Ron Belanger of Yahoo! summarizes web 2.0 nicely – it’s about consumers collaborating and sharing content.
In his talk, he stressed that today’s consumer “2.0″ is overworked and overwhelmed with information. Yet they’re addicted to leisure and spend 8% of their budgets on leisure activities. These consumers are information junkies who rely on search not solely to find stuff but also to navigate the web. They are master multi-taskers, consuming more media than every, though because they multi-task, they’re far less focused. They’re also content creators – 12 million Americans blog and millions of others upload pictures and video to sites like Flickr and YouTube. They are passionate about sharing their opinions and views.
As an advertiser, how can you tap into the creativity of consumer 2.0? First, you must identify your best consumers and listen to what they’re saying. Based on that, you can start collaborating with them by giving them tools to share what they’re already passionate about.
For instance, you’ve probably heard Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie song. To promote it, Yahoo asked Yahoo! music users and members of Shakira’s mailing list to create a 30 second video using the song. They got 10,000 responses and the video they spliced together from all the footage quickly became the #1 most downloaded video across Yahoo music. Here’s the video:
The campaign helped to extend the song’s popularity, keeping it in people’s minds far longer than a normal pop song.
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