Integrated Marketing Communications is an idea that would appear to be useful to marketers, but we haven’t yet figured out just what all it should encompass and just what is the process that leads to IMC. This is now further complicated by the recent moves away from static promotions that are directed from an organization toward a group toward tactics that rely on a message being communicated among members of a target audience in an online social network. This article has proposed that as this is being sorted out, focus needs to be on more than just any particular online social network and on more than just particular evolving social media or online tactics.
Although new social media have become available in recent years, the continuance of these media in current forms and the diffusion of these into common use by an entire society is not guaranteed. In many instances of applications that have been evolving, we are still at a pioneering stage such that there are many negative or ethically questionable uses being made. The present article has proposed that the evolution of social media and communication channels for marketing uses depends on a set of underlying infrastructures: a core/technological infrastructure, a competitive/commercial infrastructure, a political/regulatory infrastructure, and a social infrastructure. These act to enable or inhibit the diffusion of any new social media or marketing tactics. In order for a marketer to understand how these media or tactics might change, evolve, or become useful, concern for changes in these infrastructures is more important than simply looking at the media or tactics themselves.