Some Thoughts of Business on Internet
In today’s e-Commerce era, our marketing prospects on the Internet are different from the norm. As Byron Abels-Smit of Aspen Media said, “The Internet is not just a new medium, but a new kind of medium. It’s like when television was new, at first advertisers treated it like print or radio. Early TV commercials were just type and a voiceover. That only changed as people learned how to effectively use television for marketing. Newspaper rules didn’t apply for TV. In the same way, print media and TV rules don’t apply to the Internet.” That is why we should gather a deep understanding of Internet this new kind of media as soon as possible.
Usually when a business uses both traditional advertisements and salesmen, these two complement each other in the process of selling: the mass media advertisements can help the company reach a large pool of customers, while the salesmen offer customer information and process sales transactions. Therefore, most businesses need a blend of mass media and salesmen to have a complete marketing capability. However, this is not the whole story of Internet-based marketing. In other words, the power of Internet is larger than the combination of mass media and salesmen. It can reach a large pool of customers, provide information and process the sales transaction by itself. For these reasons, I think that the Internet is more a market than a communications medium. It is a market and a medium both.
Internet marketing is about communication and interaction, the foundations of emotional intimacy, If we understood the Internet, we could use it to build a stronger emotional bond between customers and us. In traditional marketing media, prospects don’t take our communications as personally as they do on the Internet. This intense involvement can lead to intense responses. This can be good, but the emotionality is also what leads to flames and anger as well. Internet customers can be more volatile than the normal customers since the transactions are tightly relied on the trust. That is why it is especially important for all marketing people to learn about “Online Netiquette”.
For more information of Online Netiquette, there is one article on UBC ssc for us to read.
http://ctlt.ubc.ca/distance-learning/learner-support/communicating-online-netiquette/
