Dear iPhone, Happy 10th Birthday! Love, Digital Marketing
Social Media and Content Marketing, and all the other components of modern Digital Marketing strategy, have grown up a great deal since the days of Friendster and LinkedIn (launched in 2002), MySpace (2003), and Flickr (2004). Facebook of course launched in 2004 as well, but suffice to say that was a very different Facebook back then.
Yes, the early aughts were a different world when it came to Digital Marketing.
Things start to percolate a bit in the latter part of the decade. Facebook launched the News Feed in 2006, the same year that Google acquired YouTube; the same year that Twitter launched. Then in 2007, we got Tumblr.
But it wasn’t until we left that first decade of the millennium behind that things really started to heat up. Suddenly, all in a row, we got Instagram, Pinterest, and Quora (2010), Snapchat and Google+ (2011), and new video streaming options like Twitch.tv and Vine (2011 and 2013, respectively).
What changed?
Cue the iPhone timeline.
Ten years ago today, the first iPhone was released. No 3rd party apps, no video. Still, amazing. The launch of the App Store came the following year, and the seeds of a revolution were sown; a revolution that would reach its first full flower with the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010. Is it any coincidence that 2010 was the same year that Instagram, Pinterest, and Quora all launched?
I was what you might call a fairly early iPhone adopter. I got on the train at the 3G station. I was doing a lot of social media and content marketing work back then, and was intrigued by the possibility of mobile/on-the-go guerrilla marketing. Want to know how different things were back then? I was ELATED when I got one of these:
Those were Wild West days for Digital Marketing. Something new was launching every minute, and more and more products and platforms were talking to one another. As an “embedded” digital journalist, you could go to an event with an iPhone, and cover all the bases. Shoot video, record audio, take pictures, type out a macro- and micro-blog post, and share it all on social via TweetDeck which, back then, was really, really cool. It was heady times!
By the time we get to the iPhone 7 in 2016, we can see that the digital marketing game has become as complicated as has the smart device landscape, and the ecosystem within which the two co-exist and drive each other’s innovations is on permanently dynamic overdrive.
But as we take a moment to recognize this significant anniversary today, we can pause and reflect on the days when a new phone release could directly trigger a brand new wave of digital marketing.
I can even look at the landing page for our Digital Marketing Nanodegree program right now, and immediately see how the timeline we’ve just discussed is clearly reflected there. Look at our awesome program partners:
In addition to Google and Facebook (already mentioned above), we have Hootsuite, founded in 2008. We have HubSpot, who grew from $255,000 in revenues in 2007 to $15.6 million in 2010. We have Moz, whose million dollar Series A came in 2010. The only arguable outlier is MailChimp, which was founded in 2001, 6 years before the debut of the iPhone. Even then, it wasn’t until they added a freemium option in 2009 that the business really started to grow at significant rates.
There is no question that digital marketing as we know it today owes a great deal to the birth of the iPhone, so on behalf of digital marketers everywhere:
Happy 10th Birthday, iPhone!
p.s. if you REALLY dig the iPhone, then you should know there’s more to life than just using one … why not build for it too?
Enroll today in Udacity’s iOS Developer Nanodegree program!
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This post was written by Christopher Watkins, Senior Writer and Chief Words Officer, Udacity
