CardMarketing 2.0

It's always tough when someone asks you to describe Web 2.0. I tend to rattle off sentences containing words like 'engagement', 'two-way web', 'social internet', 'user-generated content' and 'consumer empowerment'. But God only knows what words I would blurt out if I was asked in front of a camera.

Well, that's what happened to a handful of people at the latest Web 2.0 Expo in San Fran — click here to see what they said. It's useful to see what people on the cutting edge of Web 2.0 are saying, especially when people are already talking Web 3.0.

Mike Butcher of tech blog, TechCrunch, breaks things down to the basics in his definition, saying the internet has gone through three stages ( the "Three Ps"):

1. Pages (”dumb” pages with no intelligence or data)
2. People (social networks producing richer data and, eventually, platforms for applications)
3. Power (all that data producing powerful intelligence about the things we really want to know, like ‘what’ or ‘who’ am I looking for etc).

It strikes me that the third stage, Power, which Mike says we're only really on the cusp of, is hugely relevant to marketers. In the video, Mike points out that the internet is effectively a grand amalgamation of preferences and recommendations, a powerful imprint of society as a whole — "people are putting their entire lives online".

The basic thrust here is that everything you need to know about people, as marketers, is effectively there before you, online — the radical transparency of the internet means there's no need to second guess consumer behaviour.

For marketers, then, the third stage — Power — is to learn how to unravel that information, ideally in real-time, and use it to their advantage.