Keeping up with Marketing Newbies on Web 2.0
Often the least experienced marketers are the most effective at taking advantage of a new marketing medium. This is difficult for more experienced marketing veterans to swallow. But with experience comes preconceptions about what works and what doesn't work.
It really wasn't that long ago that I was the new marketing kid who got the web better than the old school marketers. In 1996 I began marketing on the web with very little prior marketing experience. I was able to rationally invent a system that was perfectly tailored to the web rather than trying to retrofit my previous methods. This system helped my company, Uproar, lead our category with a much smaller marketing budget than our competitors (Sony, Microsoft, Yahoo...). Their experienced marketers couldn’t keep up with the more nimble neophytes.
Now that I am more experienced, "getting" Web 2.0 is a little tougher than it was the first time around. This is despite having a Blog and being an avid Podcast listener. I've even bought advertising on Blogs, Podcasts, and Digg. Yet, I have been unable to get a good enough ROI to continue advertising on these mediums. I'm fairly confident that Web 2.0 marketing could be an important part of my marketing mix, but I just haven't figured out how to tap it yet.
It’s probably not completely age/experience related. Seth Godin is a rare experienced marketer that picks up on new trends very quickly. He has written quite a bit about Web 2.0 marketing, despite being burdened by significantly more years of marketing experience than me. But, who knows if he has actually effectively applied these theories beyond launching his own Web 2.0 site called Squidoo? Another group that has tapped Web 2.0 properties for a good return is spammers - but for a real brand spamming does more damage than good in the long run.
If anyone knows a reputable company that has effectively tapped Web 2.0 properties to drive marketing results – please let me know. I'll just reverse engineer the marketing approach that some newbie wiz kid probably thinks is totally logical.
Internet marketing for a software company is something special. It removes the hurdle created by seeing an ad offline, having to go to a computer, type something in, etc. You click and BAM- you're right there at the moment you want to be. So it makes sense that the onset of the Internet Revolution blew traditional marketing out of the water. Years later, even the big companies are all over the Net, people implicitly tune ads out, and media costs (per impression) have soared. We even performed an interesting test internally where we discovered that an ugly cross-promotion that blended in with the page outperformed a much nicer cross-promotion that was set off from the rest of the page. Search engine marketing for software companies is the cream of the crop because you can target people in your medium searching for exactly what you have to offer! Blogs seem to be a step back into impulse advertising (the person is not looking for your stuff at that time), and Podcasts take it offline- while the prices are higher than ever. So I'm not seeing Internet Revolution 2.0 here, but then again, maybe I just don't get it either. (Maybe I'm too old, already??) -Steve
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