Unfortunately, traditional media offers only a “start and stop” ability to stay in contact with customers and prospects. A television spot captures attention for 30 seconds, but can quickly be forgotten. A direct mail piece is opened, read and perhaps even saved, but just as readily finds its way into the trash bin. Today’s newspaper ad is tomorrow’s birdcage liner.

The process of building the relationship becomes a series of blips, forcing marketers to start over again and again. A costly and time consuming process that requires us to be intrusive and inefficient.

Internet marketing, however, offers the advantage of never disappearing or fading away. Because of the enormous breadth and depth of the world wide web, anything and everything you post on-line stays there forever. More important, all this information can be searched and found at any time.

This presents a fantastic opportunity for marketers. Instead of pitching the same story over and over again, we can build a more complete and compelling picture of the products and services we are trying to sell. The entire narrative is preserved and works to point new customers to you, 24/7/365.

This opportunity also comes with a burden. The information you put on-line must be sufficiently persuasive and helpful to stand up to scrutiny over a longer period. This applies to everything from web sites to blogs, Facebook pages to Tweets. The content becomes more critical than ever because it is always available to anybody with a web browser.

(So you might want to rethink the idea of putting the 20-something kid in the mailroom – the one with the piercings and tattoos – in charge of your social media effort. Just because somebody knows how to Tweet and use Facebook does not automatically make them qualified as an effective marketer.)

More attention than ever must be paid to the story you are telling. Your reputation does not ride on a single, soon-forgotten commercial or direct mail piece, but on the cumulative effects of all the information you post. You must be prepared to tell a better story, over a longer period of time, to take full advantage of the power inherent in the web.

GenNext Media Lab Guest Author

Bob Sheehan is the founder of Coastline Advertising and a Surefire Social Certified Coach. As an advertising executive with broad experience in advertising and marketing, Bob is focused on generating actual measurable results for clients in a wide array of businesses. Bob has become a leader in contractor coaching by catering to the needs and wants of our clients.