Allow me to shatter a myth - online media if approached properly has nothing at all to do with the technologies that currently deliver it.
I always ask people to think of online marketing as simply stepping back into a medieval village! Once they have picked themselves up off the floor, I explain that it’s a simple analogy to should stick to if they really want to succeed.
The very sexy technologies involved in online marketing can be distracting, making you lose focus on what you are actually planning to achieve online. In a medieval village, you pretty much knew or could easily find out about everyone else. You knew what they did/sold to make a living, whether they were trustworthy and you knew if they could keep their word and deliver on their claims. Of course this is basically what you can do now in your global village on the web – with the help of some trusted social media tools.
You can quickly tap into a search engine what you are looking for and through some clever stuff (search engine optimisation, link building, key word, on-line advertising, metatags etc.) undertaken by agencies like mine your site immediately comes up on the search and, so a lot of people believe, if you’ve done your job well – all will be fine.
Yes? No! Because listed underneath your site is every other piece of information about the thing you are looking for, through such tools as review sites, and more increasingly - individual point of view sites (blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc.) you’ll also see the truth about the organisation you where considering trading with.
So you see, it’s all back to the ways of the village, your reputation is key. Therefore I’d like to introduce what I believe will be a new buzz phrase to you, forget CRM, at BCS we believe ORM (Online Reputation Management) will be the killer strategy for organisations moving forward.
Murray Carmichael-Smith – BCS-PR
