TheBoardRoomAdvosrs, LLC
TPacileo@TheBoardRoomAdvisors.com
eMarketing – Why Your IT Solution Is Incomplete Without It
From an overall perspective one traditionally looks at marketing products and services with a
focuses on the four P’s of marketing: product, pricing, promotion, and placement. Traditional
marketing plans identify the product or service features that satisfy the wants and needs of
consumers, as well as the right price, the method of promotion, and the merchandizing or
distribution of the product or service. As a result, many companies focus their marketing
energy and time around promotional activities including advertising, special events, publicity,
and brand awareness. However, in today’s world, marketing managers need to have Web
2.0 strategies and techniques as part of their integrated marketing plans as discusses in our
social networking white paper “Social Networking Needs to Be Part of Your Business
Strategy” and as shown in the following growth projections.
In this piece, our focus is not on the marketing aspects per se but more on the mechanics
and IT strategy, that affects ones overall business and IT environment. Web 2.0
technologies are a disruptive force that are rapidly changing the way that messages about
Date: July 29, 2009 1
Copyright © 2009, The BoardRoomAdvisors, LLC

TheBoardRoomAdvosrs, LLC
TPacileo@TheBoardRoomAdvisors.com
products and services are delivered and received. The rise of social media via Web 2.0 is a
dramatic change for marketing just as the printing press was for communications. As the
printing press technology changed how we communicated, so has social networking (Web
2.0) with its new set of tools and services.
In the previous Web 1.0 world, we viewed Internet marketing just like other marketing
channels, which were very highly controlled one-way messages. We designed a marketing
plan, targeted our audience, and choose the traditionally appropriate vehicles to get our
message out. This was usually comprised of print ads, radio and TV spots, banners,
posters, newsletters, and direct mail with the addition of Internet banner ads, text ads, and
online press kits. With Web 2.0, where we no longer control the message, we now need to
consider not only the new means of reaching our online audience, but also connecting via
the social media sites. Many organizations have started with Weblogs, others are dabbling
with wikis, podcasts, video casting, and still other are creating profiles in MySpace,
Facebook, and Twitter as examples.
The very nature of social media is profoundly different from the standard channels
previously mention. Web 2.0 channels are better seen as marketing “engines” that can
energize and add power to your message and spread it in a viral fashion. “Word-of-mouth”
marketing is amplified online where it’s easy to pass on a message to hundreds of contacts
and friends around the world in a fraction of a second. Its this change that is requiring
almost all organizations to incorporate eMarketing into their overall strategy as well as invest
in a new set of tools and technology in their IT environments.
These new tools need to be invested in to better manage and monitor the Web 2.0 solution
and the overall marketing strategy. Tools such as Eloqua, Omniture, Google Analytics,
WebTrends Inc., Arketo, Pardot, HubSpot, SilverPOP, and eTrigue to name a few have only
been in the marketplace a few years and are rapidly being integrated into most
organizations marketing solutions. However, the tools are just part of the solution, as they
need to integrated with the overall business and IT strategy. One of the key benefits of Web
2.0 is the immediate feedback received from the marketing efforts that in many cases is
achieved in real time. For example, if one were to send out a 5,000-piece email campaign,
within minutes of being sent out, results data is received back into the organization.
Information such as who opened the email, what did they read, how long did they stay on
the site, did they view the video, view other links, forward it on to other associates, request
more information, etc. If someone viewed your website these new tools can tell, in real time,
Date: July 29, 2009 2
Copyright © 2009, The BoardRoomAdvisors, LLC

TheBoardRoomAdvosrs, LLC
TPacileo@TheBoardRoomAdvisors.com
what they are looking at, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed on, if they
purchased a product or service, what they paid, if they left and came back, etc.
As a result of these new and wonderful tools we are now able to obtain the results of our
marketing campaigns, web site interactions, social networking communications, etc all in
real time to determine if our marketing efforts are working and if we are achieving the ROI
we predicted. Additionally as we are now collecting a tremendous amount of data that needs
to be managed and maintained we also need to have a reliable, scable and agile
infrastructure environment to support the new marketing solutions. Changes in IT would
require an integrated data warehouse solution, servers that can scale up and down based
on demand, adequate and robust communication links for video casting and high user
demand as well as reliable and robust failover solutions. If managed properly many of these
new initiatives can be self-funding due to their very cost effective approach in obtaining and
retaining customers.
In summation, today’s organizations need to:
• Change their marketing strategy to an eMarketing strategy which incorporate Web 2.0 solutions
• Invest in the tools and solutions for effectively managing and monitoring their eMarketing
solution
• Ensure their IT solution is reliable scable and agile to meet the new demands of eMarketing.
Date: July 29, 2009 3
Copyright © 2009, The BoardRoomAdvisors, LLC