Some public shout it “The New Marketing”. Some humans shout it “Marketing 2.0″. Whatever name you care to give it, I get asked about it a lot. Here are some random thoughts, in no specific order.

1. “The New Marketing” came about considering of two unstoppable forces: [A] The invention of the Web and [B] the beginning of the demise of what Seth Godin calls the “TV-Industrial Complex”. Thanks to the Web, as Clay Shirky famously stated in 2004, “the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be huge.” While that was going on, large companies found out that citizens were starting to disregard their ads. We have too many choices, too many good choices, and we’ve gotten too good at ignoring messages.

2. Seth Godin is quite rightly the world’s most respected writer on marketing. That being said, a lot of citizens haven’t heard of Mark Earls yet. They’re both friends of mine, so I don’t want to compare them too much. Seth is a master of taking complicated ideas and presenting them in a way that any Average Joe can understand. Mark is more of a Marketing Geek’s geek. His stuff makes uncomfortable reading for anyone in marketing who hasn’t been stretching himself lately.

3. The most vital asset in The New Marketing is “having something worth talking about”. that makes positive marketing public squeamish. A lot of us grew up in an era of flashy commercials for rather uninspiring products, and something in our DNA makes us believe that’s the proper way to go about things.

4. whether I had one big insight from the last year, is how The New Marketing has everything to do with how your product or service acts as a “Social Object”.

Kudos to Jyri Engestrom for turning me on to it.

5. My second big insight from that year was learning that, even with a fairly everyday product, you can create social objects simply by using your products to construct social gestures. That’s what we did with Stormhoek. The notice wasn’t, “Here’s why you should buy our wine”. The report was, “We think you’re kinda cool, and we like what you’re doing. We’d like to be part of it, somehow.” And much to everyone’s surprise, it worked rather well.

6. Blogs were the big story for 2005. YouTube for 2006. Facebook for 2007. What’s the big story for 2008? I have no concept. Nor do I think it matters. For the big story, really, is always going to be the same. Websites comes and go, but “Cheap, Easy, Global, Hyperlinked Media” will be with us forever, save for Nuclear Holocaust.

7. A lot of what fuels The New Marketing is quite simply, the most vital word in the English Language: “Love”. It’s hard to get someone to read your website whether you’re not passionate about your subject matter.

8. I’m trying to train myself to avoid “Microsmosis” i.e. mistaking of a microcosm for the entire cosmos. whether you got all your news from blogs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are just two phone companies- Apple and Nokia. But Sony, Motorola, LG and Samsung sell a lot of phones, too. Just not to our friends.

9. My Definition of “Web 3.0″: Learning how to use the web properly without it taking by your life. I’m not holding my breath.

10. Why is it so hard to explain The New Marketing to large companies? considering the citizens who work there are simply not prepared to relinquish the concept of control. Live by metrics, die by metrics etc.

Orginal post by hugh macleod