CardMarketing 2.0

Like Techcrunch's Michael Arrington, I can't see ChaCha ever working. ChaCha, if you haven't come across it yet, is a new breed of search engine that pairs users with a human guide. The idea is that, if you're having trouble finding something, or can't be bothered to find it yourself on Google, Yahoo or whatever other search engine you're using, a battle-hardened 'live search expert' will do it for you, and in real time.

Transparency is the ugly duckling of Web 2.0. It's not as sexy for issuers as the idea of participation, dialogue and viral campaigns, and doesn't have the immediate appeal of an enriched user experience — ploughing hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds or euros into the latest technologies to make a cards site the best thing since sliced bread. In fact, it may not have even registered on an issuer's radar.

Web 2.0: depending on whether your paycheck depends on it, it’s either (a) the next great thing (b) the future of the internet and/or (c) much, much more. Somewhere online, a skeptic knits a furrowed brow and asks, “Yeah, yeah. What’s in it for me?”

Each issue, we examine a key word or phrase from the ever-evolving Web 2.0 lexicon. Some of these terms are obscure, others may intimidate but once you get up close, none of them will bite. We break them down and show how they are relevant to the world of online card marketing.

Today’s term: Perpetual Beta

We’ve talked in previous issues about how issuers need to use the internet and other convergence technologies, such as digital printing, to monetize the ‘long tail’ of smaller affinity groups and partner organizations. For starters, the smaller the group, the stronger the affinity, which can amount to increased margins and massive cross-selling opportunities.

The traditional logic of marketing and business – promoting a producer-defined product to a mass passive audience – has been reversed. And radically so. The reason for the reversal is the awakening of the consumer from a centuries-old slumber, the metamorphosis of customers from mass passive recipients to individual critical creators.

The fate of the salesperson is a miserable one indeed. Without them, there’d be no negotiation on cost, no revenue, no profits, no company.

And yet they are scoffed at, their lucrative sales incentives cursed, their very existence deemed disgusting and grotesque. Feel sorry for them? Want to cut them some slack?

Don’t. As this video clip on YouTube reveals, they are mercenaries, womanisers, immoralists — the depths they will stoop to to close the deal are nothing short of base. And then, to top it all off, they want you – everyone else in the company – to pay for it!

Web 2.0 isn’t only about social networks, collaboration and user-generated content. It’s also about ease of use, making all the information out there easier for people – for you – to access in a fun and super-efficient way. In short, it’s about making the world wide web your world wide web, enabling information to be brought to you rather than you having to go off in search of it. In fact, in Web 2.0, you could argue that browsing is for bums, surfing for suckers, googling just sooooo passé.

It’s hard to understand Web 2.0 without getting your hands dirty, without doing the hard yards. To unleash its card marketing potential, you have to understand its purpose, experience it in practice, get to know the motivations and aspirations of the people who drive it, and are driven by it. In technical terms, you need to ‘get into their heads’ — get a feel for it.

When marketers see the word ‘blogging’, they often think ‘bashing’ — and rightly so. As well as being a stream of consciousness, a real-time feed of thoughts, ideas, reflections and whims, the internet is also a stream of conscience, a grand virtual chamber where millions of people voice their views on corporate rights and, far more commonly, corporate wrongs.