Today’s marketers operate in a world where consumer-generated content and communication online is as critical a business driver as traditional advertising and marketing vehicles.
The Internet also provides an open, uncensored forum in which consumers and industry observers can provide both positive and negative feedback on branded products and services.
Marketers who choose to ignore this medium in their research efforts run a high risk of wasting marketing dollars on misdirected campaigns. And run the risk of failing to respond to trends in a timely fashion.
Social computing has quickly grown to become an intrinsic part of the marketing mix. As a result, marketing strategists are hard pressed to keep pace with the need to track, assess and respond to the proliferation of content generated through discussion forums, blogs, podcasts, social media, wikis, collaboration applications and other peer-to-peer (P2P) activities.
The new consumer is less trusting of traditional mass media and is far more inclined to turn to the Internet for guidance. Forrester notes that the percentage of people who say “companies generally tell the truth in ads” has dropped from 13% to 7% over the past two years, while trust in P2P information is on the rise.
It is evident that online content is rapidly becoming the de facto source of information for a generation of consumers who are inclined to conduct their own online research to find the personalized products and services they want.
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