Swarm Marketing - By Lezah

People are hiving, marketers are swarming, and anything hot these days is called a buzz.  The bee analogy abounds!

But swarm marketing is what I wanted to talk about.  I heard about this the other day and found it quite fascinating, being that I have some kind of a freakish interest in business.

Anyway, it turns out that in the past there were two tried and true methods of mass marketing:  the old way, referred to as 'one to many', which involved one product/presentation being offered to the widest audience possible, and the newer way that was brought about by the Internet called 'one to one', where ads were targeted at specific viewers.  The success of this style of ad campaign was limited due to the vagaries of sites which would go off-line, the limited number of viewers that would ultimately see them, and no controls or means of telling who ultimately received the message.

The latest type of advertising is called swarm marketing which develops in a similar way to a flashmob.  Advertisers look for sites that are getting huge traffic (www.jibjab.com, for instance) and then place ads there; as site visits drop off, the ads are moved on to the next site that people are swarming to.

So, keep your eyes peeled for some of those sites, and watch for the swarm...