So, what does it mean for marketing in a Web 2.0 world?
Market Drivers of Web 2.0
More people are getting online for a wide variety of tasks, including shopping-related activites. Broadband access has become mainstream and ubiquitous, and people are using the Internet more and more for even small tasks (even on different devices).
Trends
The trends show that customers will subscribe to RSS feeds and have RSS preferences, bypassing spam-filled email boxes. This shows that “word-of-mouth” or participatory marketing will be important when planning your campaigns. Blogs, rather than, web sites will optimized for search engine traffic.
Customers will now get treated like adults who have legitimate views and participate in conversations. Therefore, companies now must unobtrusively and gently shape conversations, where collaboration and organic discussions emerge.
Marketing Impact
Marketers must enter the conversations and communities via blogs and wikis by providing transparency, personalized, appropriate messages wherever and whenever. Ultimately, they are responsible for creating a satisfying online experience.
Marketing Toolkits
Companies should use blogs, podcasts, and RSS to deliver interactivity and extend or complement existing marketing activities and react in real-time.
Web 2.0 Lessons
- Leverage customer-self service to reach out to the entire web.
- Users add value, and can be treated as co-developers of a brand.
- Consider your brand in “perpetual beta” and engage your users as real-time testers.
- Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection.
- Cooperate but don’t control the emerging conversation.