Web 2.0 and the future of online marketing

There has been a lot of talk recently about the effects of Web 2.0 on online marketing and it has been estimated that there is considerable opportunity here for companies to get their messages across. Examples such as companies designing YouTube videos and planting them so that their products get across are aplenty, but on the whole, it does not seem that much has been done with the technology yet.

Second Life was a good example of a potential opportunity for advertising that has never really materialised although there are still companies with offices and buildings on there. It would seem that most of the opportunities related to selling graphics and computer programmes that specifically linked to Second Life and were not anything to do with the traditional products that the companies were selling.

It was used for an online careers fair on a number of occasions, but I’m not sure that this had any effect at all.

The same sort of thing applies with Facebook. I am not sure how Facebook will have any effect for marketing purposes apart from the opportunity to network at very low cost. Facebook is a medium for publishing photos and getting in touch with other people and staying in touch, but I’m not sure it’s really helped very much at all through any marketing for a conventional company not selling products linked to Facebook. Advertising on Facebook will be quite phenomenal in terms of income for the company, but I am not sure of the accuracy of advertising in this way unless you are a large company with a generic product.

In a similar way, Twitter is an online chat programme that enables users to talk together in live time. There have been such programmes for many years with the Windows Messenger programme perhaps being the most popular of these and others before this. Whilst I am sure they are very beneficial programmes to use, I am not sure they give very many marketing opportunities to an SME with a specific product to sell.

There has been a lot of talk about them, and the opportunities that are there but to be frank, I cannot see how most of them will have much effect on actual sales for companies, although there is plenty of scope for marketing companies to make money out of pushing advertising on the sites.

It is certainly something to keep an eye on though for future times, as it may be that advertising possibilities start to open up in the same way that Google opened up its pay per click and has generated vast amounts of potential advertising for small companies at low cost.

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