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Web 2.010 - A digital marketing perspective

02 March 2010

There’s plenty of buzz words used within a web 2.0 environment. But most of them are akin to words like Fuel injection, and SRS airbags for cars. We only need to know what a few of them are, and leave the rest to the mechanics (coders)

My web 2.0 definition goes like this:

Web 2.0 is all the Web interactions (not web sites) out there that get their value from the actions of users.

Some cool examples are blog formats, Wikipedia, Delicious, Youtube, and Facebook. Web 2.0 also existed in web 1.0 circa 99. But we didn’t know it yet. The classic example is eBay, simply because it connected users, was created by the users and focused on dialogue – not monologue. The users are the key ingredient. The users are what make Web 2.0 really special. Web 2.0 is about the fact that the infrastructure has been built. The best way to leverage it is to make cool stuff for users to connect on, and then get the hell out of the way.

Why blogging matters
At last count there were over 160 million blogs in the world. If blogging was a country it would have the 6th largest population in the world. Yep, it is pretty significant. They can be on anything from your cat, to the best airline seats, to advertising trends to political commentary…

The reason blogs are great is because they are the true barometers of the truth. Something newspapers used to be. They’re quicker to reflect consumer and community sentiment, usually more accurate, and written by the ‘real’ experts on a topic. Passionate users. People who’ll spend their Saturday night writing about something they care about for no money, with zero agenda. They are doing it because it’s worth doing.

Blogs are becoming the newspapers of tomorrow, because bloggers are the experts not journalists or reporters. Bloggers are topic specific and what mainstream media must now look to for inspiration.

It’s this authenticity that has helped many blogs become media channels in their own right:

Examples include:

www.treehugger.com – eco / environmental blog now world’s most respected eco focused newspaper bought by the BBC
www.springwise.com – business trends from around the world about innovation
www.thesuperficial.com & www.perezhilton.com – leading celebrity news station
www.techcrunch.com – web and technology news hub
www.gizmodo.com – gadgets and electronics hub

While I’m on the topic, access to blogs is marketing’s equivalent to carpenters having access to a ladder and a hammer. They’re essential tools. As is Facebook, Youtube, and any other social web application. Corporations which block access to social media tools are today’s luddites. They’d be better off blocking access excel spreadsheets and powerpoint than these. Our business is consumers (not boardrooms and forecasts). These things helps us interact in the real market. It comes down to trust. If we trust our employees not to be wasting time on the phone, why not the net?

With that in mind, let’s talk about what a good blog doesn’t do: Sugercoat, Lie, Get moderated, Talk like a brochure or be run like a PR department.

Brands and companies who take to blogging need to be transparent and authentic. It takes time to build a trusting reader base. It has to be a conversation not a dialogue. That’s it. No tricks. If you do this and embrace it, it can be the most powerful forum any brand or company has.

Media is free.
Really. But there is a catch. It’s got to be worth watching. If it is, the crowd will do the rest for you. In my view advertising has been its own worst enemy in the past 20 or so years. Media is and will continue to become more fragmented by the day. We don’t have to watch ads anymore and we won’t. We’ve now got TiVo, IQ, on demand TV like Youtube and Joost. We’ve got all the entertainment we need and we get it without interruption. Interruption marketing has had its day.

But it’s all based on being worthy. Having an idea/ product/ communication or concept worth spreading. We’ve got to focus on creating amazing products for specific people. It’s flipped from the old formula of average products and great advertising. We’ve got to over invest in our products and services. And then go about letting our people know in a way that makes sense. If we do this, media is free. If not, we’ll continue to pay for media which is getting less effective & more expensive.

We need to think “narrowcasting” not broadcasting. It’s about user groups, specific interests, conversations and tailoring. Now we can find each other, we can circumvent a lot of the crap we’ve had to endure to have the conversations and entertainment we desired all along.

The caveat is that this doesn’t mean that changes in the media landscape will solve all our media problems. It’ll probably magnify them. But it magnifies the good too. Boring stuff is invisible, bad stuff is magnified, and cool stuff is rewarded.

But what about twitter?
Twitter works because it is live. It’s like “thought TV” – it doesn’t have a lag effect where you have to catch up on what you missed. Which is why it fits in today’s society: it’s about what’s happening.

The real value of twitter is the fact that it gives live sentiment, actions and opinion on the topics of the day. Or more accurately the topics and people you are interested in.

Crowd Sourcing & User Generated Content
Eventually the future of production will be UGC. Everything will be outsourced to experts. Eventually production and marketing will split. It’s already happening with private label products in supermarkets. This is because anything physical can be substituted. It’s easy to make stuff. The hard part is in the idea, the design, the project management and generating cut through in a busy world with infinite communication channels.

So media is transforming itself from content creators to infrastructure providers. People create stuff and companies will provide forums and structures for us to build it on.

The next step will be for brands to step aside in the way media did. Let the users help us build and renovate brands. If we don’t, they’ll create new forums and do it anyway.

The truth about Viral marketing
Viral marketing has been around for a little over 2000 years…. The story of Jesus Christ and the bible is the original viral hero. Seems like an obtuse example but it’s simply the best one there is.

This story of the bible crossed countries, oceans and language barriers before motorized travel was invented or even the printing press. It’s now (the Catholic Church) the largest land holder in the world and has a greater membership than Facebook; 180 million versus 3 billion. And you thought Zuckerberg was good. It’s been such an effective campaign that it’s consumers even pay for the prizes on its biggest annual consumer promotion (otherwise known as Christmas) – they buy each other presents.

So viral marketing is about story telling. But the story must really be engaging. I guess everlasting life is a pretty high emotional benefit for their target market! Viral marketing isn’t new; we’ve just got some new tools which make it easier to spread good ideas. That’s it.

If you want anything to go viral it needs to be truly spectacular. The infrastructure exists and is waiting for your cool ideas.

So here are some numbers to think about the probability of viral success, via the viral haven that is Youtube:
• The average Youtube video gets watched for 6 seconds.
• 2 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
• Almost half the videos on Youtube get viewed less than 10 times. (1 in 2.4)
• Only 0.25% of videos get more than 10,000 views.
• A random sample of 10,000 videos uploaded received the following: 2,226 videos with no views in their first month, 237 with 1 view, 158 with 10 views, and just 23 with 100.
• Only 1 in 3.1 million videos will get more than 1 million views
Sure we can increase our chances by creating great content, and frequency of posts. But getting a viral hit is like winning the lotto, it’s fine to play, but not to back our future on it.


Long Live Television
Television is dead, long live television! This year the internet and the web start to become the same thing.

All new televisions are coming with Broadband cables and some with wifi access which means that we are now entering an on demand entertainment environment. With most of the entertainment remaining free.

It’ll be a massive challenge for Free To Air and Pay TV. The only possible response for winning is to have better content, live events and quicker rollout to beat the pirates. That is it. In some ways the live 1950’s TV model will make a come back. No matter what Rupert Murdoch thinks, people won’t pay. He’s forgetting the importance of supply and demand. We live in an excess supply environment and that supply is about to hit everyone’s living room, downloadable in real time.

Want to watch you favourite video clip – go straight to Youtube – it’s there right now today. Courtesy of the slowly catching up Record companies.

Want to watch a documentary – it’s there on Youtube, in 8 parts, downloadable in real time. Or on Ted.com with the worlds greatest thinkers. Free.

Want watch anything you’re into – it’s there… you’ll even be able to go onto Facebook or any website for that matter. In the first instance TV’s will come with popular websites installed, but eventually we’ll have wireless TV keyboards and mice to navigate, and then touch screens like the apple iphone. Convergence is finally here.

The Cloud
In internet is nearly all around us. In the 1950’s it was in Universities and military installations. It made its way to large corporate offices in the 80’s and finally into our homes in the 1990’s. But now it’s in our pockets, our cars, our café’s and every electronic device we touch. It’s in the air. The cloud is much more than storing data offsite or remotely. It’s the fact that our world is forever now a digital one where everything we need to know or access to is omnipresent. The implications are many and varied: Geo locating, multi user efficiency, better collaboration, cheaper computing in developing markets, and meaningful brand interactions for companies that are smart enough to realise it.


Rules of engagement
It sounds like a lot for people, companies and brands to take in. And it is. But the simplest way of embracing the revolution is by following a few rules of engagement. When we do this it all starts to make more sense

1. Authenticity pays. Be real, don’t pretend to be something, or someone your not. Consumer respect comes from understanding the rules and respecting the online world as the real world.

2. Speak with a human voice. Not a corporate one. People want human interaction, people like dealing with people. It’s a human revolution facilitated my microchips and Moore’s law.

3. Engage the crowd. They own your brands. You want proof. When they stop feeding you brand (buying) it dies. Pay the respect the real brand owners deserve. It’s always been this way but we didn’t know… We couldn’t hear their voices. Now that we know we must act on it. Let consumers hijack brands. UGC and Crowd sourcing is where it’s at.

4. Compound effort. Benefits take longer to garner in the new world. It’s not like the old days of a large media campaign and watch the scan sales. We are moving from a low human capital, high financial capital environment, to a large human capital, low financial capital world.

5. Learn on the job – it can’t be strategised. It’s too disorganised and changeable… the web is humanity in digital form. The only way to play is to embrace the chaos and be part of the conversation. It can’t be justified to a board room, but the companies and brands who choose not to play will be wondering what happened.

The world has never been a more exciting place to be.

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Written by: Steve Sammartino

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