Everyone on the Internet tends to congregate in certain spots. Financial people like reading blogs about making dough and investing other people’s money. Fly fishing enthusiasts hang out at fishing forums where they can lie to each other about the last “big one” that got away.

As the above illustration shows, there are plenty of places where a company’s “ideal” prospect might gather. It’s our job to find out where our prospects congregate and develop strategies to have visibility in those venues.

Let’s take a crack at chopping the Internet up into meeting points. There are forums and chat rooms, community download sites, social networking venues, web sites of course, and blogs. Our “ideal” prospects may subscribe to newsletters, read articles or targeted press releases. Don’t forget about their favorite search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Dogpile and the like. I am sure if we took a few more minutes we could separate the Internet into several more chunks; but this is a good starting point for our discussion.

Suppose we run a marketing firm. Our marketing offerings might include on-the-ground marketing tactics like direct mail or perhaps we specialize in Internet marketing solutions with mostly electronic touches.

How could we easily tell if our “ideal” prospects visit community sites such as Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us? Let’s do some searching.

If we go to Digg and search on the term “marketing” we find 345,439 results and more are coming in each day. “Internet Marketing” brings up only 41,252 posts. It’s easy to see that “marketing” is more popular than “Internet Marketing”; maybe? The analysis may be showing us that fewer people are submitting articles on “Internet Marketing”. This means there is room for us. We could start submitting articles and attract a following of readers. Just from perusing the menu on Digg we can see that they have posts about technology, world & business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports and offbeat items.

How does Sphinn compare?  Their web site tag line says “Internet Marketing News & Discussion Forums”. Bingo! This may be just the place to get in front of our “ideal” prospects. Searching for “marketing” articles brings up over 360 posts. “Internet Marketing” gets us more than 400 posts. We should develop a strategy to be seen in both these venues. These two watering holes are where “our people” gather.

To uncover whether or not our prospects read or contribute to certain forums all we need do is spend a little time reading the discussion threads. Are they talking about what relates to our business? Are there problems to be solved? Can discussions be added to begin to establish relationships?

Don’t just have the “what‘s in it for me” attitude? People with that attitude are usually asked by the moderator of the forum to leave.

Let me drive the point home that identifying one’s “ideal” prospect is the only way to wisely spend time and marketing dollars.

I did some marketing for a summer camp awhile back. They spent about $9,000 a season on advertising through local radio spots and Yellow Page ads. As the new summer got underway; I decided to ask each family or organization coming to the camp how they had found about, let’s say, Camp FunInTheSun. Their answers where evenly split. Half had found the camp web site on the Internet and the balance had either come to the camp as a teen, had sent their kids to the camp in the past or knew someone who had. No one had let their fingers do the walking or had heard the local radio spots – $9,000 down a dark rat hole. Needless to say, I recommended they stop those forms of advertising and launch a campaign to reach past guests and campers and strengthen their Internet presence.