7 September 2010
How online marketing is going through an evolutionary change as the social media phenomenon shifts into a higher gear

I would love to be a fly on the wall in one of these big marketing firms. I can just imagine on one side of the room you have the aged cast of "Mad Men" and on the other side the cast of "Big Bang Theory". Trying to strategies on a marketing campaign.

The two groups making no headway at all and generally getting more frustrated as time goes on.

The old school MM group try to describe the age old advertising techniques of finding "the hook", "branding", "engagement", "repetition" and planning. While the BBT kids use terms like "search engine friendly", "click through's", "social networking".

Each group has their own skills but each can't work in a vacuum and need the other to put together an effective marketing effort. Branding and all those age old approaches have their value but the newly emerge social media has changed the game completely, and marketers should be very alert to these changes if they want to survive the next 10 years.

I heard a very telling radio commercial while I was in my car on the weekend. It was a car dealership commercial for a GM dealership that had been around since my childhood. (They were the sponsors of my pee-wee hockey team back in the seventies)

I was saddened to hear that like so many other GM dealerships, they had been forced to close their doors and shed their GM identity last year. They had relocated and had opened up under a generic "Auto World" identity, selling all brands of vehicles.

The commercial had retooled theme song that had been en-grained in my head for most of my adult life and a familiar voice came over the airways. But instead of talking about new models in stock, or coming down for a test drive; the bulk of the commercial was talking about visiting the website to view their inventory by watching YouTube videos.

So I checked out the site and sure enough it was video heavy, and running along the bottom of the screen was a line of social networking share buttons for a variety of sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and several others.

The site itself was put together fairly well, but you could tell that the developers were working with people that were not use to being on camera, as they were not your stereo-typical smooth talking salesperson.

But what I took from the site, was that the showroom has now officially moved to the living room. I had worked with a car dealership for many years and tried to express this as the natural progression, but it unfortunately fell on deaf ears. (Or perhaps they just were not ready for that yet)

As for everyone in a business that involves demonstrating a product of any sort, heed this warning; your online presence in video and text format is going to do nothing but get more and more crucial to your business survival.

So brush up on your grammar, and get comfortable talking to the camera. It is nothing short of an evolutionary step in the marketing community.