Looking for a marketing type?

I am pleased to introduce Marketing Type, a (soon-to-be) blog about online marketing, and an extension of the communications efforts of my new marketing agency, Bug-Eyed Marketing, located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is also a long-postponed successor to my most recent blog, Tenebris, a publishing blog.

More than one person has responded to the announcement of my new venture with a polite pause, followed by a carefully phrased question: What is online marketing, exactly?

It is a perfectly reasonable question, but as with marketing in the broader sense online marketing is easier to convey with examples than with a formal definition. In terms of the services offered by Bug-Eyed Marketing, online marketing includes, but is not limited to, the following:

I. Search engine marketing (SEO), which is itself broken into at least three categories:

• paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC)
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• contextual advertising, which these days can take the familiar forms of banners and text ads, but also video.

II. Niche marketing, or identifying and interacting with online communities by taking advantage of social media like blogs, wikis, online forums, and (less glamorously) through email or events. If you compare effective online niche marketing with the old world of direct mail and expensive print and tv advertising, it seems astonishingly mundane. In fact, this kind of marketing consists mostly of talking with people--with honesty, conviction, and sensitivity-- about the things that interest them. But oddly enough a lot of companies still seem to find it hard to interact with their customers as people. For that reason, companies like Bug-Eyed Marketing can still offer useful advice.

III. Unconventional public relations (PR), or the art of creating buzz. One of the  much-abused cliches to describe this odd arena is viral marketing. A slightly less epidemiological description often used is word-of-mouth marketing. But the kind of PR I am talking about is really an extension of the values embodied in the two items above: In order to interest people, do something interesting. Novel, isn't it?

It took me a long time to figure out that I was a marketing type. As a young man, I traveled loaded with ready vitriol on the topic of marketing, which seemed to me to be synonymous with advertising. It is worth noting, in passing, that advertising was also my father's business. But I have a different angle on it now--partly because of the fantastic democratization being wrecked by the Internet, partly because I've redefined marketing in a way that suits my temperament, and partly of course because of changes in me as I've grown older.

My father died earlier this year. He was an entrepreneur for over three decades, having founded Fraser Advertising, Inc., in Atlanta, Georgia, when he was barely past the age of 30 with a family looming before him. He retired in 1995, when I was still a wild-haired malcontent living on the opposite coast. Fraser Advertising was a different kind of business than the one I am trying to launch now, but my greatest hope is to do as well by my family as did my father, and to earn anything like the trust from my clients that he earned from his. Wish me luck.