Apart from the large social networks which try to be everything to everybody, niche sites are having a hard time tapping in to the social marketing mix. This is partly due do the lack of data portability but also because of the absence of permission systems. Services like friendconnect and so on are going to tackle the former but the latter is going to be the killer that needs to be solved. If you have no way of telling the social mesh who gets to see what (of your data) than I’m afraid opting out is going to be the only viable alternative.

At the birth of the web, the idea (or, the idea I had) was that everyone would be posting their own web pages. Communication would be democratized.

No one would be just a reader, they’d all be readers and writers. A different version of your picture could show that: one-way communication in and one-way communication out. (Non-web technologies such as Usenet discussion groups could further complicate the picture since they enabled public Internet conversation.)

Alas, it became clear that there would be distinct publishers and consumers in Web 1.0, with most consumers not also publishing. It was idealistic to think that everyone wanted web pages of their own in this sense, or not to realize that publishers and advertisers would push their agendas into the new media.

Web 2.0 isn’t just an attempt to make it easier for everyone to have a web page of their own.

It allows a much wider range of participation, as illustrated by another powerful picture from Forrester’s Social Technographics report. Hopefully it continues to force change in marketing and advertising.

Sometimes, a couple of pictures really is worth a few thousand words.

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@Graham Strong, Direct Mail gets high response rates because it is so personalized, well tested and targeted. The expense of producing and sending the pieces is so great, they’d never show a return without that level of optimization, and they’ve had many years to perfect their techniques.

I am surprised at the stats though. Direct mail still leads the pack in terms of response rate (while the lowly-old banner ad, apparently, has a response rate somewhere around 0.2%…) But I do think this is where the future, including those mini-sites that are popping up all over the place.

Interactivity, in my mind, is what the Internet is all about. I think it is going to happen anyway (that’s the social media part) but the trick for social marketers is to somehow direct the conversation. And as consumers become more savvy (and more jaded) I think the challenge increases, not decreases, as social media progresses.

Thanks for providing a positive viewpoint!

~Graham