More on Marketing 2.0

As you may recall, I recently blogged about Advertising 2.0 and social networks. Since then, I've stumbled upon an plethora of interesting examples and discussions on this issue that I thought I'd pass along.

WOMBAT has a couple interesting "how-to" articles about word-of-mouth and social technologies. Brand-building Through Converts and Fanatics gives 5 tips for creating fans around brands [libraries], including how to create communities and interaction. The other article, Listening to the Blogosphere, provides another set of 5 tips that allow marketers [librarians] to get a feel for what people think about their products/services. Reference librarian Amanda Etches-Johnson of blogwithoutalibrary.net is exploring this market research opportunity via Google's Blog Search as she describes in her post. Basically, she keeps an ear to the ground by setting up a search for instances of the word "library" in the titles of posts and retrieves them through an RSS feed. Neat!

Aaron Schmidt of walkingpaper.org has taken Marketing 2.0 a step further by attempting to integrate his library into the online social community MySpace. In his post, he describes his library's foray into MySpace and the pros and cons of doing so. VERY interesting stuff! I hope he'll keep us updated on how this initiative goes.

If you still need proof as to whether Marketing 2.0 matters, academic-types may be interested to know that organizers for the HigherEd BlogCon slated for April 2006 are seeking programs on Marketing and related subjects that concern social networks, consumer-generated media and evaluation of blogging and podcasting efforts among other topics 2.0-ish. (Here's the call for presenters, if you'd like to share your marketing know-how).

While I'm not a huge fan of the term "Marketing 2.0," I am a fan of the possibilities these techniques present so I'll be sure to keep an eye on these trends.