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.