The New Age Marketing on the Net ( are you in yet)

Cheaper low cost marketing tools, wider reach as well as a direct connection with the consumers Internet and web2.0  are enabling all this for marketeers and if you are not using this you are missing out on a lot.

Want to do cheap market research why not try posting questions on Questions and Answers websites like Yahoo Answers (It has been used to ask by companies  from its users as to what characteristics they would like in a new car and so on), Rediff QnA  or use polls to measure opinions about your products as provided by Vizu answers (which s paid) and get those polls hosted across thousands of blogs across blogosphere thereby giving you a wider audience then what your websites would have given you.

Then comes using Social networks to engage user as well as  build up interaction with users to find out directly which products are more popular a wonderful example is use of MTV India of Orkut because an own website is not likely to have as many users as a social networks and if they are present there why not build an official community and engage the users present there and ask them about their interests and if number of communities in Orkut and the members in them are any indication then there is lot of scope. Facebook allowed brands to use it to popularize them and it has in turned helped even Facebook. The possibilities are tremendous all it needs is someone willing to use them.