EW-HW1_Questions

[|Andreas Weigend] Spring 2009-B EWMBA 267 Haas School of Business University of California at Berkeley
 * Marketing 2.x: The Social Data Revolution**

Homework 1 for EWMBA students (not for full time MBA students)
Please integrate your thoughts by editing this page http://haas2009.wikispaces.com/EW-HW1_Questions.I will look at whatever is on the page on Saturday April 4 afternoon, the day before our first class.Please do not email me your individual answers.

Questions
1. What questions about Marketing 2.x do you hope to get answered in the two days? 2. What do you not want to see discussed in class, if anything? 3. What do you think is the largest difference in marketing now compared to a decade ago, and what are the reasons? 4. If you could invite a guest speaker to the second day of class, who would it be? What would you like them to focus on? 5. What exciting startups have you heard about that might be of interest to the class?

//Before continuing and reading what others put down, please take the time to come up with your own answers. Crowdsourcing needs sufficient independence -- the class has a wonderful mix of backgrounds, which is great for this topic. and i want to make sure the students can bring in relevant experiences. If you want to be known that it was you who added a certain point, add your name.//

1. What questions about Marketing 2.x do you hope to get answered in the two days?

 * How to get attention from potential customers.
 * Best practices and/or innovative ideas for non-profit fundraising and program delivery and Web 2.0 in general.
 * What things should we avoid when doing Web 2.x? Where does Web 2.x not work?
 * How are traditional media going to be impacted - complemented/ replaced in the future?
 * How is traditional marketing different from 2.x
 * How do we balance customer acquisition and monetization in Web 2.0?
 * How does a startup with limited resource light the fire under viral marketing?
 * Why has Facebook taken off while others have come and gone, treated as fads? Is Facebook really making any money? Why the executive exodus?
 * How widespread will the impacts be for Marketing in Web 2.0 in terms of industries and types of customer transactions (e.g. B2B)?
 * What kind of adjustments need to be made to Marketing in Web 2.0 to address the customers in countries like India and China with a vast digital inequality?
 * How is Corporate America embracing Web 2.0 ? What are some special challenges one can expect in this space ?
 * What can we expect beyond Web 2.0 ?
 * Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, Delicious....Is Web 2.0 causing an information overload ? How can we prevent our marketing message from getting lost in the new world order ?
 * How to address new and viral distribution channels such as mobile phones?
 * As more and more customer information is available for search through Twitter and Facebook, how do businesses apply targeted marketing in a way which does not raise privacy concerns and cause a backlash with their consumer base?
 * How do you measure success in Web 2.0?
 * Are online products such as Facebook's Gifts ($1 and $2 gifts to exchange with friends), avatars, and other "micro-gifts" a sustainable business model? Will "micro-gifting" become a norm in the future, with users making several small $1-$2 purchases?
 * Are there more ways for web2.0 make money other than through commercial ads? Will user willing to pay for more any value added service through the website?
 * I recently read an article that incentive based marketing services like Super Rewards don't create long term customers, and in fact improperly incentivize customers for short term gains to them. Of course, there are companies on FB that applaud the revenues they gain through such services. Thoughts? Is the short term tradeoff worth it in the long run?
 * after day 1, still not quite clear how some companies can truly take advantage of web 2.0 to market their products. it's one thing for retail or online retail to do it, but what about companies that are not selling directly to consumers? how would they generate excitement and have people talk about/review their products/services?
 * we talked about web 2.0 marketing not replacing traditional offline/online marketing. but companies are always looking for the best way to market that would give the highest ROI. how would a company make the comparison and judgment on whether or not they need to toggle heavily to web 2.0, or stay the course?
 * Case studies, 2 or 3 examples of an integrated marketing campaign of companies who offer service and/or products using Web 2.0 as"one"of the marketing initiative tools. I would like to see it in action.
 * Useful framework: What has changed, what has not changed? (Including

2. What do you not want to see discussed in class, if anything?

 * I'd like to see more about established companies marketing on social network platforms. Lots of companies, including my company Novartis, has an FB page. But that in no way means that they are successfully leveraging FB to drive sales, recruit personnel, etc. How can mature companies better use social networks to drive their own sales? Conversely, do you envision that social networks will begin to offer enterprise marketing solutions to big companies?
 * With the limited time and the ROI I want to get in this class, individual conversations between students or between professor and student have to be reduced in the second class.

3. What do you think is the largest difference in marketing now compared to a decade ago, and what are the reasons?

 * The social data revolution: individuals publicly share lots of previously private data about themselves, their situation / state, their intent, and also about their friends. A reason is that the cost of communication to the world he gone to zero.
 * Also, the data revolution has resulted in the ability to send out targeted messages down to a personal level (that is marketing today can be customized based on much more unique customer data than was available in the past).
 * //Yet, the concept of targeting, or interrupt marketing, might lose its power as people are no longer centrally reachable//
 * Lot more consumer involvement in the process of product development
 * Losing relevance of traditional advertising media as market educators- Internet facilitating knowledge sharing . Consumer in any remote location has same information about a new product as a consumer here in Silicon Valley
 * Consumers have learnt to filter out marketing messages due to too much bombardment information so more reliance on close network of physically close people for advice
 * Marketing, //and probably the entire decision making process of both company and consumers,// is more data driven than before. Merely presenting an ad in mass media is not enough. It has to be accompanied by reviews, recommendation from trusted and untrusted sources.
 * Companies have far more information today than they did a decade ago. //Abd so do their competitors!//
 * Push vs Pull - In the past, marketing was predominantly a push strategy where mass media tried to carpet-bomb end consumers. Slowly, this has morphed into a pull-based process where consumers have the ability to pick and choose marketing messages.
 * Feedback - Consumers are able to provide feedback directly and instantaneously to product messaging. This facilitates the process of self-correction for most public content.
 * In spite of a lot of new advertisement channels, traditional advertising channels such as TV still lead to the highest conversion to sales. Expectation of sales conversion from channels such as mobile advertising is low, rather awareness is what companies are after- is this sustainable?
 * Marketing channels have increased in the recent past. Online/Web-based marketing are becoming relevant to more & more companies.
 * Platforms. Companies used to say because they had a website meant they were doing business online, which was naive. Now, companies say the same thing about social networks, but the reality is that they have not even begun to remotely tap the huge potential social networks could provide as a marketing channel.
 * **Speed and reach of information flow** increased dramatically. Consumers are now able to make much more informed decisions before making a purchase. Instead of just relying on a sales rep at a retail store or drive around to compare items, now they can research the product, compare features and benefits, read other consumers reviews, compare prices all before they make that purchase. so the point of influence is moved upstream way before the point of sales.

4. If you could invite a guest speaker to the second day of class, who would it be? What would you like them to focus on?

 * As per weigend.com/teaching/haas we have Bjorn Woltermann on the first day and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Social Media at the second day. There is space for one more speaker on Day 2.
 * Someone from MySpace with a hindsight view.
 * Someone who uses Marketing 2.x successfully in the non-profit space.
 * Someone from Ning
 * Key strategist from Yahoo
 * Someone from LinkedIn
 * Someone from Appirio who is working with Facebook to develop an enterprise product
 * Someone from a non-social networking company, preferably a large enterprise, who leveraged web 2.0 technology to create, improve, and market a product successfully

5. What exciting startups have you heard about that might be of interest to the class?

 * MrTweet helping you discover people to follow on Twitter
 * CoTweet - How business does twitter.
 * MobiChange: mobichange.org (Using Mobile Social Networking for mobilizing social change)
 * My company Embee Mobile - we need help developing a web 2.0 marketing strategy