Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

image credit: lexnger

How many barriers are there between us right now?

Just one – a little button that says publish – that’s it. It’s simple. It’s insanely efficient.

What about for your company? How many barriers exist between you and your customers? Probably many – lawyers, supervisors, departments, consultants, procedures, forms – all of these things are artificial barriers.

A recent survey from PEW Research Center for the People and Press confirmed what most of us already know: the net beats newspapers as a source for news:

Other interesting points from the survey:

• For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%).
• Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television.
• The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.

It is blindingly obvious that the future of communication belongs to the web – to believe otherwise would be to look backwards, not forwards. Despite a few reporters still pining for the “good old days” the rest of us are moving forward into a more free and open information society.

Politics and religion both are taboo subjects for marketing writers to discuss. This is so because neither institution would like you to know that at their core, they are the best examples of successful marketing in our society. They are so successful because most don’t even consider the fact that they are marketing.

By me even broaching this topic some of you are already shifting in your chairs.

Why? Because you probably subscribe to some sort of political belief and some sort of religious belief. Politics are often discussed openly, however today I would like to discuss religion from a marketing perspective as I have not seen that done nearly enough.

Religion is concurrently the most successful, yet most ignored example of the efficacy of marketing. If you are offended by me talking about religion as marketing, then the point has already been proven.

image credit: matthew fang

What most online marketing lacks…

In the frenzy of marketers drowning the web in their ultra-proofed and overly refined messages, there is something that is severely lacking: passion. And, passion is the largest driver motivating people to produce, share and remix content online.

What motivates someone to share her recipes with the world every day? What motivates a tech blogger to write about the latest gadget? What motivates a web guru to talk about the latest startup or e-commerce site? Simple – it is pure and raw passion for the subject matter.

If your marketing, your product, your blog or your brand lack passion, you will never break through the noise online. It doesn’t matter how slick your communications are, the people using the web with greatest frequency are extremely smart and will see through the fluff, or ignore it altogether.

Every year, Technorati, the authority blog database and search engine releases a “State of the Blogosphere” where they document the progression of blogs as a medium and their influence in our culture.

I touched on a few of these statistics already in my post from Sunday on the digital divide. However, now that more detailed information has been released, I thought I’d put some of it here to spread the good news of the blogosphere’s growth with all of you.

Some snapshots from the State of the Blogosphere 2008:

“The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world.”

–Seth Godin, Author Tribes (blog is: sethgodin.typepad.com)

image credit: pbo 31 via flickr

I’ve been traveling this past week – and Thursday morning as I stepped out of my hotel room for a series of meetings, I noticed a usual sight: a copy of USA Today sitting at the steps of my door.

And, my usual response was to pull it inside my room and set it aside where it remained unopened and unread. Perhaps a better idea would be to bring it downstairs and ask them kindly to save the energy and paper and not deliver my news in this arcane format.

As I have said before, the whole idea of someone bringing you news as words printed on paper with ink in the digital age is a quaint and archaic notion. It is wasteful, harmful to the environment and pretty much irrelevant.

I enjoyed my breakfast while reading RSS feeds through my iPhone – where I am receiving exactly the information I want without ads that are of no meaning to me and without articles that don’t pertain to my world or industry. There is only a fleeting amount of time daily, there is no reason to waste time reading something that was designed for a previous era. The one-size-fits-all, shotgun approach is over. Let the age of customization begin.