Interesting post here. According to HitWise Web 2 sites now account for 12% of all web traffic.  This is a rapid increase during the last 12 months.

Why the popularity? The majority of people are social. They like inter-acting, talking and exchanging information with other people. But what sort of people?

Research has shown we tend to congregate into communities where we can engage with people ‘like ourselves’. These are people we feel we can relate to. People who we feel share our interests, ideas and beliefs. The more we feel we know them the more we feel able to trust them.

We know from other research that people today are more distrustful of ‘authority’ and will more readily seek information, advice and guidance from ‘people like me’. We know that traditional media – print and broadcast – is having trouble maintaining its audience share. Partly because people want to take content as and when they want to and have a wide choice today but also because people are less trustful of traditional information sources. They are happier seeking advice and information from their community sources - from ‘people like me’. Web 2 and social media tools allow people to become content generators. Not everyone wants to. Most people are consumers or commentators on content and not generators. Forrester has completed research into this area and has interesting data and observations.

An article by Dr Paul Marsden also has interesting observations. One comment caught my eye relating to research into the effectiveness of advertising. Although completed in the USA over 60 years ago it has subsequently been supported by further research.

‘... the Columbia University research found....that advertising had absolutely no influence on the vast majority of voters – most people were far more likely to be influenced by the people they knew than by advertising. ‘

So what does this mean in terms of targeting marketing messages?

1.      Engage in conversations with your customers using Web 2 and social media

2.      Identify those who want to act as your evangelists (they will be the ones most receptive to the idea of a conversation with you)

3.      Support those evangelists with special programmes, materials and information (treat them as a VIP fan club)

4.      Identify those people who will also become ‘influential contributors’. They are only slightly less important than evangelists.

5.      The combination of evangelists and influential contributors will drive WOMMA (word-of-mouth/mouse marketing)

6.      The concept of Social Networks will rapidly ‘kick-in’ especially if some of your evangelists and influential contributors are super-connectors (people with lots of social contacts)