The status of marketing is at a crossroads right now, where the paradigms of the past are fading away concurrently to the birth of future ones, with little to no place for the present. Sound confusing? Well, it is. The rise of the online reputation managment company, for example, isn’t the only harbinger of the changing of the guards. As far as the value of the Internet in corporate branding, social media and several new technological phase-changes are sweeping in a new era of marketing strategies. Here are some of the tops examples:
Real time communication. Because it is now possible to undertake projects collaboratively and in real-time using a combination of cloud services and social media, marketers possess the ability to micro-manage their campaigns far more effectively. Real time social media interactions make it so that companies can now custom-tailor their marketing campaigns to meet the latest developments in the real world and mirror the latest online trends.
By integrating Google alerts with keywords you can even stay on top of the international dynamics of real-time marketing. The resistance to using social media in marketing is rooted in not understanding that the benefits of social media lie fundamentally in its real-time nature. Facebook Hangouts is just the beginning. Fusions of services like Skype, Google docs, and Twitter will make marketing an incredibly fluid process that requires sophisticated online skills and entirely new divisions.
Virtual reality communities. In addition to traditional advertising and newer strategies like inbound marketing, the future of online marketing will be heavily focused on virtual reality marketing that can target people spend much of their time as avatars. Digital TV, strengthened fiber optic networks, the bundling of cable, phone and Internet services and 4G networks, as well as the popularity of cutting edge gaming platforms like Wii and Kinect make it clear that in the future more and more people people will use the Internet for much of their recreational time. It’s also likely that more and more people will take part in communities like Second Life, which already has a burgeoning niche economy and online currency. The coming years should see a growing emphasis on marketing to virtual reality communities.
Smartphones everywhere. The incredible rise of the smartphone as a ubiquitous personal assistant puts it in the crosshairs of all marketers as the next great battlefield. Accompanying location-based social media sites like Foursquare and Gowalla will come a legion of marketing teams. They will look to utilize smartphone advertising in conjunction with advanced real-time communication, augmented reality browsers, and other coming developments. The public sphere will continue to be the hunting ground of marketers, but it will the public sphere 3.0, the one infused into our mobile devices.
These three examples—real time communication, virtual reality communities, and smartphones—underscore the rapid change in marketing strategies. As the commercial world sees physical space merges with cyber space, we can expect consumers to demand more of their Internet providers and more savviness from marketers.
