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Online marketing of non-internet based companies majorly has till now been confined to Websites, Email newsletters,the intrusive banners and popups and in rare cases participation in social sites like Twitter and blogs. With user generated content ruling the roost at this point of time, the sum total of all the contents a company is generating online will be negligible when compared to the contents users generate all over. Hence having standalone websites, blogs, Twitter presence, even forums are going to be limited in terms of both content and usability. Why would a consumer ever want to visit multiple sites to know about what a company is doing? It's a sheer waste of his time. If this is difficult for a consumer, consider keeping track of content users (other than the company) generate all over the web. It's practically impossible.

Mashups offer an elegant solution for this problem. If Cadbury wants to promote Bournville over the web, putting product description on their website, creating a Bournville forum, creating a Twitter stream are all going to help but to what level? To tap the full potential of all these online footprints the company and consumers leave all over the web, Cadbury would be better off creating a single RSS feed that pulls in data from multiple sources (can also be dynamic) and giving it to the user. One person might have written a blog post about why he deserved and how he earned the chocolate and some other guy might have taken some beautiful pictures of it and uploaded in Flickr. All these data could be pulled into one data feed to which people can subscribe. If Nikon wants to promote its range of DSLR cameras, it could create an RSS feed for top rated Flickr photos taken using Nikon equipment and promote it. Check out Pipes on how to do this. And obviously name the URL of the RSS feed elegantly to reflect the brand image. Try to promote this feed in addition to or better instead of promoting the website. Mashups are like the icing on the cake of online marketing. Measuring the impact of the initiative can also be done easily through Feedburner to begin with.

Further if this is done and managed well, your feed is going to sit right on the reader of your consumer. What more can you do to increase the mindshare of your product over the web? Giving the feed to the consumers is one thing and the consumers subscribing to your feed is some other thing. How can you make consumers subscribe to it? That is a different topic altogether. It's the same as why Harley Davidson owners join HOG and why thousands of CAT aspirants flock Pagalguy.