The face of Digital marketing changing with Blockchain - Part 1
Introduction to Digital Marketing and Web Evolution
These days, everyone knows digital marketing. Before some years, the web was just a static pile of information. You could add, edit or delete it, but you could not interact with it. It soon changed to what is now known as Web 2.0, a term advanced by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference. Web 2.0 is not a version of the internet, but merely a name given to a huge change in usability. Unlike earlier, now the internet is more focused on the users. Instead of being a passive entity, the internet is now an active asset and you can own a piece of internet content even without knowing how it works. A simple example is a Facebook page.
With the internet growing by leaps and bounds, a lot of things have changed. The internet, consciously or unconsciously, affects every choice of a user, from clothes to, in some cases, their friends. And thanks to digital marketing trends, you can follow them everywhere, marketing services and products you think they would opt for. But now, you need to pause for a while, because digital marketing trends are changing again with Blockchain as a new intruder in this world. Right now, "Blockchain" might be more threatening than the Google search engine update as it’s new and seems more useful for the end user than the marketer.
Understanding Blockchain Simply
So, what is blockchain? There are many articles with technical terms trying to make you understand blockchain. Let us make it simple. Suppose you owe your colleague (A) $100 and another colleague (B) owes you $175. You email colleague A saying you promise to get him paid $100 by B, and the debt is clear. But he is not going to B to redeem that amount.
Is this possible? Yes, this is how cryptocurrency works, but we will come to it another day. Now you want to make a payment of another $100 to your boss. You write an email saying you promise B will pay $100. But this time the email is not accepted by your boss. How did he come to know you do not owe $100 anymore to B? When you first send a mail to colleague A, all accountants in your company also request this email because they have access to all monetary transactions for bookkeeping. They verify the transaction along with sender, receiver, and amount.
All accountants have a record, but which record will ultimately be counted? Let’s say the record of the accountant who first solved a small puzzle on the computer. Once verified, this accountant’s copy becomes the ultimate truth and is distributed as a copy to all employees, who then add it to their bookkeeping records. When you send an email to your boss, accountants check it too. They find that B only owes you $75, so the transaction with your boss is declined. This process happens every time someone makes a transaction. Everybody in the office receives the ultimate copy of the transaction (Block), which is then added to their respective files (Chain).
Transaction Security and Verification
If someone else with the same email tries to redeem payment from B, the accountants cannot verify him. If somehow verified, everyone in the company has the copy of the transaction between you and A, so someone will speak up. To change transaction history, one would need to change copies for every person in the office, or 51% of the people must agree. Feasible at company level, but at blockchain level, millions of chains make it nearly impossible to breach data. Here, the email is the cryptocurrency, the company is the blockchain infrastructure, and the employees are part of it. Accountants are miners in blockchain; their role is to validate or reject transactions. In other blockchains, they are known by other names.
For now, this system is secure. We won’t discuss future IT issues with huge numbers of transactions. How will it impact Digital Marketing Trends? How can we prepare for changes? Will only blockchain affect Digital Marketing, or will cryptocurrency also be a factor? Many questions revolve around blockchain. It could be a revolution, as hinted in 2017. We will explore more in the following post. Till then, there is much to explore in blockchain. Good luck understanding it.