The More Things Change...

Marketing websites tend to serve as gateways for other new media tools, including blogs, banner ads, pop-ups, videos, etc. While websites may serve as a gateway and coexist with other new media tools (and vice versa), are these various tools integrated effectively, so as to enable unified marketing strategies/tactics?

Focusing on the relationships between websites and blogs, as an example, JupiterResearch found that 35 percent of large companies planned to implement corporate blogs. Prior research found that 34 percent of companies already utilize blogs. The new research, therefore, found that nearly 70 percent of large corporations would utilize blogs. Other research found that 76 percent of corporations that utilize blogs reported increases in website traffic and media attention as result of their blogs. These numbers would suggest that blogs are a growing component of corporate marketing efforts and are integrated well with corporate web sites in the sense that the blogs drive traffic to the sites, which are presumably the repositories of corporate and product information.

However, JupiterResearch also found that corporate blogs are under utilized for generating word-of-mouth marketing opportunities. Only 32 percent of surveyed marketing executives said they use corporate blogs to generate word of mouth around their company's products or services. Also, Porter Novelli found that 63 percent of respondents started their blogs in order to participate in the new medium rather than to satisfy a specific need.

This would suggest a dissonance in the corporate world of blogging. On one hand, the use of blogs is growing and the blogs seem to direct traffic to corporate sites. On the other hand, many corporations fail to utilize their blogs to supplement other specific marketing activities, or fail to understand the potential of their blogs in general.

As Frederick E. Webster Jr. commented in 1996: “Simply put, there is a real and persistent danger that, caught up in the excitement and hype of a new technology, marketers will once again let attention to the short-term and tactical overwhelm consideration of the long-term and strategic. In the new world of interactive marketing, tactics often precede strategy.” It seems, more than ten years later, that there are lessons yet to be learned in the world of new media.