Is Scotland Missing the On-line Revolution

Rhetorical question I’m afraid, because I know the answer – Yes it is.

My real question is why? I have my own theory which we’ll get to later, but maybe you, the one person in the country who reads this will have a clearer picture.

Through the 18th. and 19th. centuries Scottish scientists, engineers and philosophers dominated the industrial revolution. They built the roads, railways, canals, factories and ships. They set up international companies which dominated global markets. They were entrepreneurs taking on any opportunity, and winning.

But where is Scotland in the Information Revolution? Nowhere to be seen.

Before you tell me about all those web sites out there let me explain. We run a global Internet business from Dornoch. Our application runs on servers housed in a bunker in Dallas, managed by a hosting company based in New Zealand. Our designers are based in North Carolina, our developers are based in Winnipeg. To round out the picture our company providing the service is incorporated in Chicago.

We have people using our software all around the world – China, Hong Kong, Australia, India, Africa, Finland, France, Spain, Brazil and all across the USA, from New York to San Diego. We even have a couple of users in Scotland, based on personal relationships.

This makes us a global business, albeit a small one, and able to speak on the subject with some authority.

You might rightly ask why we get none of our services in Scotland. And we’d explain we did try to do that, but couldn’t find anybody who could offer the skills we needed. Worse, we got told by HIE, SE, and several so called Internet Marketing agencies that what we wanted to do would never work. One of them even suggested we couldn’t make it because our demo system quoted US$. Mostly they told us we couldn’t succeed because there was no market – everybody was entirely happy using Microsoft technology.

In itself that explanation supports my claim that Scotland is missing out, but there’s more relevant evidence.

We do all our own marketing using Inbound techniques- basically publishing content in blogs, spreading the messages via social media, attracting traffic with Search and engagement.

These techniques require us to spend lots of time creating content and monitoring traffic, to see what works and what doesn’t. We also spend lots of time monitoring what other people say using the same media. And this brings us to the main point.

We know every time somebody visits our sites, where they come from and the reason they came to us. We get traffic from all over the world – including surprisingly the Philippines, but we never get any traffic from Scotland. We rarely come across blogs written in Scotland. And don’t often come across anybody from Scotland with a genuine Internet presence.

So where is Scotland in the Information Revolution?