Web 2.0 – Here to stay or gone tomorrow?

All of us involved within the interactive community have heard at least some of the new technology that is available these days, and as an interactive marketer it makes my head spin trying to get my arms around all of this.

Interactive marketing used to be simple: display ads, text ads, affiliate marketing, SEO, SEM, and email used to be king. Within the last year and a half, there has been an explosion in new channels of communication. We now have RSS feeds, consumer generated media, video ads due to the expansion of broad brand connections, mash-ups, community networks, desktop applications, gadgets and widgets, universal search, mobile marketing, and clever viral marketing tactics, just to name a few. When did things get some complicated!?

In speaking with many interactive marketers such as myself, we are still stuck in Web 1.0 trying to get the basics right. This is a prime example of how business strategies and objectives cannot keep up with technology trends, which seems to be exponentially expanding itself every 6 months or so.

As a marketing program manager, I’m responsible for maximizing my allocated budget to revenue returns. I once heard from a colleague of mine, the best thing about the web is that we can track everything, and the worst thing about the web is that we can track everything.

At the time I thought it was clever, but in today’s world I believe it is true. It seems that social marketing, if used effectively by marketers, could become the new brand awareness campaign that can be very difficult to measure. Yet, even though we can’t measure it directly think of the pull it can have on consumers. To put this into context, let’s take a quick look at a few examples.

Consumer generated content: Blogs and video are everywhere. Everyone has something to say and the Internet provides the vehicle to convey that message world wide. Go to a site like www.digg.com and you can search through thousands of consumer generated content. Hmmm . . . anyone checked their brand on this lately to see what consumers are saying?

Virtual Worlds: Virtual worlds such as www.secondlife.com offer its residents the opportunity to create a new self and live in a world created by those virtual residents. I don’t know about you but I can barely keep my own life straight with family, friends, career without having to worry about creating a clone of myself. To top it off, people actually pay money into their second life, what the #*@& is this about?

Team buying sites: Sites like www.storemob.com offer a forum for like minded consumers to team up and demand bulk pricing from retailers and/or wholesalers. These retailers and wholesalers will typically discount more if they are able to sell more.

Mobile: Take for example, www.askmenow.com. This phone service allows users to text a question and within minutes receive an answer back. I know, I know, mobile might not be classified with the “Internet” but one can argue that the mobile market is an upcoming channel and this service does research content sources across the web to get you your answer. What content sources are used? If we knew that, imagine the reach you could have.

Numerous consumer research reports confirm that consumers are relying less on marketing messages and are putting more trust in the words of like minded consumers. In fact, an upcoming Forrester Consumer Conference in Chicago is all about this new social phenomena, a conference definitely worth attending if you are reading this.

Wow, what a fundamental shift in power. Gone are the days of heavy branding and welcome to the new generation of consumer power. However, one has to ask the question, is this new phenomena a fad or a future trend? Was this not said about the Internet when it started (excuse the pun) to come online in the mid 1990’s? I think the answer is the typical consultant answer, “it depends.”

To look into this further, I think we as marketers need to understand more about these social networks and really understand the motivation behind them and who is using them. If anyone reading this has any answers or just wants to share other cool applications and their thoughts, we’d all like to hear them.

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This entry was posted by Chris Beltmann on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Interactive Marketing, Branding.
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