Web 2.0 Marketing and Marketing Research 2.0

Web 2.0 is turning the model for many communication related fields inside out. Knowledge Management is one as Andrew McAffe wrote in The Mechanisms of Online Emergence and more recently, Enterprise 2.0, and Indus Khaitan did in the Writable Intranet and Dion Hitchcliffe did on many occasions.

Marketing is another space getting turned inside out as Constantine von Hoffman conveys in A Marketer's Guide to Blogging. He writes, blogs and their cohorts in consumer-generated media (podcasts, community sites and the like) are here to stay. And they're turning your marketing model inside out. "This is the way of the future," says William Hewitt, CMO of Novell, a software developer. "It's not just the blog itself, but the whole notion of enhanced collaboration with your customers."

Now you can get the voice of customer and get customers talking to each other (for better or worse). Here you need to go with flow and work within the rules of conversation. Some of the many attempts to manipulate the blogosphere by companies such as McDonald’s, Warner bros, and Panasonic, are discussed. They all ended up discovered and left the perpetrators very embarrassed.

It is better to monitor and join the conversations. IBM has taken this approach. Chris Barger (overseer of some of their blogging efforts) and a group of other volunteer blog leaders in each product group are engaged in blog monitoring as part of their jobs. “These blog leaders are a mix of developers, engineers, marketing people and others who have a sense of which CGM sites are worth monitoring. The blog leaders are responsible for making sure CGM comments are filtered to Barger and the appropriate person in their group for potential follow-up.”

Finding out what people are saying and who are the leaders in these conversations is a key part of marketing 2.0. This is where iQuest can play a critical role as I have written about before, see Making Sense of the Social Side of Web 2.0. It combines search and social network analysis. iQuest can turn up what the web is saying about your products, as well as who are the most influential participants in these conversations. As the site relates, ‘iQuest can rapidly analyze anything with words or symbols – articles, web pages, reports, memos, e-mails, telephone call logs, transcripts, message boards, blogs, survey responses, RSS feeds and more – to show who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations are taking place.” web 2.0 marketing

Comments

[Frank Shines]

Well done. Yes, Web 2.0 is having a major impact on traditional marketing. Much is changing very fast. - Frank

[Levon Guiragossian]

Consumers have always discussed their experiences with companies with friends and colleagues. This has traditionally been at a local level. Blogs are just documenting these satisfactions (or dissatisfactions) and enabling search engines to tap into the keywords discussed in these entries.

[bill Ives]

Levon - Thanks for your comment. I liked your blog and added it to my list. Bill