People now have access to so much content — and have so many ways to gather news and information — that the likelihood of your corporate message penetrating the clutter is virtually nil. Instead, if you engage the audience in a conversation and learn what the social community is looking for and concerned about, you might be able to persuade them to hear your message. In other words…

“There is no market for your message.”

David Weinberger
2007 New Communications Forum Lecture

Let’s take a big step back for a moment and realize how selling on the Web is quickly becoming less about marketers’ supply meeting up with customers’ demand, and more about customers themselves actively bringing their demand toward supply. In fact, they’re CREATING supply in many cases… and taking action to monetize that supply in a niche community setting. That should sound familiar to Revenews readers

Given the Web’s increasingly social nature, today’s customers are increasingly bypassing “interceptive” strategies like search and, yes, affiliate marketing. No, affiliate marketing isn’t dying or threatened but it IS challenged to change. How? Affiliates are being asked to do more than just shuttle traffic and get ‘in between’ demand and supply.

Similarly, affiliate networks are challenged to house more than just ‘helpful interceptors’ (search affiliates) or partners that provide access to incentivized yet existing customers (coupon and loyalty shopping partners). Marketers expect networks to provide value-added resellers. Or as Revenews blogger, David Lewis refers to them, “value added pre-sellers.” Affiliates that go the extra mile to close the sale — an sale that they, otherwise, wouldn’t otherwise have a chance at. Yet is this expectation of affiliates realistic in a world that loves to shop around? (we’ll revisit the ‘last cookie wins’ issue later… that’s another subject!)

Getting back to the consumers… shoppers are increasingly choosing a variety of non-traditional paths to discover products and services — faster and easier than ever before.

Says Jupiter Research:

Social and community sites affected the purchase decisions of 51% of online shoppers aged 18-24. This is far beyond any other age group, which averaged less than 26%. A total of 36% of online shoppers influenced by social/community sites said they buy offline even though they use online social/community sites to make their decisions.

So what’s a savvy marketer to do?

The answer may seem radical. Today’s marketers must help customers find, consider and purchase products and services by creating authentic digital experiences. That’s the new twist – and it’s not just a load of hyped-up social media spin.

This new experience-based paradigm will be fueled by the recently announced Data Portability Working Group. This consortium of unlikely partners (including Plaxo, LinkedIn, Google, Sixapart, Facebook and Yahoo’s Flickr) are banding together to ensure users of the “social Web” can have power over the data they’re putting out there. By making sure social media sites and services are inter-operable the user experience becomes simple, the social information portable and shared. It’s the first step toward providing marketers with a serious “social marketing platform.”

How exciting is that?! Well, perhaps it’s just a pipe dream given how things are playing out. Open source sounds great but it requires everyone to actually get along! What do you think?

Read more here:
Customer Acquisition 2.0: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Game