Marketing 2.0

Getting Close to the Customer: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Approaches

Qualitative vs. quantitative marketing research. What works best? Here's a good article from the Wharton school on some recent trends in the field of marketing research. I was particularly struck by the use of brand communities as this ties to research I have conducted on this type of customer group.

Getting Close to the Customer: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Approaches - Knowledge@Wharton

Fast Company | A Little Help from Your Friends

You may have heard about social networking software and services but did you know that they are increasingly being used for business purposes — things like prospecting for clients, targeted recruitment of key staff and searching for venture capital? Here's a link to a good article from Fast Company that describes some of the programs and how they are used. In a nutshell, it's like having a very powerful, digital Rolodex.

Fast Company | A Little Help from Your Friends

Fast Company | Professionals, Publishing for the Public

David Weinberger is the author of Small Things Loosely Changed: A Unified Theory of the Web , co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto , and an all-around insightful thinker at the crux of business, society, and the Web. Other hats include strategic marketing consultant and most recently, Internet advisor for the Dean campaign (remember those days?). Back in January, on the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, Fast Company pulled Weinberger in from the cold for a phone chat about blogs in business. Here's an excerpt of the conversation transcript.

Fast Company | Professionals, Publishing for the Public

The future of Weblogging

The rise of Weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries. Although the Weblogging pioneers are due much praise, their own rhetoric deserves examination, and they could also raise their sights higher. Nico Macdonald reports, and concludes with a radical proposal for the future of Weblogging.

The future of Weblogging | The Register

10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis

Here is good advice from Nick Wreden on building effective corporate blogs and wikis. The focus of his article is using these tools to achieve your branding goals.

10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis

Collaborating With Universities to Create a Continuous Learning Culture

Four years ago, a South Dakota-based health care organization developed a partnership with a local university to offer an online nursing degree program for its employees. Around the same time, an Illinois manufacturer brought a local university on-site to deliver an accelerated bachelor’s degree program, customized to the needs of the company. Companies are increasingly banding together with their own competitors to work with educational institutions on industry-focused online degree programs.

Partnerships with colleges and universities can help provide training activities that are specifically designed for your workforce and business needs, and they can do so in a cost-effective way. But many CLOs choose to “go it alone”—using in-house trainers or bringing individual trainers from commercial firms on-site for company-sponsored education and training opportunities. Since the quality of this training is often very high, what is the added value of a partnership with a higher-education institution?

Collaborating With Universities to Create a Continuous Learning Culture

Knowledge Networking

A new phenomenon is appearing online, one that I call knowledge networking. People from all backgrounds with a wide variety of interests are connecting, interacting and sharing information. What we are seeing is a natural evolution of the Internet and its related technologies.

When the Internet first emerged in the 90’s, it was hailed as a technology that would change the world, ushering us into the “Information Age”. What happened next is predictable in a capitalist society — everyone tried to make money using the Internet to either change their businesses or invent new ones. You remember the outcome from this with the overheated speculation in the stock market and the eventual crash. While the Internet was somewhat discredited by the charlatans and over-hyped start-up companies that vaporized investment funds, it has continued to become a dominant force in our lives.

While it remains a major factor in the world of commerce (witness the success of Amazon and iTunes), the Internet has also enabled ordinary individuals to do some spectacular things without the benefit of investors, venture capitalists or organizational support. It has revolutionized communications in some very important ways.

Personal publishing – It used to be that the major news and media companies controlled the publishing of information. While they still exert a major force in what gets pushed out into the public space, personal publishing via weblogs and websites is allowing ordinary people to get their opinions and creative works out there for the world to see. Writers can now publish straight to the Internet, musicians can allow fans to download their music and voyeurs can post their naughty photos.

Networking – By using the commentary and track back functions of a weblog, people can now interact online around any number of common interests. Social software services such as Tribe Networks, Friendster and Linkedin are connecting people and allowing social and professional networking to expand exponentially.

Aggregation – The advent of RSS and XML technologies have allowed digital content to be syndicated across the Internet. A news story from a traditional media outlet or a posting from an individual blogger can now be accessed and broadcasted using the RSS (really simple syndication) technology. There are lots of RSS readers available now — software that allows the user to subscribe to any number of websites or information sources. Instead of having to surf all of these sites to seek out interesting information, the RSS reader automatically imports and aggregates new postings. Anyone can now access and consolidate virtually all of the useful information they are interested in.

We are seeing a revolution in communications both within organizations and for individuals. The general theme I see is empowerment of the individual. Hierarchies and corporate control are breaking down while power is being shifted to the individual and the social and professional networks one builds.