Interactive Self Marketing

The paradigm of marketing is changing from seeking customers, to knowing all you can about the right customers for you, and being in places where they will come to you because your message meets their interests. It is essential to have an online presence, as an individual, and especially as a company.

Those who are saying, "look at me" on the internet are transforming all kinds of industries and communication channels. Anyone who is cautious about being open, and tends to see customers as someone to promote a product to, is finding that if you trust customers, employers, friends to find you on their own, you will have a better match and longer lived relationship in the end.

This means that everyone and every company must have a well-planned online presence. There is a great article called, "Never Look for a Job Again" by William Arruda 6/26/07 talking about building a strategic online presence. (You do have to give marketingprofs your email address to read the article, but it is a terrific resource that I use often.) Having your own domain name, an accurate profile in zoominfo, and your own website or on-line portfolio or blog are getting to be starting points for developing each individual's career marketing tools.

Interactive internet communications are definitely turning the marketing world around - the ultimate in customer-driven marketing. Social marketing itself is not new to the internet, but has also definitely changed since internet technology has emerged and changed to encompass audio and video as well as text. Sites like YouTube and MySpace allowed innovators to use emerging technologies to say, "look at me" in a way that engaged others all over the world. These sites launched the business world and business professionals in finding more sophisticated ways to use the same technologies to network, which many do through such sites as LinkedIn and Facebook.

The growth of entrepreneurial ventures, spurred by the downturn in the economy and the telecom and tech bust of the early 2000's, generated sites like sologig, elance, and guru. Disjointed and rambling web-logs (blogs) from the innovators have evolved into more strategically planned communications at every level on any subject from travelogs to the latest executive thinking. All this blogging has seriously impacted the control marketers have on the position of their products and services in the mind of the consumer, and have led marketers to find that more than ever before they need to understand the customer's perspective before even conceiving a product. Now, multi-discipline teams involving marketing, customer support, sales, strategic planning, etc are on the product design teams with the engineers. Internet marketing professionals on the leading edge are flourishing, like imediaconnection, marketingsherpa, and debbieweil.

So, have you checked your internet presence lately? Are the news articles, project bids, books that are popping up with your name who you really are? Is there a way for companies or individuals to really have any control over the positioning and image they portray on the internet?