com.in / com.Business: february 12, 2009
A major change is taking place in the fields of communication and marketing. Mass communication is slowly losing ground to a more personalized dialogue between the brands and their consumers. This dialogue is terribly powerful on the Internet and has become an endless flow of conversations.
In the heart of this dialogue, an impressive quantity of information is shared on many of the blogs, forums, communities and other social networks that are active on the web. About two thousand platforms, forty million groups, and nearly five hundred million people are already involved in these different networks where passion is more important than any other rational factor.
These new open medias, which are available to everybody, have allowed the emergence of new opinion leaders called the “influencers.” Mostly non-professional, they are characterized by an enormous enthusiasm which doesn’t follow any rationale, and which can destabilize marketing specialists. Their style follows the Web 2.0 characteristics: participating, transparent, and open to critics. Totally independent, they are sometimes better-informed than some of the brand employees.
In this context, the role of marking evolves from being a unilateral message-sender to becoming a unifying force that sustains information-sharing, and that participates with the construction of a community around the brand.
The social medias are not the unique solution, and this evolution doesn’t mean the disappearance of the so-called traditional medias, but it rather implies a different approach in the use of the tools and channels available.
It is now unquestionable that brands have to work with an element that they have always been afraid of, the impossibility of totally controlling their image. Indeed, at this very moment, through internet everywhere in the world, people are giving advice on products, sharing their consumption experience, making suggestions, and calling for action. Brands simply cannot ignore these speakers.
This world is not virtual. The different actors in these interactions are real. Most of these long-lasting groups or communities have a life in the real world. This is not surprising, as human life has always been organized in networks, even well before the emergence of these technologies. It is therefore easy to understand why social medias that facilitate exchanges are so successful.
Finally, it is obviously not the recession that provokes this evolution; it is only accelerating a process that has already caused a deep transformation of the marketing and communication worlds. In this context, enthusiasm has become, more than ever before, a powerful engine to succeed this mutation.
PDF Tags: communications, dialogue, influencers, media, networks, social media, traditional media, web 2.0
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