Marketing is changing.  If you have missed the boat on this you might want to catch up.  Traditional marketing is a sinking ship and all that cash is bailing out to more fertile pastures of the online world.  So what is the key to interactive marketing?  I think a lot of people would say its PPC and I think they would be wrong.

Don’t get me wrong.  PPC is the cheapest form of online advertising you can get.  Cost per acquisition is minuscule. This makes it an important interactive tool, but the one you might be missing out on is social media.

Social media is a big change in the way we think about marketing.  Social media is about finding, and more importantly building, clusters of highly qualified potential customers.  Once you have a customer cluster you can drive home your marketing message in a personal way.

I have two great examples of this recently using Twitter.  The first example illustrates a way to build a customer cluster, the second illustrates how to push a customer cluster to your product.

A few days ago, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, announced on twitter that as soon as he reached 20,000 Twitter followers he would give away a free MacBook Air.  Watching his numbers grow is like watching a gas gauge in a SUV go down.   For the price of a MacBook Air he is going to have a customer cluster of 20,000 that he can now continually push to Mahalo.  Cost per acquisition is around 9 cents a person.

Today I read about (via a Scoble Tweet) a site named Wine Library TV.  This is a video site about, you guessed it, wine.  But the interesting thing they are doing with Twitter is offering Twitter exclusive deals.  Anyone following Santa GaryVee in Twitter will get the chance to receive free shipping, discount codes, and other deals on wine and wine related products.  Thus building his customer cluster and driving highly qualified traffic to his products.