A friend and I were joking last week that the next time someone asks, "What is Web 2.0?" we should reply: "A way for young people to make money off old people."
It's a cynical answer, but there's a point. A casualty of the Internet Age is reason; a winner is fear. Change happens so quickly, each micro generation growing up with a better version of the web, that older generations grow increasingly confused and fearful. The result: A 24-year-old agency wunderkind can sit in a meeting and jabber about "social bookmarking" while his older account exec exclaims "you mean you don't have a YouTube?!", and the fearful marketing director will buckle--especially if he was told to "do something with Web 2.0."
Fear need not apply. Web 2.0 a simple phenomenon. You just have to look at it from a psychological (rather than technological) perspective:
No matter how old you are, but especially when you're younger, whom do you trust the most? Your friends. From a marketing perspective, Web 2.0 is simply this: a way to make it easier to trust your friends.
The revolution is real. The younger the person, the less she trusts any authority, at least directly. Today, Facebook is the epicenter of all social interaction. Next year, it might be something else. The point is that the web now gives everybody a powerful stamp of endorsement. If your friends don't endorse the movie, the video game, the political candidate, the car, then neither will you. (That sound you hear is Roger Ebert losing his relevance.)
As a marketer, your job is exactly the same in one way and completely different in another. You still need to influence people. You just have to do it in a different place and in a different way. It's not about shouting from the rooftops. It's about a new concept both shocking and hilarious in its irony: "perceived authenticity."
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