What's to be gained from greater synergy between the real, the cyber and the creative worlds?

Setting off on this kind of quest, it's difficult to bypass the most obvious elements in the history of mankind that might contain just the lifesaving elements one needs to survive the journey. So here's a tiny advance on the retirement, senility included.

In our daily searchings on the web, we are all more or less like the hero of what is widely accepted is Europe's first novel Don Quixote. Don Quixote and his pal chased after windmills, mistaking them for giants and went on a series of similar lunatic trips. Perhaps it's the excessiveness, perhaps the numerous side tracks, but surfing in a sea of information can render even the sanest of persons to succumb to similar lunacies as those suffered by the two Spanish gentlemen.

There are more striking similarities between Don Quixote's adventures and the modern internet - in both you often don't know where one saga/browsing expedition begins or where another one ends.

Furthermore, Quixote offers an abundance of contradiction, imagination beyond what is ordinary, subplots here there and everywhere. And despite the book's age, the concept of interaction was already born; there's real interaction between the author and the characters! Somehow the author managed to make his intervention and direct communication with the reader as natural as you clicking on the links on this page! It's no violation of the characters or of the story itself. Isn't it great that europe's oldest novel should be offering us such a richness in story technique?

But let's not get too carried away. Besides adding a nice heroic feel to the world of the web, we fear that in a practical sense, the comparisons to Don Quixote more or less allude to merely the lesser aspects of cyber space. Because, what pleasure is there to be derived from knight errant-like experiences when that's exactly what a browsing excercise really boils down to when you need to get information of vital importance or when you get that high ranking listing your business needs to survive?

The character Don Quixote, despite offering great insights into the author's ingeniously laconic reaction to the writings of his era (even Sigmund Freud apparently skipped classes to read the book), does in the end perish as a result of his suicidal life style.

Somehow it is less than reassuring that even though Europe's first official novel is an interesting account of lunacy, the rest of the stream of works unleashed on readers have not really been overly occupied with the subject of madness. The very nature of cyber reality dictates we follow on from where we started. This is where the old world and cyber space go their separate ways.

The way the web is structured is far from ideal and this does affect us as grassroots level. But what if we got things wrong at this stage? The deflation in the dot.com sector indicates a lot of misunderstandings were prevalent in the initial take off of cyber space. People interacting with their search engines are having a hard time actually finding efficiently what they are looking for. Where is the interactivity that actually connects in such a way that we find what we are looking for to the same degree the potential of our technological tools promise?

Making the best of things the way they are at the moment is to devise a way to stand out from the crowd in cyber space. But where to begin? Researching the status quo of internet marketing is a good starting point because the marketing guys are there to bridge the gap between companies and customers. The main theme of marketing studies at the moment is customer research.

A lot more money gets spent on consumer behavior than before the deflation of the dotcom sector. The trend is driven by companies turning to quantitative analysts to find hard and decisive numbers about their actual consumer markets.

Here goes, the more you can fragment a market, the better one's chances (of at least having a degree of control over it). Nothing new. What is new is the way marketers are devouring the data, dissecting it like biologists would owl droppings. Hopefully, interpretations of the findings are not exactly stomach turning but contributing to better interactive patterns. So this is where we are - at the beginning of an understanding-based approach of customers.

The trend has been termed 'new marketing' or 'behavioral marketing'. Wonder how companies translate this into their strategies? What we see is that there's a general trend toward aiming to gradually reach higher click/sales conversion rates from marketing campaigns, rather than going for quick sales (the strategy before March 2000).

Apparently, the focus is more long term and on an increased understanding of what brings buyers to their decision. Marketers say it's back to the drawing board throughout the bank. The very beginnings of the buying funnel are now researched in greater depth.

It is good to keep in this mind when you are getting to grips with cyber culture. Search behavior is the focus of a lot of market research, if only because so much information that comes out of this has yet to be capitalised on.

Angelique van Engelen is a freelance copywriter who runs www.contentClix.com from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She specialises in writing sales copy, feature articles and research reports. Feel free to contact her.

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