Discovery in web marketing today
Discovery is a simple word that means a great deal to the context of today’s society. In a manner that has crept up on the public consciousness, Discovery of new things is immense as a concept that is highly relevant to today’s internet marketing.
Consider www.pandora.com, one of my favorite music discovery tools at the moment. In fact I stopped listening to Winamp after many years as a loyal fan.
Pandora enables me to discover new music that I might consider to be similar to my musical tastes today, but alters the context each time, tweaking who-knows-what, precise, parameters that let me find new music. It works wonderfully for my particular tastes.
This site lets me find things. Not through search, but through Discovery. It aggregates me into channels based on my desires.
Move on to think about tags and tagclouds. Aggregation into channels via Discovery. With the parameters, namely the data feeding the tagcloud, as a highly customizable input which tweaks the Discovery process to the needs of a content owner.
Aggregating users is of course, the point. Create a user path that lets consumers see a marketing message. Experience something, consume something. Discover something first, then be a consumer. Isn’t this the path of all traffic? Are not email, search, media, all different means for discovering things? so what makes the new tools more interesting?
Nothing.
They still allow consumers to discover new things. The point is that they are new in themselves. New ways to discover new things. Some of the new Discovery tools are parts of a site, others are a site in themselves, still more are entirely new, reaching even into our living rooms. What will you do as an internet based marketing ad sales person when you can reach consumers in their livings rooms? What about in their cars? Walking on the street, or sitting on a train listening to their internet connected Walkman?
When random Discovery is enabled in a navigable manner, the consumer prefers this method. When a channel is enabled, an opportunity exists.
If the consumer is given a new, fast, interactive, transparent, controllable interface to interact with the world at large, they like it. Happy people make good consumers and we all LOVE that.
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