Feature: Internet Marketing

The impact of the internet on global society today is so revolutionary that describing it as a revolution isn't revolutionary enough. The internet has slowly crept up on us, after all the initial hype, and transformed how people live, work, spend their leisure time and how they buy things.

Consider some of the pressing facts:

In social networking - perhaps the biggest growth area on the internet today - more than a quarter of people expressly use these sites to influence others. They do this, interestingly enough, not for any commercial reason but just because we all tend to get a kick out of sharing our pleasure in things we like with others. It's the same kind of emotion that makes us want to tell our friends about movies we love. In today's cluttered world, people are increasingly turning away from traditional advertising and towards their peers for information and product recommendations.

Change is not about to happen, it has arrived. It arrived last year. No longer can traditional 'more of last year' and 'let's experiment' marketing models be effective in this world half your customers are now living in, where a brand has potentially many voices and many ways of talking to audiences.

What does all this mean? It means the chances are your customers are spending much of their time using a constantly changing mix of media rather than imbibing traditional media.

The point is not that media is fragmented – it has been fragmented for years – it is now completely fluid. Only ten years ago, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV were watched by a total of eighty percent of people in the UK. Satellite and many new terrestrial channels started to cloud this simple picture five years ago. People were beginning to move from reading a newspaper over breakfast or on the train or tube on the way to work; many have now entered a media world where they graze on media through their day, 'eating', 'drinking' or 'snacking' on media at different times and in different places.

Overall, the secret is to map out your marketing plan in a way that builds all these little connections – so you tie your retail presence, your webstores, your traditional media plans and all these voices and ways of talking seamlessly together.

You should aim to create a 'pattern of advertising and promotion' that people see, sometimes over the course of a day, rather than see on page six or when it appears on Channel Five. If you market in the new world in this new, seamless, fluid way, people who are ready to start loving what you want to sell them will find you irresistible. Every little message you shout out will echo across channels and across time – building the brand and your opportunities for years to come.