Posts Tagged ‘disintermediation’

web2 and relevance to current businesses

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Had dinner with a friend and her CEO.

The idea was to discuss web 2.0

Now the CEO was only vaguely interested, and she noted her board was less interested.

Their current site is a poor web 1 site , about 8 pages, most of the good content crammed onto 1 page (so poor SEO).

They do bi yearly PDF newsletter.

They aren’t a mega organisation.

The value of web2 to them, is difficult. I came down to a few reasons :

1. it needs to fit your company. web1 fits traditional business with large budgets for marketing and media buys

2. web2 fits better where you have time to grow, and community fits better

They keep asking on how they control the whole web2, and how they sell to the web2 people.

So I guess they want the web2 traffic, and just abuse them the old and traditional methods.

The marketing manager, my friend, started to get on board. I don’t think the CEO gives 2 hoots.

We also discussed how web2 dis intermediates a lot of groups , including:

– ad agencies
– media buys
– web site builders, and content maintainers
– marketers in general

the idea is you get closer to your customer, spend more of your focus on your customers, and less time/money/effort on marketing/advertising/interupting.

I guess long term, its about building trust, respect and value, as opposed to spending money and abusing.

This article has similar ideas acidlabs

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getting ideas to spread – an intro to Seth Godin

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Seth is someone you ought to listen to.

Here is an easy and fun to watch video as an intro to his ideas.

This video introduces you to:
– old companies sell average products to average people, and use a lot of TV advertising. Seth says this is dead
– we are in an economy of idea spreading, or idea diffusion. Make something remarkable, and get WOM (word of mouth) to spread the idea
– be remarkable. Good or very good isn’t enough – be remarkable

Seth is listed in the top 50 business thinkers, runs a blog, and authored a lot of books.

You will find Seth slowly moves you along in your ability to innovate.

He has a quality that slowly convinces you of news ways to think/look/understand Before you know it, you will be innovating too.

My Take

Idea Diffusion for me brings together a few concepts:
– Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point – talks about different sorts of people – connector/maven/salesman. Whilst Seth doesn’t differentiate between these types of people, he still makes the point – ‘telling the right person, and hopefully that person will tell/convince their friends’.
– word of mouth (WOM) advertising is a cheap and effective marketing strategy – when done well. Seth says – be remarkable – you will get WOM.
– web 2.0 and social networking on the internet has changed a lot of people’s lives. This can be explained similarly to WOM and idea diffusion.

I like the juncture between remarkable, WOM marketing, web 2.0 communities, and an ecommerce site. If you can get this happening, then you have unlimited free marketing. You have also dramaticly reduce your costs, as you no longer pay for advertising, or sales or channel commissions. You effectively disintermediate all sales/marketing costs from your business, and have unlimited scaling of your marketing for free.

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