, but does ask 3,625 branding professionals and students which brands had the most in our lives in 2006? The press release claims that traditional companies do not account for or acknowledge non-traditional Internet companies like those mentioned.

According to the release, older companies are propping themselves up with the new found popularity of companies like Skype and Flickr. I cannot even reiterate this without a chuckle. If traditional business, meaning the really big boys, wanted Skype they would just buy it if they don't already own it! Oh, sorry back to the press release.  

"Ask yourself how many more hours you are using the Internet compared with 10 years ago. Now ask yourself how many more minutes you make calls on a mobile phone. There's no comparison," said Bengt Nordstrom, chief strategy officer at business and technology consultants InCode.

It can be easy and cheap to run an Internet company and this means a lot of ideas are coming to the market and many products are free to use. Google tops the branding chart for Internet companies and has a market capitalization of 153 billion. The Internet giant placed number 24 amongst all branding competition in fastest rising dollar value.

It is significant to note that Wikipedia, which has only 10 employees and is only 6 years old, ranks so high in these figures. Skype, a 4 year old company, has 510 employees and 171 million users. That is one heck of an employee to customer ratio!

"The Internet is the great equalizer. It doesn't matter how small you are, the Internet gives you power and presence and you can reach the global population in one fell swoop," said Skype's co-founder Niklas Zennstrom.

Fiddling with Rome? 

As Web 2.0 enthusiasts we should be thrilled that our venue is coming into the limelight. The web is a place where the little guy can thrive still. However, overestimating growth potentials and hyping up "air" filled companies is what caused the "dot.com" bust in the late 90's! Google is certainly the poster child of the Web 2.0 trend, and the company continues to confound traditional business experts. Certainly, YouTube and Skype are overnight success stories, but think back a short while to the host of companies that looked as if there was no end in sight for them too!

According to Forbes, Google has risen to the number 2 fastest growing technology company. None of the other companies mentioned in this release are in the top 25! Six of the top 25 are biotechnology companies, while four are software companies. The rest of the list is rounded out by mostly traditional technology companies, and there is not one other search engine or online community listed. This is not to say that the Internet is not growing at a fantastic rate, but overinflating the trend will only pump more air into a system that needs more substance.

A comparative look between last year and this reveals that many of the companies simply changed positions. The number 3 company WebEx Communications fell from 3rd in 2006 to 7th this year. As for Google, surfing near the top at number 2 can mean several things. With so many potential competitors lingering in the shadows, Goodle really has only one more spot to obtain before there is not place to go but down. It is one thing to get to the top, but staying there might prove to be more difficult in the years to come. Do you think that Roman businessmen cried "success" the day before Rome fell? Let's be optimistic and realistic rather than dillusional!