What distinguishes Web 1.0 from Web 2.0 and the now imminent Web 3.0? The way in which users get and use the online information and how marketing professionals can derive information from this and take action. Web 1.0 was mainly a web for reading - it was static and somewhat mono-directional. Businesses presented their products and users read and, sometimes, contacted them. Ignoring the medium itself, it was more or less like an advertisement on the street or in a newspaper. It was Web 2.0 that changed user behaviour. With reading as well as writing, the web has become bi-directional. You read, but you also write. You can generate content (so-called user-generated content). Businesses must adapt to this as they're no longer the only ones ‘invested' with the power to disseminate information online. For marketing professionals, this is one of the biggest opportunities ever, and not at all the problem that it is sometimes regarded as. Web 3.0 will be (is?) the semantic web, that is, the meaning of the data is defined. It will be about personalization (e.g. iGoogle), behavioural advertising (smart, targeted advertising) and intelligent searches (e.g. the latest search engine on the web, Bing, calls itself a ‘decision' engine). For marketing professionals, the times are, and will, be good. There's no doubt. Web monitoring, Web 2.0, social media marketing, listen & act.

For marketing managers, talking about measurements of ‘quantity' in reference to social media marketing campaigns or the web in general is certainly easier, not to mention less uncomfortable, than talking about ‘quality'. But if you think about it - particularly in connection with social media marketing - measuring quantity in terms of the number of clicks or impressions says very little in terms of the results of a campaign. Put simply, they can give an indication of the volume that a campaign has produced but certainly not a measurement of how effective it has been. A recent Forrester research study revealed just this: marketing managers still rely more on measurements of quantity rather than quality. The reason is obvious: it's easier and more tangible to measure clicks and impressions. The Forrester research study also indicates, however, that growing numbers of businesses are moving towards KPIs that measure the brand engagement of users and brand advocacy in conjunction with more traditional quantitative measures. Only by adopting KPIs for their marketing campaigns that take these qualitative aspects into account, therefore, is it possible to determine their effectiveness. In short, clicks no longer count!

With the development of forums, blogs, micro blogs, and social networking sites, businesses must start thinking about CRM from a different perspective. People are now looking for help in ways that up until a few years ago were unthinkable. Blogger Jessica Gottlieb, for example, was sitting at JFK Airport in New York waiting for her children's flight to arrive. Since she hadn't got any news about the flight delay from the channels available at the airport, she tweeted her ten thousand-odd Twitter followers and explained the situation. A little later, the airline called her to reassure her about her children's flight. If this isn't on-the-spot CRM...

Can you use direct marketing on social networking sites? There's no doubt that direct marketing, perhaps using an anonymous or visibly impersonal account, aimed at advertising a product on social networking sites is definitely a bad more from every perspective. But can social media marketing benefit from direct marketing? The key thing is probably to first build a relationship of trust with the social networking site users and not just dive in straight away with sales messages. Once the relationship has been established and you've won the confidence of users, then more direct messages designed to sell products will be accepted by the community, because trust has been established. But if you think that social media marketing can be used in the same was as direct marketing, identifying target markets and sending out direct sales messages... Well, you are very much mistaken and any social media marketing strategy that you come up with will crash and burn.

Anyone who's been in marketing for a while knows all about the 4 Ps: product, pricing, placement, promotion. Of course. For many, they're the underpinnings of marketing and still remain a point of reference. But social media marketing involves another P, that is, a fifth P: people. Never as much as in social media marketing has the starting point been people, that is, what they say and the opinions they share. Many people still think that all you need is a well-put together company website, a few leaflets, and some banners to bring in sales and profits. They're quite wrong. It's time to stat thinking about the fifth P, the semantic web, social media, search engines, hunches...

This is the promise of Hunch - the new... search engine? Service? What is it? - online for only a few days and set up by the people who started Flickr. So, how does it work? It promises to be able to respond to a variety needs based on the collected profiles and preferences expressed by community members. You begin with a profiling questionnaire of 20 questions - ranging from which paintings you prefer to your favourite chips - so the engine can ‘understand' something about you. Then, on the bass of your questions and the answers provided, the engine compares your profile to that of other community members, with the promise of giving increasingly precise answers as its knowledge about you and the community grows. Is this a step towards the semantic web? Who knows; it's too early to say. It's even too early to say whether Hunch will be successful. This is what they say on their ‘About' page: ‘Hunch is designed so that every time it's used, it learns something new... Hunch's answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people like you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room...' Fair enough... Web 2.0, the semantic web, marketing, behavioural advertising.

Listen. This is possibly the most obvious and most difficult change in mindset that social media marketing requires of businesses. While we're all used to identifying a target market, deciding what to do, what to offer them, and putting together a call-to-action, it's not so easy to do marketing when the first step is listening. Because this means listening before you act - listening to what consumers have to say and the way they recommended products or brands to each other. It's from here that you need to extract the information for taking action. If, then, we step back just a little from the way we're accustomed to thinking about marketing campaigns, we can see that listening to consumers before acting is probably what we've always wanted to do. Certainly, we have tried it. Focus groups, market research and other means have all provided information, but this information has always been incomplete, influenced by context and, by anyone's standards, limited. But what if we'd had the chance to listen to consumers while they were waiting for a bus, having a coffee or eating out with friends? What information could we have picked up for guiding our activities? This is what social media marketing lets us do today, because that's where the conversations between consumers are: they leave traces, and we can identify, track and measure them. And once they've been tracked and measured, we can choose what action to take, how to stimulate consumers both on- and offline. Marketing then becomes a case of listen & act.