After reading and debating in a thread at Net Marketing Forum about demographics and the ‘old school way’ of marketing to people, I thought for sure I wasn’t going to get into it anymore. You see, I will never convince people that the old school way of marketing to the masses is dying…Why? There is comfort in familiarity.

People hate change. They don’t and won’t embrace it until they have no other choice. Here’s what is changing and why I think the old school way of marketing is dying.

A few years ago, all you needed was a survey of about 100 people. Ask them questions like how old they are, how much money they spend on certain things, what their sex was, average household income…You know, stuff that made everyone an ‘average’.

Then along came Mr. Marketing and created products and services, geared towards ‘the average’.

People usually just embraced whatever the average was and you had empires built on catering to the ‘masses’ or ‘the average’.

Then along came this thing called the internet and in the past few years everything has changed. In Chris Anderson’s masterpiece ‘The Long Tail’, he explains that the real opportunities in life are the ones that the ‘masses’ aren’t looking at. It’s the smaller niches. The group of people that don’t like what everyone else does and that’s where I REALLY get excited about the future of marketing.

I’d rather cater my business to people who think like me. No marketing survey on earth will tell me this, the only way I can ‘cater’ to this group is to roll up my sleeves and interact with them. How do we do this in this day and age? Simple, Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, Sweeva, forums, blogs, and every aspect of the social media world we can use.

The power is found in the people during this time of social revolution and while companies will hide behind ‘marketing demographics’ for as long as they can, savvy marketers are seeing the change. They are embracing the need to be visible, to ENGAGE and interact with others. This is where the future is, it’s not in the numbers, it’s in the people.

I’m sure many people will debate this and tell me that old school marketing is not dying. And hey, like I said in the forum, whatever works for you, works for you. But I encourage interested people, roll up your sleeves and get to ‘know’ your fellow entrepreneurs. There is a lot that is about to happen in this social world…Key word here is…Social.

Big news this week…

We just completed the 5th major change in the history of Net Marketing Forum…

Thought I’d kind of recap the ‘history’ of NMF and what we are planning for the future.

The future first, we are really trying to get ‘social’ with the new vBulletin script. Everything from blog integration to facebook integration, we’re really trying to broaden the horizon of your networking opportunities in NMF.

This is a HUGE part of my business plans these days, being social, and since Tim Linden and I teamed up with Tim Tech LLC, NMF is going to become the hub of activity we hope for not only our programs but the entire traffic exchange industry…Included but not limited to safelists, list building topics, viral list builders, downline builders, tracking…etc….You name it, we talk about it!

Now as you know NMF has had ‘an interesting’ history. One thing I decided from day one in this forum is that discussion and debate are GOOD and very much welcomed here.

NMF has always been rough around the edges and while I don’t see the ‘bluntness’ of NMF changing anytime soon, the new culture here should be about networking, building relationships and the freedom for voicing your opinions.

This business is 99.9% about building networks and relationships and Net Marketing Forum has been a relationship builder since 2003. So welcome back…Let’s go have some fun and get ready for the forum to once again become the hub of activity in this business…

Version 5.0 is here!!