The New Rules of Marketing 2.0 & PR 2.0

The Internet and mobile devices have changed not only our lives, but entire disciplines. Marketing is no exception.

Marketing 1.0 vs. Marketing 2.0
In Marketing 1.0 world, marketers could get away with producing brochures, ads, press releases, events, and promotions. It was a world world where opinion makers ruled in mass communication mediums. Accountability for performance was fuzzy at best; metrics such as brand impressions were bantered around and were found acceptable. Half of advertising was effective, but no one knew which half.

In contrast, Marketing 2.0 is about doing all of that in a new ecosystem where your prospects and customers are now living in print, on the Internet and carrying mobile devices. Opinion makers are moving aside and social networks are the new opinion shapers. Direct to consumer PR new channels are exploding. The new currency of conversation is demand generation and accountability for performance. Campaigns better be measurable, or else you risk joining the statistics of short-tenured CMOs.

The paradigms of new marketing are demand generation, conversations, collaborations, engagement and accountability.

Here is how the marketing 2.0 ecosystem looks like.

Two Mediums
The Marketing 2.0 ecosystem is currently dominated by primarily two mediums:

The first is the interactive web powered by search engines, social media, direct to consumer PR, and widgets. On the one hand, communities like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, Blogs, LinkedIn, and others are opening up the conversation space. On the other hand, PR2.0 revolution is taking place with RSS, Stumble Upon, PR Web, Newsvine, Google News, and more.

The second force is the mobile devices upon which we increasingly rely for day-to-day living.

Marketing 2.0 tools
During the 90’s, 1-to-1 marketing was the rage; while it still remains the rage, the new eCommunications are are permission based and are morphing to facilitate sharing and spreading the word with the recipient’s social networks. Email marketing, event marketing, sweepstakes and surveys are designed for individual interaction and encourage sharing.

Here is how Marketing 2.0 tools are working now:

Search Tools
Although people worldwide are searching Google, Yahoo, and MSN on the tune of 2.67 billion searches a day, new specialized search engines are becoming popular by the day. Google Blog search, Technorati Blog search, Twitter search, and YouTube search are becoming the currency of daily conversations.

Measurement Tools
New measurement tools are emerging for monitoring and tracking Marketing 2.0 activities.

Traffic reporting tools measure point activities such as website traffic, blog activity, twitter traffic and more.

Alert tools such as Goolgle Alerts, TweetBeep and others let you know when someone is discussing topics you care passionately about.

Buzz Monitoring tools such as Cymfony, Biz 360, Umbria BuzzMetrics are emerging (expensive) tools that let you monitor multiple touch points such as blogs, web, forums, twitter, etc.

Listening tools such as our Ennect Survey let you get a pulse of your customers and prospects.

It is a tall order, but marketers are now expected to be as comfortable with left-brained analytical skills in deciphering this dizzying data as they are with the right-brained insight-driven campaigns.

New Skills
To adapt to this new world order, marketers not only have to get used to the new paradigm, but will have to either polish old skills, or learn new ones.

Marketing strategy is now more challenging because of the dizzying choices of tactics. The real art of Marketing 2.0 is to pick the right tactics and prioritize the activities. Balancing short-term with long-term is trickier than before.

Traditionally PR skills of storytelling, presenting unique points of view are back in vogue. Perhaps more challenging part of all this is that marketers will now have to not only understand but write for both search engines and people.

If marketers found technologists as their nemesis, it may be time to set aside the old enmity and befriend the yahoos. They are becoming more, not less, important in the Marketing 2.0 ecosystem.

Marketers will now have to develop comfort with both left-brained and right-brained thinking, analysis & synthesis, story and visual thinking.

Marketers will either be the new renaissance men and women, or dinosaurs.

So, What Hasn’t Changed
Marketers’ mission to surround and engage their customers at all touch points still holds. However, the number of touch points keep multiplying. Marketers will now have to work both harder and smarter.

Brands still rule, however branding will be done differently now. Building differentiation into products and services will now be more important, because interesting products will foster buzz and conversations.

Welcome to the New World Order of Marketing 2.0.