The Biggest Marketing Secret of Web 2.0 Companies
Web 2.0 companies have more in common than social networking, social bookmarking, AJAX and Ruby on Rails… and thats in the way its marketed. Many of them start out as bootstrap companies with the desperate need to outwit instead of outspend. Most marketing follow a push strategy, shoving its ads in consumers’ faces. So much so that most people have become immune to it.
Did you know that only 8% of people pay full attention to TV ads! We’re not even talking about conversion ratios here… However, notice how many web 2.0 companies are gaining visibility on a shoestring, or even on a thread for that matter. True, that web 2.0 is all the hype now, but something is definitely working right if they are getting more than just techies to sign up.
The secret to Web 2.0 marketing is that in using your product, more people must come to know about it. This is the fundemental concept of bottom up marketing. One company that has done well thus far is start up Billmonk.com. Billmonk is a service that helps you keep track of borrowed and lent money, and more recently even things. They solve a very simple everyday problem, that I guess nobody really ever thought of solving. Its not that they have the best site design or anything like that, but the fact that in using your service, even more people find out about it.
Imagine you’re the only one who knows about billmonk and you go to a restaurant and its time to pay up… Nobody wants to be the one to settle the bill coz you dont want to be the one who has to keep track of who owes you what. This ususally results with the person with no exact change paying the bill first. It so happens that its one of those days for you… But its no biggie for you coz you have billmonk. You go home and key in all the tabs on billmonk. You now dont have to worry about forgetting who owe’s you what, and the billmonk service instantly spreads to the rest of your friends who had dinner with you. There are many other instances, but this was the most prominent one I could think of at the moment.
New Media: Power to the People!
New media is changing the world we live in. With the culmination of the Internet, power has once again been returned to the people. Its time for mass media to take a backseat and new media to step up. But what is this new media thing? According to Wikipedia, New Media is has developed around cultural practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution.
For net savvy media junkies like me, it means I can finally say what I want to say, when I want to say it and I can share it with the whole world. Media is all about the user and the user is all about media. Both publishing and obtaining published material has never been easier. Everything from files, photos, diaries, videos and podcasts shape your new reality. There is a new culture being born… One that will truly transend geographical barriers….
I’m gonna be blogging about new media, entrepreneurship and cool new technology. So keep it tuned and I’ll try to keep new articles coming in.
