Complete Web Monitoring

A New Kind of PR

With so many free web platforms now available, it’s easy to craft a message and build grassroots support, provided you can generate genuine attention from an audience. Getting genuine attention is the hard part.

In an industry once dominated by one-to-many broadcasting, online marketing analytics brought accountability to advertising. Viral marketing approaches made it easy to spread messages. And now community marketing—done right—makes it possible to overcome the natural skepticism of a media-saturated audience and communicate with it directly. Figure 12-2 shows how information flows in each of these models.

Figure 12-2. How messages flow between buyers and sellers in various marketing communications approaches

Broadcast Marketing Communications

Broadcast marketing was the twentieth century’s dominant form of promotion. It cost money to design and produce a message, and still more money to print and ship it, or to license some spectrum and transmit it. Broadcasting a single message to a broad audience offered the economies of scale needed to market cost-effectively. Where the industrial revolution gave us mass production, broadcast marketing gave us mass media.

Computerization and lower production costs meant that advertisers could target their messages to specific audiences according to publication, TV program, or geography—with computers, the incremental cost of a ...