Galileo was right
Yesterday I gave a presentation on conversational marketing for small businesses at the Haymarket conference on Loyal Brand Advocates. I’m going to be developing a number of the themes I touched on in this blog. And the one I’m going to start with is this …
Galileo was right … our view of our place in the universe is no longer geocentric, in fact we understand that our planet is part of a solar system. Blindingly obvious today, revolutionary back in the 17th century.
We are starting to witness a Galilean revolution in online marketing. Our perspective on Internet marketing is still site-centric. We believe our web site should be the centre of our net marketing strategy. However, given the sheer number of sites and the very high costs of driving traffic to a single entity on the web, this strategy is not working for many businesses, especially SMEs, many of whom are not even trying.
I believe that we will soon see that marketing efforts (SEO, SEM, display …) that aim to make the Internet revolve around your web site are as absurd as thinking that the sun revolves around the earth. So what has changed?
The explosive growth in online communities has started to reveal on the net the social graph and relationships between people on a massive scale. To attract customers it is now necessary to participate in communities relevant to your business. By participation that means taking part in a conversation with prospects on terms understood and accepted by the community. We are very far from ‘traditional’ online marketing here.
Audiences are fragmented and this means customers are distributed and harder to reach. Online this means they are present in many different contexts, often behaving differently in each. So not only is it now necessary to be present in may different communities, we also have to adapt our behaviour and engagement accordingly to be relevant. This poses a stiff challenge to the concept of a strong unified brand.
So net marketing is going to move from being web site-centric to generating customer engagement through multiple, highly contextual ‘profiles’ - in other words a constellation of online assets. Online marketing will also shift from being ‘advertising’ driven to ‘participation’ based.
Some big brands have already seen the way the wind is blowing and are being successful. Most haven’t. And I also am convinced that smaller businesses are best placed to leverage this revolution in online marketing … but more on that later.
Posted by Ivan Croxford on November 29, 2007
Tags: conversational marketing, online marketing strategy, Small business
I’m a digital strategist and I like building new businesses. This blog is an opportunity for me to air some of the insights, issues and themes that I come across in the course of my work. I’d love for some/any of these to be picked up as part of the broader conversation on digital disruption.
Galileo was indeed quite right when espoused heliocentrism. What worries me is that Google may be the sun.
Point taken, and one to put on the watch list. But if that happened we’ll always have the European Commission to sort out the anti-trust angle :-). There will always be strong online communities with relevance to particular businesses. The depth of resonance in the community should drive attention/engagement/traffic outside the realm of traditional ‘google spend’.
You must be referencing/trusting the Commission’s ability to break up Microsoft’s desktop monopoly so efficiently and speedily Ivan
To be honest, I think the ‘kentron’ is actually the ever-changing, contracting/expanding, confused/complicated needs of small businesses today to grow and survive using a rich tapestry of tools in often schizophrenic ways! Google are unlikely to become anything like a business marketing monopoly, not least because the world is VERY aware of the intentions of the web giants of our time where even baby steps in the direction of invasion of privacy or invasion of our wallets are ’smacked down’ en masse by the very mass of users that make them giants in the first place: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7584397130 - I love the ‘constellation’ viewpoint, something Seth has been trying to wrap his intellectual property around for a while with his ‘lens’ approach - http://www.squidoo.com