The Impact of Web 3.0 on Marketing Essay Example for Free

The Impact of Web 3.0 on Marketing Essay The future of the Internet is in Web 3.0, known as the Semantic Web. Feigenbaum, Herman, Hongsermeier, Neumann and Stephens (2007) summarised the concept as â€Å"a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine†. The authors, referring to a 2001 article by Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila about their vision on Web 3.0, also said Berners-Lee et al: painted a future of intelligent software agents that would head out on the World Wide Web and automatically book flights and hotels for our trips, update our medical records and give us a single, customized answer to a particular question without our having to search for information or pore through results. This means online sites and databases already contain information about individuals’ culture, travel, health and education. In Web 3.0, individuals’ habits and preferences are known. The technology of Web 3.0 is ‘smart’ in using the data to drill down key choices to individuals, thereby saving Web 3.0 users time and effort in searching for information and in making decisions. Web 3.0 is however not a product separate from its previous ‘incarnations’. Instead, it is an extension or an enhancement of the current Web. The World Wide Web Consortium has already released Semantic Web technologies and languages for the different sites and databases to ‘talk’ and generate results in a unified manner for Web users. In contrast, Web 1.0 was just about linking Web pages with hyperlinks. Web 2.0 is where we are now—the consumer and producer of information are increasingly the same person, sharing views and new ideas with fellow netizens (sometimes anonymously). Web 3.0 is the â€Å"convergence of new technologies and rapidly changing consumer buying trends†, having overcome some of Web 2.0’s limiting factors such as presenting the audience with too much information, which Tasner (2010) argues, distracts us. Advertising has accordingly evolved from placements in newspapers, magazines, radio, signs and from the 1930s, on television. When the Internet came to wide use in industrialised societies in the mid-1990s, marketers advertised online through banners or interstitials (among others) and refined their search engine optimisation so the brands’ Web links appear at the top of search results. Functions of Web 3.0 Although Web 3.0 is not widely utilized, the technology is already in use (Ohler, 2010). Smith (2009) speaks of Web 3.0 as sophisticated, intelligent software that can learn, understand and make decisions. For example, Web 3.0 can trace online materials, analyze the popularity of content and draw conclusions. It will filter and refine the users’ online searches. This idea is also echoed by Reh (2011), who says Web 3.0 will be able to extract feedback on products, services or organizations that have been posted on blogs and online forums, for example. Organizations can then develop Web pages specifically aligned with their customers’ needs (Reh, 2011). This saves time and cost for the organization. The norm is that an organization would track online traffic by the number or pattern of clicks on its website and get feedback from surveys in order to predict what its customers want. Web 3.0 will empower marketers by allowing them to target products and create specific marketing messages for particular customers more intuitively. Advertising might turn out to be less effective and marketers will need to rely on their merits and not on what they claim (Smith, 2009). In an article by Baumann (2009), Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Radar Networks views Web 3.0 as an upgrade of Web infrastructure. He says the focus will be on the back-end of the Web, where final processing of the data occurs. An upgrade of the databases and data stores will increase efficiency and make searches faster. Time-consuming tasks such as searching and compiling currently done by netizens will eventually be taken over by computers in the future. Web 3.0 applications will have the capacity to run on any device, be it a computer or the mobile phone. These applications will be speedy and customizable (Cho, 2008). Theoretical framework For the purpose of this research paper, we will be adopting the Co-creation method as the theoretical framework. According to Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004), it is the process whereby consumers take an active role and co-create value together with the company. With the impending rise of Web 3.0, the framework has provided companies with unique and inventive opportunities to capitalise on consumers’ innovative potential. This has resulted in various approaches to collaborate with consumers during the entire value chain. Most often co-creation occurs during the innovation process, referring to joint product development activities such as generating and evaluating new product ideas; elaborating, evaluating, or challenging product concepts; and creating virtual prototypes (Fueller, Matzler, Stieger, Kohler, 2011). Cost-efficient and multimedia-rich interaction opportunities offered by the Internet and the existence of online communities have made virtual co-creation a suitable means of creating value and improving the overall success of new products. Information technology enables new forms of producer-consumer collaboration in new product development processes (Fuller, Muhlbacher, Matzler, Jawecki, 2009). With Web 3.0, social interaction drives business operations (Laurent, 2010). We infer that marketers will take advantage of this because a Web 3.0 browser would have learned a customer’s likes and dislikes. The more interaction a user has with the Internet, the more the browser would learn about him/her to predict future behaviours and consumption patterns, putting the user in touch with people who share his/her interests and aspirations (Kumar, 2009). Consumer co-creation, in which consumers participate creatively in the production of content and innovation of services, has arisen because of consumers’ greater access to the â€Å"means of production† through information and communication technologies (Lundvall and Johnson, 1994). It aligns to the shift from producer-centric to consumer-centric innovation. Consumers are not just engaging in production, but also in dynamic production, or innovation (Potts, 2008). This is facilitated by the same forces that are increasingly delivering productive capabilities into the hands of consumers, and is occurring with ever higher quality, at ever lower costs, and on an ever increasing global market into which particular consumer specializations can find a â€Å"producer† niche (Potts, 2008). According to Fuller (2004), consumers are considered a valuable source of innovation. Researchers as well as consultants claim to virtually engage consumers in co-creation activities s uch as generating, designing, refining and testing ideas and new product concepts. They do this in order to develop new products and services that better meet consumers’ wants and needs and to decrease the high failure rates of new product introductions, especially prevalent in the consumer goods sectors. The novelty of virtual co-creation compared to conventional customer integration is that consumers are not only asked about their opinions, desires, and needs, but also are asked to contribute their creativity and problem-solving skills. Consumers therefore take on the role of co-creators (Fuller, 2010). In this paper, we will apply the co-creation framework to address the following research questions: †¢ How will marketers now skew their marketing strategy to maximise on Web 3.0? †¢ Will online marketing efforts move towards targeting social networking sites only? †¢ Will online marketing efforts now be shaped by customers? †¢ What is the impact of privacy issues on marketing efforts? We infer that as the opportunity arises to innovate, along with further development of social networking characteristics of Web 3.0, online marketers will have to look to consumers’ insights when it comes to shaping their online business models. As set out above, it is an inc entive for consumers to have a say in how they experience their shopping online. Marketing strategies on Web 3.0 With Web 3.0, social interaction drives business operations (Laurent, 2010). We infer that marketers will take advantage of this because a Web 3.0 browser would have learned a customer’s likes and dislikes. The more interaction a user has with the Internet, the more the browser would learn about him/her to predict future behaviors and consumption patterns, putting the user in touch with people who share his/her interests and aspirations (Kumar, 2009). Mobile technology, too, will advance with Web 3.0 where advertising will explode, as Web-based advertising allows for rich, engaging ads (Kurtyka, 2007). Zoetrope is one of the early users of Web 3.0 technology. Using the Zoetrope interface, a user could compare historical changes of various data through time by comparing snapshots of different pages on the Web. Analyzing different and changing elements on Web pages over a period of time is downright difficult today, if not impossible. But Zoetrope makes it happen. The headlines of, say, today’s Straits Times homepage will be gone tomorrow, and yesterday’s price for a pair of jeans on ASOS is likely irretrievable today. This means that marketers can now see the key words trend or correlate the relationship between products, consumer needs and brand names over a period of time. By using this technology, they can now provide better information to searchers overall. By using snapshots of their competitors’ link profiles over time, marketers will able to find out whether their competitors are out-linking them. U.S. retailer Best Buy is using a Semantic Web markup language called RDFa to increase the visibility of its products and services online. With data such as store name, address, store hours and geographical data being marked up using RDFa, search engines can identify each data component more easily and put them into context. The use of semantic technology led to increased traffic and better service to its customers (MacManus, 2010). Meanwhile, marketers will face the challenge of having to be more creative in their strategies (Cobe, 2007). They would need to constantly update themselves abo ut their customers’ preferences and develop their software for user interface feasibility, functions and so on, to keep up with customer’s spending needs (Smith, 2009). Research using Web 3.0 may take the shape of working with consumers to build a co-managed interactive feedback/preemptive mechanism. The essential 4P’s of marketing — product, price, placement and promotion — will be affected by linked data. Linked data come about when information is marked up in standardized, highly structured formats such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), allowing computers to better understand the meaning of content, rather than simply matching on strings of text (Byrne and Goddard, 2010). So the real power of the Semantic Web, as Byrne and Goddard note, lies in the ability of â€Å"intelligent† search engines to disambiguate terms (Apple the computer vs. apple the fruit, for example), to understand the relationships between different entities, and to bring that information together in new ways to answer queries. How then will marketers skew their marketing strategy to maximise Web 3.0? Marketers love data and they will use these â€Å"free† data to do market research, Web analytics and customer relationship management records. As marketers, they will b e able to use this data to advance market research and product development. With the Semantic Web, they can easily make correlations and connections between the audience and the brand far more deeply than before. This in turn will empower marketers to be more targeted in messaging, more efficient in reaching their customers and more relatable as brands. Besides providing more meaningful information for consumers, marketers will gain from enhancing search engine optimization as well. With the consumers’ online search patterns on hand, marketers can add search-engine-friendly structured data to their websites, resulting a more relevant search, hence generating a better listing, more clicks and more traffic. At the same time, word-of-mouth sharing, syndication of Web content to other online sites, feedback and social groups will have a role in spreading memes. The newest innovation by Facebook, called Open Graph, is a good example. Facebook users will be able to instantly share activities with their friends through applications without being required to grant the apps permission each time. As a result, Facebook users will be sharing more data with friends, Facebook, and marketing companie s than ever before. The goal is to send everything a user does, everywhere on the Web, to Facebook. Guess (2011) notes that Open Graph allows the Web to evolve into the Semantic Web, where experiences are personalised and needs anticipated based on user data. Users are highly likely to love this they will be seeing what they prefer . Engagement with customers is high and they will more likely to be interacting with product brands. With this, marketers will need a tool that can measure the sentiment of an article or comment, who it came from and who it was directed to. It will also be good to measure the connections between community members and between people and concepts. By looking at both trending and popular dialogue, marketers can tell if their brands have sparked robust exchange online. While Web 3.0 offers all the gears for marketers to become better at their game and to measure the effectiveness of campaigns more completely, it also makes marketers less relevant. The content is crucial but the message or is no longer being told alone by marketers. It is in the social graphs and others’ perception of the brands’ ranking in importance through linked data. For survival, marketers must embrace collaboration and innovation, be transparent and continue to harvest content of value. Moving towards social networking Web 3.0 represents a shift in how people interact with the Web and vice versa. Standards are continually being created to make Web-based data and information smarter. Mobile devices are becoming more powerful and versatile, making almost any kind of Internet activity available on the go. Immersive and virtual environments are becoming richer, more complex, and as applications become smarter, the Internet experience will become more immersive (Green, 2011). According to Manas (2009), social media are no longer reserved for teenagers discussing the latest fads — they have become a tool that will either help or harm a business, depending on how they are utilised. Manas reasons that businesses should take advantage of Web 3.0, as rather than just responding to queries, a search engine will try to understand a consumer’s nature, social footprint and sentiments, before it gives a response. While scouring the Net for people, places, and things and determining the relationships between them, new search engine technology can understand the feelings associated with them, positive or negative. However, he advised businesses to be discerning about which platforms to use as there are more than 100 social media platforms, each with its own flavour — some users like Facebook, others like Bebo, and another group is more into MySpace. Customer integration can be much more than merely access to the right information. It can be defined as a form of value creation where the consumers take part in activities and processes which used to be seen as the domain of the companies (Wikstrom, 1996). The customer becomes a ‘co-producer’ and from a producer perspective, the customer is seen as tasks in a production system (Ramirez, 1999). In a case study of Nike made by Ramaswamy (2008), the article discussed how to co-create value through customers experiences in the context of the innovation and marketing processes of Nike. It provided details on Nikes social networking site, Joga.com, where individuals can upload videos of their soccer skills and the network community can judge a monthly winner. Other marketing initiatives of the company include street soccer competition sponsorships, a website where professional soccer players can interact with fans and conventional Internet marketing program sponsorships (Ramaswamy, 2008).