20 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 • FOGHORN FOGHORNFOCUS: SALES & MARKETING “Are you using software owned by a company that competes with your Internet service provider (ISP)? They could block it or slow it down so much that it becomes useless. This has actually happened before: When FaceTime first became available, AT&T considered charging customers more for use of the software over their cellular networks.” Liz Diedrich, a long-time passenger vessel marketing expert says that her staff at Diedrich RPM in Burnsville, MN, has been looking at this very issue since 2014. She says the new FCC rules will likely change for small businesses, including passenger vessel operators, that use digital marketing to build their companies. But, as to how much and when is still largely undetermined. “It clearly is the wild, wild, West,” Diedrich said.  She explained how the new laws could impact vessel operators who market themselves through their websites to book passengers. “Access to sites that are excluded via an ISP will change and poten- tially be limiting,” Diedrich acknowl- edged. “We, as digital marketers, will feel pressure because the concept of a non-neutral Internet will likely limit our ability to promote our businesses the way we are today. So things will change!” Diedrich encourages business owners to continue to utilize the marketing tools that have had the biggest impact on sales. “The bottom line is that people will likely keep and pay for access to what they are used to using, like Google, Amazon Prime, and social platforms that they are used to and companies that they trust,” she said. “At the end of the day, I think that the ISPs will want to provide access and create bundles to compete enabling people to maintain the access they are used to,” Diedrich remarked. She also thinks it’s likely that Google and Amazon may end up acquiring a large ISP. “In any case, most ISPs will keep Google and Amazon in their packages which means to me that search engine optimization will largely be in place as it is today, so the impact may not be as bad as everyone is predicting,” Diedrich said. Clearly, the days of relying solely on newspaper advertisements and direct marketing mailers to sell tickets to passenger vessel riders are long gone. Even the possibility of reverting back to a net neutrality environment has dimmed as the FCC rejected some of its own authority over the broadband industry in a bid to stymie future FCC officials who might seek to reverse the Republican-led ruling, according the Post’s Fung. Therefore, we must use the tools at our disposal to our advantage. “We just need to be forward-think- ing on how to leverage and capitalize on the Internet however we can,” said Diedrich. n