February 19, 2008
By Keith Ferrell
Marketing, Selling and Complying on the Next Web
On the core-business side of things, it gets far more interesting. Let's take a look at some of the possibilities and potentials.
You'll have far more assurance that your Web-based marketing endeavors are reaching the precise prospects and customers you want them to reach, rather than today's "craft your keywords and trust you'll get proper placement" approach. As your customers' and prospects' Web tools — browsers, calendars, clipboards — grow more familiar with their owners' preferences, histories, and needs, they'll be far likelier to bring your products and services to their attention — flagged and pre-vetted — as opposed to your current dependence upon carefully crafted keywords vying to catch the attention of a search engine.
What-If Web 3.0 Marketing Wish
As long as we're looking ahead at an ideal and effective Web for marketing, how about a wish for what we'd get out of it, in addition to more effective marketing:
* Pay For Clicks Only When Paid By Clicker: Commission your advertising placement service on your actual sales, not just click-throughs: that'll solve click-fraud pretty quickly.
Not likely – but then neither was pay-per-click.
What goes for your customers will go for your sales force as well. Prospecting for customers will become a far more automated, and far more efficient process, again based on the various systems' deeper relationships with what you sell and what specific customers — from individual consumers to enterprise purchasing agents — want.
Financial reports, taxes, and compliance regulations are all items ideally suited for content-smart applications and processes. We're already starting to see some Semantic Web tools applied to compliance matters, and that's likely to become far more common and also a major business category for both software developers and business service companies.
Imagine, for instance, your company employing software that not only tracks your sales, inventory, costs, etc., but also constantly coordinates and communicates with appropriate regulatory bodies, financial institutions, revenue-collection agencies, counselors to your business, and so on. You'd undoubtedly be no less annoyed by the regulations – but you'd be far less worried about violating them, too.
Don't Miss: Part 1 -- Where We've Been And Where We Are: Web 1.0 and 2.0
Don't Miss: Part 3 -- Web 3.0: The Risks and the Rewards
Keith Ferrell is the author of a dozen books and countless magazine and newspaper articles. The editor of OMNI Magazine from 1990-1996, he also is a frequent speaker to corporate and institutional audiences.
