Why the internet needs a new social platform for the consumer and business relationship?

This section will briefly explain the technology of the internet and the pros and cons of email and search engines that help consumers have an online relationship with businesses. For the purpose of this paper Vocit has defined an “online relationship” of a consumer and business as being able to connect, stay connected, and grow through loyalty.
Over the years, businesses have used the internet to find direct and more convenient ways of communicating, exchanging assets, and interacting with their consumers.
Search Engines
A website can be attractive and perfect for growing a business, but if no one visits a website it is just a waste. A search engine is simply an online tool that consumers and businesses use to find each other. The reason search engines are needed is due to the vastness of the world wide web. Consumers and businesses need to be able to find each other online, somehow remember each other, and remind each other they are still there.
In 1993 there was an estimated 130 websites currently on the world wide web. By 1996 this number had grown to around 10,000 and then by 2012 it was estimated that there were 644 million websites. In 2018 there are approximately 1.3 billion websites. This task of allowing consumers and businesses to connect, stay connected, and grow through loyalty can be extremely difficult with that large of a number.
To put this into perspective just imagine a medium size living room filled with rice and that is about how many websites there are on the web. Search engines make it possible to filter through all the websites and their content and find correlated and relevant information and show it to a searcher.
The history of search engines date back to the very beginning of the world wide web. In 1990 a student by the name of Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal developed the first search engine called Archie.
A search engine has 3 main aspects to its functionality:

1. Digital Spiders search the internet by following hyperlinks to websites that have not yet been indexed or who have been updated since the last visit.
2. The index or catalog is a huge memory database that stores everything received from the spiders.
3. The search algorithm is how the search engine determines what is shown first based on the search
   In the early 1990’s several search engines were created like wandex, ALIWEB, jumpstation and the world wide web worm. Excite, galaxy and yahoo shortly followed. As each new search engine was developed the software and search capability was increased. A couple other popular search engines that are still in use that were developed in the early days of the internet are Jeeves and webcrawler.
   Google is probably the most well-known search engine and continues to dominate the search engine world. Google was first developed in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. To this point most search engines based their rank algorithm on how many times a word was shown on a specific page. Google was developed with a different concept in mind. The search engine would deliver the search results based on the most important which was determined by a page rank algorithm.
   This algorithm ranked pages based on the quantity and rank of the webpages that are linked to the original webpage. This quickly grew in popularity and Google soon started offering paid advertisement. In the early 2000’s Google began selling advertisements associated to keywords.
   As a business with a website it is critical that consumers are able to find the website. It becomes very important that a business owner hires someone to or they stay current with Google’s search algorithm in order to stay in the top percentage of specific keyword searches in different locations. Google does allow for paid advertisement to be at the top of lists, but that can get costly quickly.
   Search engines quickly created this costly middleman and timely processes for consumers and businesses to connect through websites. One technical process to help businesses and consumers connect is called search engine optimization or SEO.
   Search Engine Optimization is the process a business owner would take to get recognized before their competitors on a search engine. This can be a very timely and confusing process for business owners as they try to grow their business.
   Search algorithms have become fairly complex so to be a Google/Bing/Yahoo rockstar businesses must be able to master the SEO puzzle. There are several factors that influence a page ranking, but they are broken up into two categories. The “on the page” factors which a publisher has direct control over and the “off the page” factors which is the influence that a website has on its viewers.
   “On the page” influencers are broken up into three categories.
4. The Content — Items like is the content well written and substantial enough, does it have the key words and phrases people are looking for, is it fresh and about hot topics, do you have other vertical context like videos, pictures, news, and does your website answer questions.
5. The architect — Items like how easy is it for bots to find and crawl your pages and site, is your site mobile friendly, does the site manage duplicate content issues well, how quick does the site load, how effective is your URL’s, does your security offer HTTPS security to visitors, and does your site have different pages that are only available to search engines.
6. HTML — things like do the HTML title tags contain keywords, are meta description tags relevant, does the site use structured listing to enhance the site, and keywords in headers and sub headers.
   The “off the page” influences are also broken up into a couple categories.
7. Trust — things like how trusted is the site based on links, shares and other factors, how engaged are the viewers, do viewers spend time or bounce off the site quickly, what is the history of the website, has the site been flagged for hosting pirated content, and how many effective ads does the site contain.
8. Links — the quality and quantity of links the website has from other trusted websites, keywords of linked websites, and does the website have paid links or does it have spammed links.
9. Personal — the location of the viewer and search history of the viewer
10. Social — is your content shared by popular social media sites and people.
    SEO can be very timely and expensive to master, but it is necessary as the current age of consumers need to be able to receive instant and easily found information from trusted sites.
    The interesting thing about search engines is they are not only gathering information about websites but are also gathering information on the consumers. For a search engine to give a perfect search result for a specific user it must know about that user. The search engine must know about the consumers locations, tendencies, history, data, internet analytics, and some personal identifiable information.
    It is said that google may know more about a person than the person knows about them self. An optimal search engine can almost predict what a consumer will search for, before the consumer actually starts the search. This is called artificial intelligence and is becoming increasingly more popular within the internet.
    The business of search engines is truly matching consumers and businesses together on a centralized platform.
    This technology is very helpful, but once again does not allow for consumer ownership of their data, analytics, and personal identifiable information or DAPII. Google and other centralized search engines own the consumer DAPII and are making tremendous amounts of money off this information. Every time a consumer visits a centralized program like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Bing, they are gathering information on that consumer and are able to copy it, sell it, exchange it and do whatever they want with it.
    Once again this is a prime example of how centralized programs are beneficial but have taken away the consumers right to ownership.
    Vocit will have this incredible search technology of a centralized search engine and will combine it with the decentralized ownership that must be allowed to create a prosperous consumer and business relationship through search engines.
    2.1.4 Email
    Electronic mail is the most widely used tool for communication with around 2.5 billion active users and around 4.5 billion accounts. It is by far the current most relevant internet tool for fostering a positive consumer and business relationship.
    Email was another early internet invention. In fact, in the 1970’s Ray Tomlinson developed the ARPANET’ network email system, and for most early internet users electronic mail was probably the first practical common application. In 1993 the public lexicon had adopted the word email to replace electronic email and the race was on for companies to develop free and easy to use email addresses for the common household.
    AOL, Yahoo, Echomail, and Hotmail were some of the first large companies that offered this amazing widespread technology to businesses and consumers. As soon as society embraced email as a popular and effective way to interact online, we experienced new phenomena of targeted email campaigns to inform, interact, and reach potential consumers. Businesses quickly came to the conclusion that email was a great avenue for advertisement. They could easily send out a message to an infinite number of potential consumers timely and cost effectively. The different unsolicited email campaigns, even then, immediately gathered distaste while also tagged as junks, spams, and other not-so-attractive titles. It quickly became apparent that most customers treated these unsolicited emails the same way as unsolicited advertisement through the postal system.
    It is critical to understand that although email was a great way for consumers and businesses to find each other the spam emails are generally not mutually wanted by the consumer. A consumer could get very frustrated with inboxes filling up with unwanted email. This negative feeling from a consumer to a business is not what is needed when trying to foster a mutually beneficial consumer and business relationship.
    It became apparent that email needed a way to filter out spam mail and only deliver wanted communications to consumers. In 1996 the Mail Abuse Prevention System or MAPS was started to build software to fight against unwanted mail. During the last 20 years several systems were developed to filter out negative email that was getting sent out.
    In year 2000 Justin Mason created a program that was called the SpamAssassin to combat spam email.
    Spam or unwanted email became such a problem for email users that in 2006 in the United States President Bush passed a law called the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing” also known as CAN-SPAM. Other countries had or quickly responded with similar type of laws.
    As a quick overview a sender must do the following to be in compliance with email laws.
11. Received permission from a consumer to send them an email
12. Don’t use misleading header lines
13. Identify the email as advertisement
14. Include a postal address to allow a consumer to get a hold of you
15. Tell consumers how to opt of receiving emails
16. Honor opt out requests promptly
    These international accepted laws are currently what have been used to define the consumer and business relationship with emails. It is very common to be asked by a business to join their newsletter or subscribe to their reward program. Often times businesses incentivize consumers to sign-up now so that businesses can receive a consumer’s permission to add an email to their email list.
    During the early 2000’s a new internet technology was beginning to take off called social media. Social media was a centralized platform that would allow consumers to follow another person or entity and receive messages from that person. This seemed to be the answer for the consumer and business relationship as businesses would be able to build a following and reward consumers for purchases and loyalty.
    This has not been the case and email is still the most widely used platform for continuing to develop the consumer and business relationship and allowing growth from the business and consumer through loyalty.
    In a report called “Email Marketing vs Social Media Performance (2016–2019 Statistics)” by Mary Fernandez on November 8, 2016 she clearly shows that email marketing is winning the battle over social media except in one category.
    (https://optinmonster.com/email-marketing-vs-social-media-performance-2016-2019-statistics/)
    The results of this research are very convincing that although social media should have overthrown email in online marketing the current social media platforms are failing to create a thriving customer and business relationship and businesses are stuck with utilizing technology of the past, email.
    Although business to consumer emails are beautiful email pages the main technology behind an email has not changed.
    The Vocit platform combines this amazing technology of email with social media to push the business and consumer relationship onto grounds that are typically only seen with mom-and-pap type of stores. The communication is wanted and allows for growth within both sides.

Regards,
Aaron Luiz, Vocit team.