Only on the Internet can marketing disciplines invented just a few years ago be dismissed without irony as "so last millennium." The ins and outs of attracting and keeping customers' attention online have just begun to take shape, no matter which tactic you previously thought defined the pinnacle of online outreach. "I get a kick out of people who describe the Internet as having sorted itself out, because it's just really starting to happen now," says Jere Doyle, president and CEO of online marketing provider Prospectiv.

As many of the methods that drove the first decade of Internet marketing begin to pass their prime, new options are challenging marketers to think differently—at Internet speed. But instead of rushing to adopt them, take time to get your next-generation Internet marketing strategy under control now.

Making sense of channels
Almost from the moment the first legitimate email marketing campaign was sent and the first banner ad posted, marketers and strategists have lamented the creation of a new and often disparate channel of measurement and analysis. The self-service, always-on, and often anonymous nature of the Internet can make cause-and-effect tracking difficult. Even as online campaign tracking has improved, the enterprise view of marketing success has been hazy. "The challenge is that analytics get siloed in the applications that support different types of initiatives," says Kim Collins, research vice president at Gartner.

Too many enterprises use disparate analytical programs and approaches for different campaigns and different channels with little or no way to integrate those activities into the greater marketing organization. "The real problem, the real bottleneck, has been attribution," Collins says. "Customers may never agree to buy via email—they may drive to a store, use the contact center or the Web site, but it may never be clear that the email is driving the sale."

Reconciling customer success across various touchpoints requires deliberately building both marketing tools and analytical applications around the same, unified goals. That means counting a customer win as a win no matter where or how the transaction is completed, and using every available tool—including surveys, Internet logging, and point-of-sale communication—to identify who your customers are through every channel.

Enterprise software developer QAD has implemented Aprimo's marketing tools in part to help it manage and better measure the results of its cross-channel campaigns. Doing so for its global user conference, for example, has kept response rates from its 5,000 installed customer sites high. "For our global user conference we are using a multitouch program, and have coordinated not only our online campaigns, but also email, tracking the customers who have responded in each channel and following up with key messages," says Kim Beaudin, global database marketing specialist at QAD. "It's been very successful for us so far." Previous efforts to emphasize online marketing at the expense of virtually all offline communication did not achieve positive results. QAD's new blended approach maintains a high frequency of touches, and provides enough content to keep customers engaged.

Searching for context
Many marketers put a great deal of thought into how search terms affect results on search sites, as well as how context and behavior can affect an offsite banner ad. But that's no longer enough. Today marketers must also consider behavioral and contextual traits when building their corporate Web site experiences. Unifying behavioral, contextual, and search information, a customer arriving at a Web site through a search engine can be shown content most relevant to her situation—not relying on the search engine to send the customer to a specific product site, but using the search term itself, passed in the clickstream, as a hint to the customer's interest. In essence, the search term becomes just one of the many factors behind personalization.

"Now, instead of just delivering a generic message, the home page will show something relevant to me, such as a user who searched Google for 'broadband' seeing my most relevant material on that subject," says Philippe Suchet, CEO of marketing personalization specialist Kefta. Unlike simply taking a customer to a product-centric page, these customized landing pages provide a complete company message, but one that is slanted in favor of the topic most relevant to the arriving customer.

Sonic Solutions, for example, uses online customer behavior to provide a more contextual Web experience for its Roxio software division. "My job is to take the massive amount of users who come to my Web site every day and provide the most customer-centric experience…. To that end we have tried various [approaches], from viral marketing to path optimization to trigger-based emails to cart reactivations," says Michael Roehricht, Sonic's director of eBusiness, which uses Kefta to support its e-marketing efforts.

Roxio has enhanced its targeting with email campaigns that take customers to Web site landing pages specifically tailored to the product Kefta's algorithms help identify as most relevant. The algorithms look at products of interest, shopping cart behavior (including time spent with items in the cart), and known purchase history. The process has improved email conversions by 15 percent, Roehricht says.

The company also uses customers' own behaviors to improve their experience. An "interstitial" (a pop-up box) offers a small discount for users who have idled with an item in the cart for a predetermined amount of time and appear to be in danger of dropping. "The take there is amazing," he says, "and we learned that it increased conversion rates substantially among people who otherwise either dropped off or would be less likely to convert."

Microtargeting and macroinfluence
The Internet has made it possible to reach out to an almost limitless market, at any time, and usually for little cost. Yet sometimes, reaching out to one very important customer becomes more important, more effective, and more manageable than trying to reach 1,000 average prospects. "We feel that for every business objective there is a unique set of influencers," says Bradley Silver, CEO of online marketing firm Brandimensions. "Not every product can be sold to every consumer out there, but you can always target the influencers."

Basic marketing theory says that all customers are influencers to some degree. Online, where product discussions take place every day in thousands of forums, blogs, and chat rooms, some customers have greater credibility and affect prevailing opinion more than others. These are not necessarily the loudest, wealthiest, or longest-tenured customers, and choosing the right influencers to approach is part art and part science. Various marketing consultancies, for example, claim to have mathematical models that score the relative importance of major contributors to various online communities. One could also look at how many posts a visitor makes, how many topics he starts, how many products he owns, or other data that is most relevant to how his company would like to connect with these enthusiasts.

Once identified, the influencer strategy depends on the product or service being promoted, but typical activities include arranging exclusive news reports, sending product samples or arranging previews, and creating unique brand-related experiences that the influencer will then report on to peers. Engaging influencers ties closely with conventional concepts of market segmentation. But it's too simplistic to think of the influencer-targeting process as simply identifying the most important customer in each segment. Influencers may not even be customers—think of all of the independent financial analysts who make clear that they do not own any of the stocks endorsed in their articles. Influencers are people whose opinions may cause important customers to stay loyal, and even spend additional dollars.

"An SUV can be used as an off-road vehicle, or it can be purchased by the active corporate individual who likes the idea of an SUV but may never go off-roading," Silver says, adding that each type of customer will respond to a very different influencer. "[The challenge] is to find the diverse communities, find the influencers, and…communicate to the influencers so they go out [and promote] on behalf of the organization."

Organizations can also draw on influencers to improve or expand on their offerings without doing any more than opening the doors. Countless newspapers have created discussion blogs and forums, allowing readers to play the role of analyst and expert, filling in the gaps for thought-provoking topics where paid columnists do not have the time to tread.

The skinny on blogging
Customers will discuss you online, whether you like it or not. If you are thinking of starting your own blog or discussion forum, consider carefully the impacts of discussions getting out of hand on your site. "Blogs are a great mechanism for getting information back from the customer, but it goes back to the old [parable] about somebody who has a bad experience and is going to tell everyone they meet—and everyone they meet can become anybody who wants to visit that company's blog," Gartner's Collins says.

In fact, so far, corporate blogging experiments have resulted in more don'ts than do's. When GM's open marketing experiment encouraging people to create their own Chevy Tahoe ads resulted in some harshly critical ads, for example, its Fastlane blog was a logical place to respond. But even after more than a year of blogging experience, GM made what some consider a mistake, using marketing-speak as part of its damage control.

"The general manager of the Chevrolet division made an interesting [blog] post trying to answer some of the criticism and controversy, but he started off with a marketing tagline, and as soon as he did that, everyone knew he was going to sprout a corporate line about how everything is fine—and that's pretty much what he did," says Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer for media measurement provider Cymfony. "If he had just edited that sentence out it would have been a much stronger post."

The blog is not a substitute or clone for the obligatory press conference or news release. To be effective and relevant, they have to represent a new conversation between company and customer. The concept of the "fireside chat" is a good place to begin. Blogs work best when they demonstrate candor that is not easily refuted.

Although blogs were initially Web creations, some prefer to get their blog content through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) readers, which act as desktop Web content spiders, bringing headlines and posts to users in real time based on preferences and subscriptions. To a large extent RSS combines the best elements of tracking offered by email and Web sites. "With RSS, we know about opens, clicks, conversions—it's just like email, but [the customer] is in charge of when he receives those messages," says Ken Lajoie, chief technology officer at e-Dialog.

The downside to RSS is that most computer users don't take advantage of it because they must download additional software to start subscribing to RSS feeds. However, just as integrated Windows software has made Web use and streaming video nearly universal on the desktop, RSS hopefuls see change coming courtesy of Microsoft on that front as well. "Microsoft put RSS in the new Internet Explorer, so there's a shift coming with that release as more people will have it by default on their desktop," Lajoie says.

RSS transmissions fit well into the marketing mix for companies whose clients are early adopters. Because RSS only transmits headlines and not the complete message, it is possible to use RSS to publish more items than would be wise to do over email—if a customer is not interested, she can simply choose not to click on the headline, therefore never downloading the content. RSS works well for daily updates in a product development cycle or for "breaking news" for high-value customers who should be the first to know about new developments.

Tuning in to podcasts
Some have theorized that podcasts are an excellent way for top management to directly engage with customers, by giving a CEO or CMO a low-cost channel to create a personal message for a number of customer constituencies and distribute it with little effort. Resist the temptation to block off time to get the chairman of the board in front of a microphone, however. Outside of consumer niches such as outdoor wear and beer, top executives have done little to establish their face and name as a conduit to the customer. Direct appeals to the customer are often associated with the issuance of a mea culpa or performing acts of contrition—remember Ford CEO Jacques Nasser, ashen-faced in front of the camera, apologizing for the messy tire recall episode of 2000–2001 shortly before being forced out of his job? Top executives at the mic have more an air of the golden parachute than the golden throat about them.

So who should have the mic? For B2B, the prevailing wisdom is that podcasts should include all the best material that might be in a conference call or sales meeting—useful information targeting clients or sales reps, for example, but available at any time rather than, say, at 8 a.m. on a Monday. For B2C it's a lot more guesswork. "Do something engaging that reflects your brand image" is the amalgamated (and fairly empty) advice thus far.

In either case a podcast can be as simple as a radio spot repackaged, but the more interesting podcasts have an informational or entertainment value that goes beyond broadcast material. Electronics surplus retailer Woot uses a daily two-minute podcast, consisting of a brief product blurb and a musical skit to promote its daily clearance item. The focus on entertainment has grown so far that Woot no longer even mentions the product's price or features in the podcast, rushing instead to the ditties which sound like nothing so much as drive-time radio comedy—warbly, hastily assembled, cheesy, and yet still fun for the audience.

Other podcasting advocates echo the comparisons to drive-time radio. "There are millions of Americans driving by themselves to work at least 20 minutes each way. You could push content relevant and pertinent to them at that time, and that's amazing," says Paul Colligan, CEO of podcasting strategy site Colligan.com. A growing array of portable music devices link directly with car stereo systems, and podcast promoters are trying desperately to encourage a daily podcast load as part of every professional's morning ritual, right up there with coffee and commuting.

That is where the similarities to radio end, however. "Podcasts don't work well as broadcasts, they work well as narrowcasts," says George Colombo, coauthor of The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Podcasting. "You want to have a specific, identifiable audience, and put forward someone who can connect with and be credible with that audience—somebody who speaks their language and has an intuitive understanding of that audience."

Podcasts have a number of important advantages over traditional broadcast formats. The audience has opted in specifically to hear your podcast message—unlike a broadcast audience, which only tolerates advertising because it supports the main program being offered. The digital syndication and distribution methods available for podcasts (like blog posts, podcasts can be distributed via RSS, and clearinghouses such as iTunes carry them as well) allow users to call up the message at any time. Because a podcast does not have to be consumed at the same time it is created, there is less pressure to publish podcasts on a set, inflexible schedule. "You are not obligated to do it more frequently than when you have something to say," Colombo says.

Where to turn?
The next wave of Internet marketing techniques brings with it important questions that have no clear answer today. For example, although companies such as Intelliseek and Brandimensions claim to understand the ebb and flow of customer opinion on the Web, there are few verifiable best practices to govern how tightly or loosely an online community should be monitored and moderated for maximum benefit.

Whatever online marketing tools you choose, expect to work at higher speeds than ever before. Many next-generation techniques reward immediacy—but that can be difficult to achieve in large companies with regulatory and organizational hurdles to clear. "A company that commits to getting out a [podcast] every Monday based on something that happened last week may hear lawyers say 'it takes two weeks to review that message,'" Colligan says. "This media doesn't allow that [delay], so what are we going to do differently?"

Companies that plan to use RSS, blogs, and podcasts as a more real-time way to reach customers, whether in the aggregate or in tightly focused messages, will need to redefine nimbleness on a corporatewide level if they want to move beyond traditional approval and turnaround times.

Finally, be prepared to deal with customers who are increasingly reliant on the Internet. "There is a generation out there putting spam-blockers on email, and using TiVo, do-not-call lists, and caller ID. People are blocking out a lot of channels, yet they're becoming engrossed in others, and over time marketers are going to have to shift to create new ways to reach customers who have filtered them out of other, traditional channels," Collins says. "The Internet is where most customers choose to engage with you."