FutureWatch - Online Relationships & Marketing

I spent an absolutely fascinating morning with a friend of mine who runs a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) business in town (check out www.aimclear.com). Despite being quite savvy about the web, I was just blown away by the sophistication of the tools he showed me he used to help his clients build better, more focused online presences. Wow!

It got me thinking about how different marketing of the future will be from today. As a professor, I feel I am responsible for keeping up with these trends to try and help my students understand exactly how they need to relate the material I'm teaching them to the world they will face tomorrow. We talk in class about word-of-mouth effects and the traditional admonition to monitor and manage word-of-mouth communications because people are three times more likely to repeat a negative experience with your product than a positive one. That's all good and fine, but our marketing graduates today need to have a much more sophisticated understanding of how technology is changing the pattern of relationships among individuals. Word-of-mouth networks and information sharing on products are now done virtually among many segments of consumers. Any marketer failing to understand this is doomed to watch the future world pass him or her by. Marketers also must concern themselves not only about managing communications among networks of targeted consumers but actually creating word-of-mouth exchanges about their products. I think there are going to be some more significant breakthroughs within the next few years in how technology is used to manage the flow of marketing information in an online world. It is still not widely understood and I think many of the traditional theories of word-of-mouth interactions will need to be revised to take into account these changing communication patterns. These students are going to find themselves in a new world of marketing communications and they better be prepared. I am doing my part by trying to better understand these developments and relate it to the theory I cover in class.

Everything I cover on reference group influences will also need to be altered for this new virtual-supported world - but more on that in a later post.