E-Marketing is not so much about creating content as it is about manufacturing an electronic world where others spread your message and communicate your ability or product. “Digitized word of mouth” is a term used by many including the authors of the course book.
The reality is that today, e-marketers are realizing that not only must the product and advertising be innovative and interesting but so too must be the framework around the product and advertising. The way you communicate now more than ever means instant success or failure online.
For instance videos featured on the youtube.com homepage for one day skyrocket in views when compared to other videos. While it is possible to purchase space on the sites main page, many of the videos are chosen at random based on quality, essentially creating an underground audience for the video. This takes traditional advertising and puts it on it’s head.
It hardly stops there however. Here is a very short list of sites that are making traditional e-marketing useless:
- www.digg.com
- www.facebook.com
- www.stumbleupon.com
- www.igoogle.com
- www.myspace.com
These sites and the many others being created every day are rooted in content that is generated by users. While the end content is created by people, the sites act as a filter to tell you what you would like and it is based entirely upon what others have liked. Many sites go a step further and ask what you like to further define your list of things to check out.
Why should e-marketers care?
So why does this matter to e-marketers? Imagine an ever changing, always fresh TV guide that is written not by editors but 100% by viewers. For e-marketers, simply having an advertisement on the right website is no longer enough, your marketing strategy must be the topic of interest and your business can no longer be seen as pushing the information.
The future of e-marketing is taking product placement to an entirely new level. Actually generating ad content that people 1 – Don’t realize is ad content and 2- Love so much they want to share it with friends. The word of mouth so effective in the past is the e-mail forwarding of today and the digging, sharing, stumbling upon of tomorrow.
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