As with all good things, there has been a price. Sitting on the couch at home, holding hands with your nearest and dearest, watching television, has had the strange effect of isolating you from each other. You may have been literally in contact but your communication was with the TV screen, not with your spouse. You have both been receiving information, not disseminating it, seldom discussing it, hardly ever initiating it.

Finally viewers and readers have rebelled. Now they can join in the information revolution, not just with facts but with views, opinions, original thoughts. When they look up their online encyclopedia – at astonishing speed – they can add their observations, correct errors and impart newfound wisdom. And they do so; Wikipedia means what it says.

The most startling aspect of the internet is its inexorable promotion of free thought. Take the simple issue of consumer protection, something Asia has largely ignored. No country had much consumer protection until Ralph Nadar started the movement in USA in the 1960s, challenging the car giants to make motoring safer through such simple devices as seat belts. Nadar wasn’t welcomed in Asia.

But if you think consumer protection is still absent from this part of the world, think again. Most people now consult blogs before committing money to a new car, dishwasher or overseas holiday. Consumer protection has been brought to Asia by the very best people to do it – the consumers. All over the world manufacturers are having to rethink their relations with their customers and with the medium that gives people such freedom to express themselves.

You will have noticed that Tesco, one of my favourite big companies, is suing for defamation. I don’t know the circumstances of the case but I sure hope Tesco does. There are many adverse comments about any large organisation today and legal action is a potentially dangerous precedent for dealing with them. You can’t sue everyone who says your service stinks. Perhaps attending to the cause of the defamation would arouse more sympathy with the customer than trying to beat him into the ground?

But consumer protection is not the only reason why so many find recourse to expressing themselves on the internet. After one hundred years of being more or less passive consumers of the mass media, we want our say. We don’t even much mind if nobody is listening. Our ears have been battered enough; our mouths are poised to take over – and our “speakers’ corner” is right there on our laptop.

The implications of the internet’s accessibility and consumer friendliness are massive. They impact on the mass media themselves, on our personal and commercial relations with each other, on education (why learn by heart when all you need to know is a click away?) and on the core need of man today to find the wisdom to cope with his new technological age.

For those who grew up in the shadow of the last century’s mass media today’s new media present a bewildering mix of excess, and personal opportunity. Excess, because we are all overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing knowledge in the world; personal opportunity, because never before have we encountered such a menu of communication, entertainment, control. From primary schoolchild to political scion, we are each faced with a level of choice that needs a clear head and a focused purpose if we are not to sink into a pond of thoughts or retreat into a safe haven of our own virtual world.

Making use of the new opportunities requires an understanding of how our individual thinking has changed over the last twenty years. This is best illustrated by the contrast between the old desire to keep up with the neighbours and the new aspiration to stand out from the crowd. Not everyone has changed and no one person has changed totally. We still need to identify with our kaki or social group but we want to be able to express our individuality, establish our right to be seen as different and unique.

So anything we say to another must be relevant, not just in general terms but specifically now. Anything that is not useful is spam. But note that one man’s spam is another man’s nourishment. Worse, the nourishment of today becomes the spam of tomorrow if we do not attend to its relevance.

As with all promotion, a sales pitch has two jobs to do – to attract attention and to sell. You can’t sell if you don’t successfully display the wares, but just showing off the goods won’t necessarily sell them. The old lesson of getting the customer to Look, Listen, Learn and Leap still applies. Or, as I used to put it to the creative teams in the agencies I ran, “Selling is L”. (You’ve probably worked out that ‘Leap’ was ‘for the Credit Card’.)

Today’s sales story has not only to be relevant but to be fast. Just making it understandable is hard enough. The development of language, both technical and day-to-day, has put well-known encyclopaedias out of business. Hundreds of new words and thousands of new acronyms emerge very day. We need to know them, to understand them and most importantly to know who else understands them.

Defining the potential buyer is not a matter of purchasing someone else’s database, although you may have to do that at times. However, observing the golden rule that 80% of your sales come from your existing customers is still the way to maximise your potential new business. There is no database like your own, and that applies if you are a behemoth or a sprat. Understand how to build and maintain a good database and you have already made over half your sales effort.

What should you say to your intended customer?

Very, very little. Remember the old adage that “More means worse”. It is so true. Observe the long diatribes poured onto the net and ask yourself, ‘does anyone read this stuff’? The answer is ‘yes, but very few’. Then ask the more useful question ‘how many people don’t read this stuff who ought to?’ The answer is ‘many’. Then ask yourself ‘how often have I seen something I ought to read, held it for a while then clicked it away unread?’ You’ll find this is common.

Clever restaurants present a taster of their speciality. It whets the appetite. Then the customer orders the dish. Today’s clever marketing offers a hint, a summary, a teaser. It also offers the whole dish, free. Then it has you coming regularly to the restaurant and the rest is profit.