Traditional online advertising models are great as a first step. And it will help to establish some aspects of name and brand recognition. But it has the disadvantage of adhering more to the older style of internet usage. In short, it lacks the two way interaction which is often seen as a necessity these days. This is especially true given how inured many people have become with traditional advertising. People who grew up using the internet will often have an unconscious filter in their mind which allows them to quickly move past advertising without letting it really sink in.
This is one of the reasons why so many advertisers are moving to pushing sponsored content into movies and TV shows rather than using traditional commercials. It’s always important to move past people’s blind spots and into areas where the public has a more active investment. With passive media that means putting a brand into the viewable content that they’re paying close attention to. But with online reputation management, that means allowing a brand to actually interact with the public as a whole.
The modern public is tired of being talked to. They want to instead take part in a larger discussion where they can feel that their voice has some meaning. They don’t want to simply be an audience. They want the chance to be a participant rather than just a spectator. And in many ways it can even go beyond that and into actual expectation. This can create an environment where advertising even has the chance to alienate people if mishandled.
Of course all of this theory won’t do people very much good if it can’t be turned into concrete action. So to begin, one needs to remember the central concept of the post-google internet. And that’s the fact that the web is now a fully interactive medium. The additional element there is that some people will even be turned away if they expect interaction and don’t receive it.
Now, interactivity can be a very complex idea depending on which side of it someone is. For the average user, it’s quite simple. They want to use the service they like to interact with their interests. What the service and interest might be will change by person and time. Someone might decide to jump onto what they perceive as the next big thing in social networking at a moment’s notice. As one might expect, this makes the opposite end of things rather complex. It means that one needs to cover as many bases as possible while presenting a similar and unified image among all of them.