March 27, 2006 | Monday

Marketing for the World Live Web

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Quotations

Doc Searls, co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, the book that (nearly seven years ago) anticipated much of what the internet has become, blogs about a Newsweek cover story entitled Putting the ‘We’ in WEB. The closing paragraph is worth quoting here.

Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr and all the other newcomers aren’t places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live.

The response to this from marketers shouldn’t be, “So how do we market ourselves in this environment?” The proper response is: “How do we make our products and services as valuable and accessible as possible to the huge percentage of the population that now lives much of life online?”

Mary Hodder adds:

I do think that the difference between the web of 5 years ago, and the web now, is very much the liveness of it. The static web is email and static webpages.. and the live web is all about change, time and people conversing across time and place online.

So here’s an even better question: Do you converse with customers and potential customers via the web (your site or otherwise)? If not, why not?