Why we try to ban web2.0 from presentations

Back in december 2005 we organised the first Belgian seminar in which we introduced the web2.0 revolution within the Belgian marketing world. Even back then I remember I had to address the early anti-web2.0 thinkers who already found this whole thing to be a hype. Man, these anti-Web2.0 guys were very edgy back than!  However, I always defended the use of the web2.0 concept, because I was convinced that behind the hype, there's some really interesting disruptive thinking about the very nature of the medium. Web2.0 is useful as a semantic concept, because of the ability it gives you to compare it with web1.0.

However, when preparing my presentations for the Jos Willems Chair and the Belgian Broadband Platform Symposium this week,  I realised that this is not 2005 anymore and that the landscape underwent some major changes:

• Every speaker at seminars starts his presentation with the essence of web2.0 (you know which slide I'm talking about)
• Everybody knows about the basic premisses of web2.0 by now... and those who don't are simply not ready for it.
• There's a huge web2.0 suspicion amongst advertisers. Not in the least because there are too many people trying to convince them to disrupt everything they do and start to think about communication and CRM in a radical new way

The concept was so good that it eventually became useless... at least for an agency like ours. Because in the end we're not selling the big idea, we're selling advertising, marketing and communication projects to clients. That's why I am moving from web2.0 over "marketing 2.0" towards "marketing in the conversation era". And that's the very essence of what web2.0 implies for marketing: dealing with the fact that the real power on the web lays within the conversations that are going on in blogs, fora, mails, review sites, comparison shopping sites, etc...