Web 2.0 and Other Hypes

Web 2.0 slowly made it´s way to the executive suite. The definition you find in Wikipedia.

Then I get asked, what the impact of Web 2.0 is having on the practice of marketing. My first answer is: practically very little, with exceptions. In my experience only a few industries have had any real exposure to the Web 2.0 trend of net collaboration, interactivity and free online sharing.

That does not mean that it had not had a serious impact for selected industries with easy online sharing, like

• music industry (file sharing, even if illegal)
  
• the electronics and travel retailers (exchange of price data)
  
• internet advertising (millions of little ads)
• social platforms, like youtube.com (don´t know what business, if any, that is...)
  

However, in practice, for most industries, the topic of Web 2.0 is so far out of their world that many do not even know what it means. Practically oriented marketers and leaders are more concerned with established metrics and issues that keep them more than busy right now.

I do not judge either side, the progressives nor the laggards, as each industry very much follows it´s own logic and development for a reason. However, more interesting would be those twilight places where an outsider enters the fray with a new business model based on Web 2.0 principles. I have not seen to many of such, for suggestions I am open.

In fact, most of the Web 2.0 players "play" in their own little world, while the rest of the "real" world only very slowly adopts these scary new concepts of UGC (user generated content), blogs, wikis and semantic web .... Marketing inertia is here to stay and especially now in uncertain times, many will be loath to experiment with unproven marketing tools.

It will be interesting to observe over the next years how such innovations are either integrated in existing marketing practices or overturn the existing order. The latter would have happened already or would it not?

So let us look out for the Web 2.0 impact, before we end up at Web 11.0 or so. In the meantime there are many quite profitable applications for early adopters to capture with Web 2.0. This blog is just one.