The other day my son asked me: “What if Google didn’t exist?” At the time, I was a bit distracted, so I just gave my standard reply to questions I don’t have time for (or an inclination) to answer: “No idea. Google it.”

Seriously, though, what if Facebook, Google, et. al. didn’t exist?

Older readers might laugh at this thought because, of course, we grew up without smartphones, Google, and Facebook. If you wanted to find out how, say, an external combustion engine worked, you looked it up in an encyclopaedia. If you wanted to send your friend a photo, you had to get it duplicated, put it in an envelope, and mail it. Ah, the old days…

Imagine going to Facebook except something is different. Instead of the usual abundance of selfies and complaint-filled statuses, you see a simple message: “Sorry, that page does not exist.” Your confusion leads you to your next stop, Twitter. You see the same message. Every social media site you visit shows the same results. What would happen?

The first thing that springs to mind is that data losses would be huge. Many companies have saved tons of data to Google’s Cloud services – from Google Docs to Google Drive to Photos. We’d be looking at losses running into billions of dollars if these services ceased to exist. Companies that rely heavily on Google tools might even go out of business.

Secondly, a lot of people would be out of their jobs. Just think of all the social media marketers, content generators, and influencers.

We’d also have a lot more spare time, but what would we fill it with? Interestingly, the BBC recently reported on a survey that looked into what happened when companies suffered an Internet outage that lasted four hours or more. The researchers found that, rather than sit around idly, employees did things that they would normally put off, such as dealing with paperwork. The research argued that if every company turned off their computers for a few hours each month and made people do the tasks they postponed, there’d be an overall productivity benefit.

We would have to (re)learn traditional marketing and networking again. Creating and distributing flyers, speaking to people to find out what they want (rather than relying on search trends and social media data), speaking at conferences and events, and thinking of billboards and radio commercials.

The point is,  you shouldn’t take social media and the online world for granted when it comes to marketing and communications.

Facebook is currently testing a second newsfeed in select locations. The second newsfeed would be reserved for updates from company Facebook pages, keeping the main newsfeed for person-to-person updates. Businesses in the current test locations reported drops of up to 80% in engagement on their Facebook pages. Without engaged pages, Facebook will turn into just another push marketing channel. People liking and engaging with pages on Facebook is what provides the platform with most of the data that makes it so useful to marketers currently.

Why are messenger apps like WhatsApp so popular these days? Partly, I think, because people get tired of newsfeeds and crave more person-to-person communication. How good are you, as a company, at communicating in a “person-to-person” way?

Lastly, how spread out are your marketing efforts? Many hotels and restaurants appear to rely largely on Facebook and Instagram only. If that sounds like you, do you have plans in place for when these channels change or, heaven forbid, disappear? I don’t need to tell you that it’s never good to put all your eggs in one basket, but the fact is that the marketing skills of many companies appear to not exceed posting to the same platforms day in and out, which is a bit worrying.

Whatever you do: Keep it social!

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