The Web 2.0 world is one that embraces the collective knowledge of the community as a resource to making individual buying decisions. Marketing can be defined as the science/art of influencing these decisions. Traditional approaches have embraced mass marketing as the primarily way to economically address the consumer with this messaging. These traditional campaigns sometimes claim to be “Segmented” by the fact that they differentiate their message based on demographical information but ultimately they share the common thread of mass distribution of one way communication to a large audience base. This is becoming less effective as the Enterprises ability to influence a single consumer is becoming overshadowed by the effect of communities on their members buying decisions.
Enterprises need to start thinking about how they engage communities of interests with their products and services. This level of engagement needs to be more than simple messaging; Enterprises need to be seen as part of the community and share in its overall well being. Enterprises that merely “prey’ on these communities with differentiated messaging become a disruptive “noise” to the general collective. This “noise” may have the reverse affect and too often results in the general collapse of the initial community that it is targeting.
Communities cannot be “created”. They can be grown, facilitated, enhanced, and disrupted but communities by they’re nature are organic to a central idea or concept. Enterprises interacting with these communities need to respect the boundaries imposed by the social system at work and seek to enhance the general experience rather than capitalize on revenue opportunities presented. Enterprises that find ways to embrace these concepts will ultimately find revenue opportunities in these interactions that will be seen as adding value rather than detracting from the general experience. The challenge for enterprises to do so is to find means to economically support these types of interactions by leveraging technology in innovative ways.
In future posts I will try and explore how Enterprises may use emerging Web 2.0 technology to achieve this goal.
