Tutorial: New Media Marketing for Old Media Marketers. Part 1: Why Bother?

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Part 1: Why bother?

So before you embark on a journey of discovery, you need to stop and think ‘why bother?’ or, even better, life’s greatest cliché-question: ‘What’s in it for me?’ Before Chris Columbus squashed that egg and impressed the queen enough to be granted permission to sail to the Americas you can bet he thought long and hard about why he should bother to live on a ship for the next few months.

So you’re a ‘postcard marketer’ that is thinking of embarking on a journey into the new world of marketing and you want to know why you should bother. Here are a few reasons:

• It’s good (if not essential) for you career. If you plan to stay in marketing, this is the way to go.
• Critical mass. Web 2.0 websites/application have active members in the hundreds of millions.
• The ability to target very niche audiences.
• And targeting niches has led to psychographic targeting – many a marketer’s Holy Grail. Have a look at this article from Marketing Vox on Facebook’s Psychographic Targeting.
• Web 2.0 applications offer many solutions for internal and external communication solutions. If you’re in communications, you are always looking at ways around the ‘face to face delete syndrome’.
• Blogging can create two-way communications between company and clients, or even execs and employees, aiding with employee engagement.

I’m sure there are many more marketing advantages to Web 2.0, and many more to be discovered, so please let me know if I should add to the list.

In part 2: So what is Web 2.0?