Free whitepaper on marketing2.0

I found this very good whitepaper through the emarketer.com newsletter. The whitepaper is called "invisible marketing" and it's published by marketing consultancy firm Marqui.com. In this paper, they hold a strong and convincing ple for rethinking marketing in the conversation era. One of the ideas that struck me as being much overlooked, is the fact that sales departments often know a lot more about the customer conversations than the marketing departement. The paper suggests that businesses should re-align their marketing organizations so that they are more closely connected to —
if not completely intertwined with — sales, customer support, and other critical business units.

This new approach to marketing, call it “Marketing 2.0,” is as much an attitude as it is a set of tools and techniques. This paper offers an introduction to the ideas of Marketing 2.0, grounded in the context of recent technology and marketing history, and provides advice to marketers looking to understand and succeed in the “invisible” domain.

What really makes this paper worth reading is that it places marketing 2.0 in a historical perspective, talking about "marketing 1.0" as being traditional mass marketing (=branding), "Marketing 1.5" as being the one-to-one marketing hype and the permission marketing hype around the millenium (=segmentation & personalisation) and talking about "marketing 2.0" as marketing in a many-to-many context (=conversations & community). What marketers are facing is not only the fact that there are lot's of conversations online, but what's worse: these conversations become visible.And therefore, marketers have far less control over their message.

Download the paper here: http://www.marqui.com/InvisibleMarketing/?tid=EMA (register for free, the paper is 23 pages, pdf required)