Best Strategy for Web 2.0 Marketing

After reading the Online Advertising Playbook, I thought it necessary to comment on the strategy of Brian McAndrews, CEO of aQuantive. McAndrews describes a four pronged strategy.
1- Target and personalize every marketing interaction. (Consumers now decide when to consume content and whether to consume advertising as well. Therefore better targeting and personalization making the ad more relevant to the consumer. The ultimate goal is to always send the right message, at the right time to the right person eliminating wasted advertising dollars)

I think that the emarketer has plenty of tools to effectively use personalization and targeting. However, the growing concern over the protection of privacy will require methods that instill greater consumer confidence and trust in sharing their data over devices that allow for communication, but have underdeveloped security measures in place. For example, the most vulnerable areas are wireless communications, such as wi-fi and portable USB storage devices and memory cards for portable devices, where access information is often stored.

2- Make your web site the central expression of your brand. (The web is a unique medium in that it can service three channels combined, such as advertising, sales and CRM. Therefore marketers must maximize this capability instead of previously using the web as "brochure ware")

I think that these three channels each share obstacles that the emarketer has less control over. For example, some advertisers feel insecure in placing ads on social networking sites, where the content can change from a conservative point of view to a radical political protest regarding a recent news story on the environment or human rights violation.

3- Integrate your digital messaging vertically. (The marketer must integrate information across all digital channels, such display advertising, search, the website and email marketing, etc... in have one view of the consumer in order to engage them effectively and efficiently in a meaningful dialog.)

As emarketers integrate their information from multiple sources to achieve a single view of the customer, they must be vigilant in their use of this information. For example, Europe has stricter standards than the United States regarding the sharing of personal information with third parties. As more and more information is shared globally, the emarketer must consider local laws regarding privacy and build adaptable infrastructures to support regional differences in laws and customs.

4- Test and experiment in emerging media. (Today experiments are founding in blogging, pod casting and social networking, video on demand and more mobile content. Each new media is accompanied by new risks. The goal is to maximize learning while minimizing investment and risk.)

Experimentation provides a great source of opportunity and peril. The emarketer must not only worry about ROI and risk, but also develop a strategy that adapts itself to two new developments such as a multilingual domain structure and a content management system that can easily translate content into multiple language to answer the growing world population not willing to use the roman character set to communicate with one another. For example, the Chinese language is the second most popular on the web with 15.7 percent of total online population.

As of June 20, 2007, the top ten languages on the web are:
(percent of total Internet users)

1- English 31.2
2- Chinese 15.7
3- Spanish 8.7
4- Japanese 7.4
5- French 5.0
6- German 5.0
7- Portuguese 4.0
8- Korean 2.9
9- Italian 2.7
10 Arabic 2.5

Luckily there are some professional web content management systems that have integrated language translation systems, such as SDl Tridion. This particular system is particularly suited for managing content that targets the growing non-English population.

Source:

1-Joe Plummer, Steve Rappaport, Taddy Hall, Robert Barocci, The Online Advertising Playbook, 2007, ISBN 978-0-470-05105-4

2- What's the Hindi Word for Dot-Com?, By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS, October 11, 2007; Page B1, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119204776102055002.html