"Some of the splintered Internet sites are so popular that if you aren't part of them, you could risk watching your brand get wiped out."

- Rich Tehrani

Two years ago, Hasbro woke up to a nightmare in which 600,000 people were playing a word game that wasn’t called Scrabble. Which means they didn’t own it. Which means they missed an opportunity.

At the time, Facebook had gained a strong foothold among a significant segment of the internet population. New communities were forming like convoys headed west during the gold rush. Meanwhile, many companies still existed in a paradigm in which having a website optimized for search engines as their portal to the world wide web was good enough. Among them…Hasbro.

Today we have social networking sites, microblogs, social bookmarking sites, smart phones (choose your gadget and your platform) and an abundance of news content available only to subscribers armed with a password.

Most of today’s compelling web content is trapped or hidden from Google’s all-seeing eye. That is, until Google is able to write an algorithm that can figure out everyone’s log in and password. Which is probably an enterprise they will avoid, lest they be shut down for good. But not by the law. By the Internet population—a mass of people who would just as soon be hidden from anyone they haven’t given permission to be in their space.

In the midst of all of this, companies on the internet are wrestling with the fact that if they haven’t created the right kind of web presence, a large portion of the, let’s call it, digital community cannot use what they do have. (Some websites just won’t work on an iPhone, or a Droid, or a Blackberry…)

Standardization was once the Internet linchpin that made things like Google and SEO work. But throw in a few disparate technologies, all void of the stuff the web is made of (iPhone, iPad, etc..) and the paradigm of uploading content available to all through one of two, three or four web browsers is shattered.

In the words of Josh Bernoff, “The golden age of the Web is coming to and end. Prepare for the Splinternet.”

Once again, it’s a whole new world in which mass marketing becomes even less attainable and super super-targeted strategies aimed at smaller, niche audiences will become even more common. The wider wider-reaching vehicles being Facebook and iPhone apps. But to be certiancertain, there are countless other channels through which to work.

Are you ready for The Splinternet?

 

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