Digital Marketing and PR

     In the past decade the digital world has become a growing platform for uses of any kind, marketing along with advertisement are a couple of those uses. The articles How Internet Marketing Will Affect Various Industries in 2015 by John Rampton, Viral Marketing for the Real World by Duncan Watts, and 5 Key Viral Marketing Tactics Proven to Work by Matthew Yeoman all bring up excellent perspectives about marketing in its digital existence. Each author brings up valid points of what digital marketing is composed of and how to do it successfully. The common theme from all the readings is that when it comes to marketing on a digital platform, the rules are completely different than those of traditional, old fashioned marketing. The biggest shift in digital marketing is the variable of the “opinion leader”, their role, as well as their influence over the public.

     One of the most undervalued marketing tactics is the value of a person’s opinion on a product/service when discussing it to their peers. This is where the concept of opinion leaders are born; an individual whose thoughts and opinions are held in high praise by those who surround them. The digital world allows for opinion leaders of all kinds to voice their thoughts, making it easily accessible and heard by their perspective public in an instant. In his article Viral Marketing Tactics Proven to Work, Mr. Watts introduces the term “big seed marketing” which is made possible because of the presence of opinion leaders. Big seed marketing is an effective viral marketing technique because people are the ones spreading the word about a particular product, without their contribution of opinion exchange to others it would not work. Arguably, your peers can sell you a product better than a salesman without the intention of doing so, just through basic conversation.

     Mobile phones along with social media are the thriving outlets that everyone uses for conversation in today’s society. John Rampton in his article How Internet Marketing Will Affect Various Industries in 2015 states how cell phones and social media are shifts in marketing realm themselves. This allows for communication between all parties to happen almost in an instant; the presence of social media allows marketers to engage the public to their product in a non-traditional sense. It also a platform that gives everyone a voice, and when that oppurtunity is present, most take advantage of it. Through the use of these, it is effortlessly easy for almost anyone to become an opinion leader when regarding an issue or product. As digital marketing grows, we see the focus become more about individuals selling a product to each other, rather than the company selling it to the masses as a whole.