Marketing 2.0

Marketing 2.0 refers to the new generation of marketing ideas emerging from the Internet era. The expression became popular in 2005 along with the idea of Web 2.0. It is a buzzword that forms part of the business jargon of corporate work environments pertaining to new means of marketing.

The expression is most frequently used by a new breed of marketers who work primarily with the Internet. This new generation of marketers views media such as TV, newspapers, and radio as secondary means of communication.

Many Fortune 500 companies have already started using the term internally and creating advertising campaigns leveraging the Internet as a socialisation mechanism between equal individuals instead of seeing it as a unidirectional mass medium.

Definition
Marketing 2.0 is an evolution of Marketing that leverages the social networking aspects of many new websites. Frequently called Web 2.0, these sites reach millions of people via social networks and can involve media such as pictures, videos, blogs, social bookmarks, and feeds.

The interconnnectivity of social networks combined with their ability to communicate a variety of mass media forms can be used to advertise/market in novel ways. Companies can supplement traditional marketing methods with Marketing 2.0 for things like branding, hype, promotion, and public relations.

Marketing 2.0 also leverages social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, for putting their content in front of eyes of users. The hyper focus on sites such as Digg and Reddit has been noted for producing a large amount of new inbound links towards the media that reaches its front page, though many people may consider this Search Engine Optimization.

Examples
The fast food giant Wendy's created a profile for their square hamburger character from television commercials on Myspace.com. This character was then added to the "friends" list of over 90,000 profiles resulting in a significant amount of unpaid advertising.

The Weinstein Company posted an eight-minute clip of their movie "Lucky Number Slevin" on YouTube prior to its release. This movie ended upon the homepage in the category of "most popular videos of the day" and received 4.5 out of 5 stars from YouTube visitors.

Other websites that can be used for Marketing 2.0 include Flickr, Digg and Del.icio.us.

Branded Entertainment
Because of the growing variety of devices like digital video recorders and mobile video devices, it is becoming easier than ever for viewers to avoid or ignore conventional TV advertising. Hence, product placement - which has been used for a long time in advertising - is playing a more important role in the context of Marketing 2.0.

These new TV advertising opportunities come in the form of what is also called branded entertainment. They include mentioning brands in lines of dialogue, placing products in scenes so they are visible to viewers and giving advertisers roles in plots of shows.

Buzz Marketing
These tactics along with others can all contribute to buzz marketing, which is pushed a lot further in Marketing 2.0. Buzz marketing helps with several aspects of marketing and advertising including search engine optimization. With all the links to a website generated through blogs, websites can become ranked very quickly for certain keywords pertaining to that product/service.