I was talking to Andrea Yager earlier about the value of Twitter to marketers and whether it was “life changing”.

I think there’s certainly things that will be life changing, these include oxygen, water and food.

The litmus test of whether something is “life changing” is whether you could survive without the item before, and whether the absence of the item or service, means your business can continue surviving.

The definition is pretty loose, but I have a feeling that businesses can continue surviving without iPhones, MacBooks, Twitter or many of the new products and services out there.

So are businesses slaves to technology?

Rather than go into a philosophical discussion of whether your business will collapse without email, or if you lost the use of a cell phone permanently, here are some essentials for businesses and new internet marketers:

• An online presence: If you don’t show up on the search engine results, you’re as good as invisible which isn’t a good thing. If you can’t or are not able to set up a WordPress blog or a website, it’s going to be difficult to maintain an online presence.
• Lead generation: A business without customers is dead in the water. Whether it’s bringing inbound traffic via a content site or a blog, or heading out to bring traffic in via PPC (pay per click), articles, classified ads, or ezine advertising or social bookmarking, you will need some form of traffic generation in place, which can then be converted into prospects who will then be converted into customers.
• Customer engagement/customer relationship management: Internet marketing as an industry needs to move beyond the single sale, into building customer relationships like in the real world. Savvy merchants are already picking up on this, and smart affiliates will move beyond just a single sale to building up email databases (ie: customer databases) to build relationships with customers.
• The sales funnel: The concept of cross selling and upselling are key here. Are customers able to get a variety of products, premium products, personalized service if they want it? Can they get it from you? Else they’ll go to someone else to have their needs met.

Technology is just one piece of the puzzle in putting the system together. Without the processes and customer service to back up the tech element, your online business could remain stagnant and struggle to reach the next level of growth.

Lifechanging technology only makes sense when accompanied by well thought out business processes. Else the whiz-bang effect will last for a very short duration.