A marketing communications mainstay has been the concept of PEOS (or PESO), which makes the case that an effective marcomm program should include Paid, Earned, Owned and Shared media components. In fact, most marketing communications agencies and departments typically identify with one of these “home rooms,” with advertising comfortably ensconced in the PAID area, public relations in the EARNED space and digital agencies in the OWNED space. SHARED media was the one place where the agencies got together and collaborated.

But today, those silos are becoming less and less relevant. I've written about this before. Marketing recognizes the value and credibility of earned media. Public relations realizes you need to put some paid dollars behind your earned program to give it enough “runway” to take off. Digital agencies are doing virtually everything under the sun.

Shared media is a “table stake” – everything is shared now. By everyone.

So is it time to change our PESO moniker? Is it time to change how we look at marketing communications today? I make the case that PESO should become POKE. Now, I can hear you chuckling. Yeah, I wish it worked out another way. I wished the moniker didn’t bring back fond memories of Facebook’s first foray into user interaction. But hear me out…

With every step in marketing evolution, we get more precise not just with measurement but also targeting. We’ve moved from shotgun targeting to surgical. We’ve transitioned even from demographic targeting to psychographic targeting, targeting the person not just because of their age, gender, marital status or zip code to actually specifying interests, intentions to purchase and previous buying habits.

The holy grail of all of this is KNOWN marketing – the idea that we use insights from our previous interactions (or attempts) with an individual to further refine future contacts. And we understand what types of interactions work on what types of folks, and then try to find other people just like them. Check out how one way to do this with our Active Audiences product, which my colleague Liam Doyle talks about on the blog here, 

For us here at Salesforce, this is an exciting time. Within the Marketing Cloud, we want to ensure that our clients can share insights about a customer in social media with programs running in email. Or that the predictive intelligence insights gleaned from what product a customer clicks on a Web page can inform what is presented to her in a mobile app.

But it goes farther than that. As we continue to integrate our Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, the marketing data can inform us what products a customer owns or is interested in. A customer service person can understand their customer not just in a vacuum – but see their entire purchase history and previous service interactions. And a sales person can better understand what products a customer might be interested in and how their previous brand experience has been, even before they walk into a showroom.

And the customer benefits from less misdirected marketing (seriously, I am tired of seeing Chuck Woolery spin face cream and pain relief gizmos) and a better service experience that gives good customers the priority and preference they deserve.

It’s a great time to not just be in marketing, but also in customer service or sales. Knowledge is power, and actionable data is knowledge.

For more information about Social Advertising, check out our Advertising Benchmark.