The more I use the term Word of Mouth Marketing, the more I think I should really be callling it "Learning how to leverage the many-to-many nature of the Internet for marketing purposes". I see Word of Mouth being used to define practices that have been around for the past 50 years, and some people there's anything really new going on. Why all this hype about giving out free samples in front of movie theatres? Weren't they doing that when I was a kid? And so on.
Web 2.0 is good shorthand teminology for "leveraging many-to-many communications online". Unfortunately lots of people don't understand that term that well either. Wikipedia has a good definition right now, although it's pretty long. So, here's to Web Marketing 2.0, the transition from "broadcast advertising" to "building many-to-many customer enthusiasm about products and services". I've seen a bunch of companies having a really hard time with it so far.
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