Thursday, November 15, 2007

Web 2.0 Marketing

I've decided to shift the focus of this blog to a discussion of Web 2.0 marketing techniques.

If you are interested in online marketing, the old strategies focusing around SEO and static linking are no longer enough. Today, being an aggressive online marketer means using Web 2.0 tactics. What are these tactics? There's so many it tends to make your head spin.

In case you are not aware, Web 2.0 is about interactive media where readers (members) are also the publishers. Given the democratic and interactive nature of the web this shift (in retrospect) was inevitable.

One of the most obvious examples is Youtube.com - anybody with a free account can post videos about just about anything. Other people watch them, and comment on them. The number of times particular videos get viewed pushes the popular ones to the top of the list and so they'll get even more views.

Wikipedia is another interesting example (although not friendly to marketers at all.) Anybody can start a page on virtually anything at Wikipedia. For instance, if you consider yourself an expert on 19th century Romanian folk music, go ahead and create a page (although there may already be one there). Then anybody else can just add to or edit your work.

Craigslist is another, more marketing friendly example. Anyone can post free classified ads in major cities across North America and around the world. Your ad stays in circulation for usually about 45 days. If your ads pass the automated CL filters and if nobody else tags it as spam or inappropriate you've got your message in front of millions of potential viewers. And it doesn't cost a cent.

There are many other sites like this, and I'll try to look at and experiment with several of them - always from the online marketing perspective - as time goes by.

We will also be offering Web 2.0 online marketing services for clients serious about using these media to reach millions of people.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rick,

Web 2.0 Marketing has more to offer than the eyes meet.

In fact, according to a recent surey by cormetrics.com on Octber 30, 2007,

"78% of of marketing professionals polled in the survey see social media marketing as a way to gain competitive edge, BUT only 7.75% of total online marketing spend is devoted to it"

And here is some more data from the same survey:
* 58% of respondents have implemented user-generated content or reviews in the past year.
* 31% of respondents have implemented a blog in the past year.
* 25% of respondents have implemented an RSS feed in the past year.

It's obvious that inorder to match the looming competion, one has to adopt the Web 2.0 Marketing in the overall mix at the earliest.

Courteously -- S. Kumar
Learnhomebusiness.com

clive said...

Hi, I too have recently started exploring web 2.0 marketing but was stymied by the massive amount of web 2.0 applications out there.

For that reason I set up a blog http://www.webel.biz with a daily TO DO list (over a 2 week period) sites to join, tactics to use etc.

It is community driven so sites that don't performed and replaced with ones that do on the advice of subscribers.

Within 10 days I 'owned' half of the top 20 rankings in Google for my keyword phrase.

By the way it's free :-)

Rick said...

Thanks for the interesting statistics "S".

So now that we know that everybody is jumping on the bandwagon, what should we be doing about it?

Rick said...

Hey Clive,
Very interesting.

So much to do, so little time. But it looks like some of this stuff is starting to make sense with lots of experimentation.

Until Google shifts gears of course.