Marketing Management in a Web 2.0 World

I think we can all agree that, at this point, the term “Web 2.0” is over hyped. As digital marketers, they being told that they need to develop a blog, produce podcasts, provide mechanisms to rate our content, accept user comments and create the new mash-up of digg/YouTube and wrap it all in Ajax. And, these days, we can be in such a hurry to implement these new technologies that we forget the fact that they should actually serve some functions.

There are two trends here that really interesting; the first is simply the sheer focus on getting users to go to the web. This isn’t any big surprise for us, as we are being asked to justify our marketing spend and the web is a sure way to measure our effectiveness. But the second trend is really interesting, and speaks more to how the web is becoming much more a “platform” for marketing than a vehicle to drive visibility to a corporate website. These new sites are campaign-specific. They can even be “spot” specific. The trend is toward more, smaller websites designed to leverage an experience for the consumer and to drive a specific conversion. Certainly this trend is evidenced by the new types of corporate blogs that seem to pop up all over the place. But even more distinct now are the new designs, content platforms and even brand extensions.