Web 2.0 is a phrase coined just after the .com bubble crash of 2001 to describe the changing trends in the www – World Wide Web.

Most notably web 2.0 is often used to describe the newer functionality of web communications, information sharing, communities, and collaboration.

The newest breed of what we would describe as ‘web 2.0’ websites would include those websites such as; Social networking, Video sharing, Blogs, and Social Bookmarking. Some examples of these include YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Youmeo, Twitter and Flickr;

The increase in web 2.0 technology and culture has led to many companies reinventing the way in which they market their businesses and adopting web 2.0 as a significant portion of their marketing strategy.

Web 2.0 Marketing Strategy
Web 2.0 tools are used much in the same way as traditional marketing (i.e. directing mailing, cold calling, offline business networking); and that is to convince your customers to invest in your products and/or services by effectively spreading your brand message to the world.

With web 2.0 however, rather than simply spreading your message, you encourage your customers and potential customers to actually engage and participate with your company and whilst this is an extremely powerful brand marketing technique, it also allows the company to garner feedback that can lead to better product/services development and customer services.

An example of the growing use of web 2.0 for marketing is the 2006 introduction of prolific blogger Hugh MacLeod as the new marketing strategist for a small South African winery called Stormhoek.

Hugh has been utilising Web 2.0 tools such as blogging and Facebook to get the word out about Stormhoek, resulting in a fivefold increase in sales. Who says social networking and blogging doesn’t work for business? No one with any ounce of sense I hope. These days Hugh also concentrates one of the newer web 2.0 tools – Twitter.

In addition to these successes driven by Hugh, in November 2007 Stormhoek won the Best Small Budget Brand Marketing Campaign of the Year, awarded by a Council of judges for South Africa’s Marketing Excellence awards.

Hugh’s most interesting project of recent times is creating the Blue Monster wine label and poster in collaboration with Stormhoek and Microsoft. The wine and associated branding is intended to be used for employees and friends of Microsoft and I personally feel is the start of an exercise in re-branding Microsoft; for a long time now the brand has been negatively effected by bad publicity.

It seems to me that the idea is for Microsoft to stop the rot from the inside first and spread that out to the public. I.e. first get the employees to love Microsoft and then work on the rest of the world after that. I agree that really you can’t project the right brand image if you haven’t got your employees on board first.

When you visit the Stormhoek website you can see that essentially the entire website is quite simply one big blog, obviously part of the Web 2.0 marketing strategy that is working so well for them.

Marketing Tools
A useful list of web 2.0 websites and tools useful for brand/business marketing;

www.socialmarker.com
www.ecademy.com
www.wordpress.com
www.twitter.com
www.youtube.com
www.skype.com