Abstract
Online marketing communications are moving toward interactions between individual
recipients and consumers rather than being directed from a marketing organization to masses of
consumers. It is now possible for an individual to be just as efficient in broadcasting
information, both positive and negative, about an organization as it is for a large corporation to
promote itself. The social networking that allows the quick and easy dissemination of
information and mis-information is in part a product of changes in online communication
channels, but these communication channels are in part enabled by such social networking.
From a marketing perspective, we are at a pioneering stage in understanding how these work.
This article suggests an infrastructure that could be useful in studying how online
communication channels are emerging and how they might evolve in the future. The elements of
this infrastructure are core/technological, competitive/commercial, political/regulatory, and
social.
Introduction
With the emergence of new communication channels via the Internet, we have seen an
emergence of new ways that marketing promotions can be launched and new ways that
marketing attacks can be initiated. As a U.S. presidential candidate, Barack Obama began using
“viral marketing” techniques early in his campaign for the 2008 elections through extensive use
of Internet social networking (Tumulty, 2007). Obama’s Democratic party opponent, Hilary
Clinton, was the victim of a damaging chain email campaign, in which she is falsely identified as
having an involvement with the defense of Black Panther members accused of tortuous murders
(Snopes, 2005).
There is little scholarly literature or guidance on this topic in part because it is so new.
Our current concepts and models in the marketing discipline were formulated around
promotional media, modes of service delivery, ethical considerations, and such that were
common before the Internet existed. Our thoughts on integrated marketing communications
(IMC) and corporate reputation management are based on tactics such as traditional press
releases to paper news media, whether that be to promote a new product or to react to a negative
event such as an oil spill. Traditional marketing models aren't especially helpful in formulating
corporate communication strategies in an era when a competitor or a single disgruntled customer
can post negative comments on websites that become indexed on search engines, or when a
competing politician reaches a younger demographic of campaign donors via non-traditional
online media.
Of interest in this article is the observation of emerging issues in marketing
communications, in light of an integrative model of diffusion. Our hope is that this model can
help us in the future to better understand how emerging communication channels are enabled and
manipulated. Scholarly inquiry into new online marketing tactics has perhaps been inhibited
because diffusion models in marketing are concerned with how consumers adopt new kinds of
physical products, and these models don’t lend themselves very well to understanding how
people adopt new methods of communication and how marketers can adapt to those new
methods of communication.
