• Marketing Mag Website

  • Marketing Digiguide

DigiGuide DigiGuide

DigiGuide

for insight into online,search, mobile and more

brought to you by
brought to you by

Web 2.0 and its effects on marketing practice

this article
  • Page 1 of 6
  • 1
  • 28

Theresa Cunnington is a senior usability consultant with iFocus, a web and eLearning services consultancy. Theresa has been active in the usability field since 1994 and is a passionate advocate for creating useful, usable and engaging user experiences.

Advertise with us

Theresa Cunnington offers some tips for companies thinking of jumping into Web 2.0

Far from being a buzzword, Web 2.0 is providing new opportunities for marketing professionals to reach new audiences and develop new products. So why is this next generation of internet so headache-inducing?

Simply, the rules have changed. And there are many traps for unsuspecting organisations. Increased bandwidth, combined with a critical mass of users, means that organisations who do not carefully consider the pros and cons of Web 2.0’s increased flexibility, risk digging a nice big hole for themselves.

Mistaking Web 2.0 as a technological issue can also lead to many dead ends. Technology is often the easy bit. Web 2.0 is merely a facilitator, albeit a powerful one, allowing for more meaningful interaction with your target audience. Think of it as a focus group on steroids – super honest but occasionally aggressive and capable of hurting you.

So why exactly is Web 2.0 different from the same old web, or Web 1.0? Wikipedia explains that Web 2.0 is “…a perceived or proposed second generation of internet-based services – such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies – that emphasise online collaboration and sharing among users.”

Let’s not get bogged down in jargon. Web 2.0 is different because it turns the traditional broadcast model – which we have known and loved for its predictability since the first headline was carved in stone – upside down and inside out.

For users and consumers of product, Web 2.0 brings us a step closer to the original promise of the internet as a multi-directional, amorphous hub of interactivity and commerce. For most of the internet’s history so far, the web has just been a convenient, more up-to-date extension of the traditional publisher-consumer model, where an organiser publishes content for its audience.

  • Article links
  • Article links

1 Comments

ezimarketing
  • Wrote on 10 Oct, at 05:32PM
Great article. The network company example is tiny compared to what can happen. Remember Dell a few years back? One annoyed customer of a $1,700 faulty laptop (journalist Jeff Jarvis) recked havoc by taking his bad customer service experiences online. End result was a huge drop in Dell stock price as more and more people followed his rather sad story. Took years for Dell to recover, but they now reallise the power of one, online. Go to http://www.buzzmachine.com/tag/dell/

To have your say, login at the top of the page or register free and start commenting.