On-line Media: Which tools are right for you

There is an important difference between, “The next big thing,” and a today’s fad. Adding headlights to cars – that was the next big thing. Running boards, however, were the fad.

The same is true in on line advertising. Tools of reaching people through e-mail, banner advertising, or paid search have all proven to be effective means for reaching potential customers. However, new elements like MySpace, Digg or YouTube, in terms of their marketing and advertising potential, they have not proven to be effective means of reaching quality customers. Whether they are fads or not remains to be seen.

Still - how do you tell which of these new platforms are worth pursuing? For how long should you try?

Mighty Interactive, Off Madison Ave’s on-line division, regularly deals with these emerging technologies. As a result of this collaboration between traditional and on-line marketing, we are able to offer our clients holistic solutions that cover more ground.

For example, while we regularly write press releases for our clients, we can also create a draft optimized for on-line, and release it electronically. This will spread your message to all of the people who get their news from the Internet, and improve your natural search engine listings.

At the same time, there are other more exotic vehicles for messaging which are far less effective. Second Life is a very interesting development in the on-line experience, but hasn't shown itself to be a great source of buying customers. While you may get bragging rights for being the first company on your block to have a Second Life store, it is questionable whether you’ll make back the money you spend doing it.

Rather than exhausting yourself with every new on-line technology, or writing off all new technologies as wastes of time, one should strike a balance between the two. For each business there is an approach that best suits it.

If you have a lot to say on your site, don’t bother creating YouTube videos and instead start a blog, or a podcast. If you are trying to sell individual products, blogs and podcasts may be less effective than opening an Ebay store, or creating a MySpace profile of your company.

The idea is not to find the, “latest thing” everyone is talking about. It is to find the right thing for your business, so you are the one being talked about.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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