The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World
Consumers are flocking to blogs, social-networking sites and virtual worlds. And they are leaving a lot of marketers behind. — For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers. — If only they knew how to do it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This WSJ piece lands at the tail end of a multi-year debate over whether Web 2.0 is a real business opportunity or a bubble of attention without revenue. Earlier coverage flagged the Web 2.0 economic conundrum — audiences migrating to blogs and social networks faster than anyone could monetize them — while practitioners like Hugh MacLeod had already been arguing that the new marketing playbook was fundamentally different from advertising. What this article adds is the mainstream-business framing: the gap between where consumers are and where marketers know how to reach them has become large enough to warrant front-page treatment.
First-order effects
- Marketers at established brands face an immediate capability gap: their audiences have moved to blogs, social-networking sites and virtual worlds, but existing campaign playbooks don't transfer to conversational, community-driven channels.
- Agencies and consultants who can demonstrate genuine Web 2.0 engagement skills gain pricing power, since demand for that expertise currently outstrips supply.
Second-order effects
- Traditional media sellers — publishers dependent on display and print advertising — feel pressure as brand budgets experiment with social channels, echoing earlier anxieties about who should be afraid of online advertising.
- Expect a wave of 'social media strategy' offerings from agencies and software vendors racing to productize engagement before brands figure it out in-house — the same dynamic McKinsey addressed when it published six ways to make Web 2.0 work inside companies two months later.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, marketing shifts structurally from interruption-based media buying to participation in communities the brand doesn't control — making authenticity and community trust the scarce assets rather than reach.
- The recurring failure mode — new platforms emerging faster than institutions can adapt — suggests marketing becomes a permanent capability-building exercise rather than a channel decision, a tension visible as far back as the issues facing Web 2.0 going into 2006.
The trend: Consumer attention is migrating to participatory web platforms faster than institutional marketing can reorganize around them, widening a capabilities gap that will define digital business through the next decade.