Competitive / Commercial Infrastructure
The presence of a core/technological infrastructure is not sufficient for a technology to diffuse; a commercial/competitive sort of infrastructure must also exist (cf., Frambach, 1993; Gatignon & Robertson, 1985; Robertson & Gatignon, 1986). Access to cyberspace resources and services relies in large part on the existence of a competitive/commercial infrastructure.
Core resources obviously have to be available, but competitors also must have some motivation
to attempt to compete for a limited pool of resources (e.g., domain names, the bid prices of payper-
click keywords) or to disrupt access to core resources (e.g., denial of service attacks on
servers; click fraud which depletes a budget intended for funding legitimate advertising
clickthroughs).
This competitive element creates demand and creates "scarce resources" that cause the
continued existence of communication channels. When Ron Gonzalas began running for mayor
of San Jose, CA, he found that the domain name Gonzalas2002.com had already been registered
to someone who had similarly registered future dates with the names of mayoral candidates in
other large US cities as well as the names of US senators. Someone else registered San
Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s name on multiple domains as a way to drive traffic to content
that was unfavorable to the mayor (Learmonth, 1999). Part of the value of a domain name
bearing the name of a person or organization is that it is either an easy first guess or is easy to
remember for people who want to find that entity; domain names have become a limited resource
that is valuable for communications associated with a particular person or organization.
Given what has been learned about anticipated uses for scarce resources in the domain
name squatting examples above, the current rapid diffusion of social networking websites such
as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn should have marketers building a presence on these places
before a competitor (which could be any detractor) consumes them. If a political figure fails to
maintain a profile on MySpace, for example, then someone else will squat that space as a spoof
of the political figure, holding control over what information or mis-information is posted. Even
still, a person or organization risks being spoofed on additional profiles posted by others and
risks being mocked or mis-quoted on others' profiles (cf., Keen, 2006).
Political / Regulatory Infrastructure
Without some sort of universal regulation, vulnerabilities to attack on individuals and
organizations will exist: the lack of regulation could cause adoption by "legitimate" users to be
sluggish while encouraging negative forces to pioneer new uses. A US teen committed suicide
in 2006 after allegedly receiving messages from a MySpace user she thought was a 16-year-old
boy. The fake profile and messages were apparently created, however, by a former friend's
mother. The problem in this case is that there is a lack of legislation that deals with the creation
of fake profiles and with the damage that this can cause; prosecutors had difficulty in finding an
existing statute that could be used to pursue a criminal case (Glover and Huffstutter, 2008). An
engineer in Morocco was sentenced to three years in jail after creating a fake profile of the king's
brother on Facebook. Activists are using the case to highlight their beliefs of "deteriorating
freedom of expression" in Morocco; no matter the actions of the person in this case, additional
fake profiles of the prince have since been set up from overseas where the Moroccan courts have
no jurisdiction (MacFarquhar, 2008).
Globally, we are still at a pioneering stage with regard to such issues. A
political/regulatory infrastructure is necessary to provide control over the usage of scarce
resources and to ensure the maintenance of a fair playing field for all competitors on the other
infrastructures. The core/technological infrastructures of the Internet and of the World Wide
Web are still relatively young, so industry self-regulation and government regulation is still
lacking. Additionally, the Internet easily crosses country boundaries, so regulation on a
worldwide level provides new challenges; regulation on a worldwide level, however, would seem to be implementable (cf., Grove et al., 2000).
Social Infrastructure
None of the above infrastructures matter unless people use the product, concept, or idea. The Internet was limited to government and educational institutions until the above infrastructures enabled household users to start using it, but it still saw limited use until commercial businesses and household consumers started to use it. From a marketer’s perspective, the Internet and the World Wide Web were not especially useful until consumers started using the WWW as a means of communication. Initial promotional communication was through exposure via traditional advertising – seeing a company website, seeing brand names and product information via banner advertising, and such.
The WWW has enabled many new forms of communication through social networking in recent years. This has enabled marketers to make practical use of “viral marketing,” “buzz marketing,” “guerilla marketing,” and other forms of "word of mouth" marketing that rely on social networking. The concept of viral marketing was apparently added as a term of art to the vocabulary of marketers by former Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey Rayport in a 1996 article. According to Rayport (2007), the general idea of viral marketing is to "let the behaviors of the target community carry the message."
Marketers have long used "word of mouth" (WOM) promotion campaigns. The idea is to get people to pass information about a product to other people. For example, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications is said to have taken WOM to the extreme of "guerilla marketing" by paying actors to be "fake tourists" who ask unsuspecting people passing by to take a picture with a newly launched camera phone and to engage these folks in a conversation (Commercial Alert, 2005). Similarly, Sony promoted its Play Station Portable via what appeared to be graffiti, paying building owners to use space for the campaign, while Nokia used sidewalk chalk drawings to promote a cell phone targeted to gamers (Musgrove, 2005). The idea in these kinds of WOM campaigns is to reach segments of consumers who distrust paid advertising by creating the illusion that the message comes from someone who is like the message recipient.
By the time Professor Rayport discussed the concept of viral marketing in 1996, the Web had by now made it possible to use WOM in a way that could penetrate a nation or the entire world in hours rather than years. The "fake tourist" example was as slow as a personal selling campaign, whereby a single "fake tourist" could socially interact with only one person or small group of people at a time. The graffiti campaign, while affecting larger groups at a time, was restricted geographically to people who passed by particular buildings in a way that is no different from purchasing billboard space. Diffusing a promotion through these communication channels could take years to reach a nation; the same techniques might take only days or even hours to reach the same number of people through newer online channels.
Concluding Remarks
Integrated Marketing Communications is an idea that would appear to be useful to marketers, but we haven’t yet figured out just what all it should encompass and just what is the process that leads to IMC. This is now further complicated by the recent moves away from static promotions that are directed from an organization toward a group toward tactics that rely on a message being communicated among members of a target audience in an online social network. This article has proposed that as this is being sorted out, focus needs to be on more than just any particular online social network and on more than just particular evolving social media or online tactics.
Although new social media have become available in recent years, the continuance of these media in current forms and the diffusion of these into common use by an entire society is not guaranteed. In many instances of applications that have been evolving, we are still at abpioneering stage such that there are many negative or ethically-questionable uses being made. The present article has proposed that the evolution of social media and communication channels for marketing uses depends on a set of underlying infrastructures: a core/technological infrastructure, a competitive/commercial infrastructure, a political/regulatory infrastructure, and a social infrastructure. These act to enable or inhibit the diffusion of any new social media or marketing tactics. In order for a marketer to understand how these media or tactics might change, evolve, or become useful, concern for changes in these infrastructures is more important than simply looking at the media or tactics themselves.
