Social Media in the Product Development Strategy by Jens Gutermann

Integrated communication has emerged as both the core element and one of the main challenges facing corporate communication over the last few years. Everything revolves around communication. As companies dicker over gaining customers’ favor, integrated communication appears to offer an escape from the bewildering multitude of options available for customeroriented and targeted communication with users. New forms of information and communication commonly known as social media or Web 2.0 have opened up evolutionary and revolutionary opportunities for positioning products and services on the market and getting in touch with consumers. However, this also poses a new and completely different type of challenge with regard to our communication, particularly when it comes to integrated communication. Companies are finding themselves in a problematic situation where comparison with competitors is just a mouse click away, and where only strong brand identities that are able to incorporate social media in their integrated communication strategy manage to withstand the information overload. If we consider the fundamental aim of integrated communication, namely to achieve the greatest possible degree of control, this contrasts paradoxically with the situation described. The information society was still a thing of the future in the 1980s, and when it became a reality in the 1990s, yet another future started to beckon. It took 5 years for that future to be realized, and no sooner has the world embraced the concept of a network of global markets than people are already talking about life beyond the information society. Until the early 1980s, marketing and advertising only had three communication channels for communicating with consumers and getting in touch with them: 1.) Print (as a purely visual medium) 2.)