Marketing with Web 2.0

For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers if only they knew how to do it.But first, a more basic question: What is Web 2.0, anyway?

Web 2.0 is composed of some set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information, and collaborate or discuss such projects online. These includes blogs, social-networking sites, online games, other online communities, and virtual worlds. Lots of people become familiar with these tools through sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogger, (where they can write their own thoughts) and through mail. A growing number of marketers are using web 2.0 tools to interact with their consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion.

Web 2.0 tools can do what traditional advertising does: like persuade consumers to buy a company's product or services. For example the executive can write a blog about the product or the services of their company. But this kind of approach misses the point of 2.0 (even though they are blogging their products or services). Instead, companies should use these tools to get the consumers involved and inviting the consumers to participate in marketing-related activities so that they can receive feedback from the customer.

Consumers should have some incentives to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences on a company website.

One way is to make sure that consumers can use the online community is by creating a forum discussing about the different topics about the company. In this way the site ins't all about the company, it's also about the consumers. For example, a mobile company that created a community of hundreds of users to solicit their opinions and ideas about mobile. In this way they can get some ideas that might helped in to improve their product. Consumers might create also blogs about the products that they want to buy. In this case the product is advertised by the consumer.

All of us are participants in web 2.0!