Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 1. The Web Is Not a Channel (And You're an Aggregator, not a Broadcaster)

Learning to market to the social web requires learning a new way to communicate with an audience in a digital environment. It's that simple.

It does not require executives to forget everything they know about marketing. It does mean that they have to open their minds to new possibilities, social change, and rethinking past practices. In the pages ahead, I look at what we can learn about these new possibilities and what the social web is all about.

Instead of continuing as broadcasters, marketers should—and will—become aggregators of customer communities. Rather than broadcasting marketing messages to an increasingly indifferent, even resentful, audience jaded by the 2,000-plus messages the average American is reportedly exposed to every day, marketers should participate in, organize, and encourage social networks to which people want to belong. Rather than talking at customers, marketers should talk with them. And the social web is the most effective way in the history of the world to do just that on a large scale.

The social web is the online place where people with a common interest can gather to share thoughts, comments, and opinions. It includes social networks such as MySpace, Gather, Facebook, BlackPlanet, Eons, LinkedIn, and hundreds (actually, as we'll see, hundreds of thousands) more. It includes branded web destinations like Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. It includes enterprise sites such as IBM, ...