Talking about e-marketing, e-business, e-booking is a given. But could we talk about e-behaviour? If I compare myself with my mother, the first thing you could differentiate us is the tightness in my upper back, neck and shoulder area. 90% of my day is spent at a 90 degree angle sitting in front of my monitor. My remedial massage therapist even added "computer" under the "what sports do you play" questions of her diagnostic card.

It made me think...

First thing my mother does in the morning is makes herself a nice cup of coffee and has a chat with my dad and brother around the kitchen table. First thing I do in the morning is unlock my computer (notice how it was not even turned off to gain time) and chat to my friends on Messenger, Skype and Facebook.

Mum then potters around the house, runs some errands, maybe reviews her cookbooks and calls a few friends. I clean my desktop (which has by now become my home), google anything and everything that comes to my mind and eventually sign up on online dating services as it seems to be the natural thing to do since I already do everything online.

My daily activities made me realise that is it not only the traditional services that have switched from offline to online but that the change is at a much bigger level: humans are turning into e-humans and their behaviour has been e-altered.

How does that relate to your business? Well, imagine a customer that had a great experience with your service. He will have a positive e-behaviour and e-brag in social medias all over the Internet. Fantastic free advertising for your company. 10 years ago you would have not dreamt about reaching such a large audience. Now, imagine a very angy customer with a negative e-behaviour. What could he do? Write a nasty blog post? The Web 2.0 offers way better revenge opportunities... such as recording a phone conversation, broadcasting it via on youtube (because when you are angry a blogpost seems too docile) and ruining your business before you even have the opportunity to realise what is e-happening. This is a true story: Mr Vincent Ferrari has a blog. He also happened to want to cancel his AOL account (which is harder than getting out of prison in the USA apparently). Unhappy with the response he got from the AOL customer service representative, he recorded their conversation and eventually broadcasted it on his blog via an audio file, asking his readers if they had experienced a similar situation....

His webserver crashed because it could not cope with the thousands of downloads of the audio file.... AOL had to intervene and the rest is history.

Read more about adapting to the influence of a Social Media Internet on the Search Engine Guide website