Yesterday I went to a concert. One of my favorite bands was playing in town and I couldn’t miss it. You are probably wondering what this has to do with a web marketing blog. Here it is: I knew about this date on Facebook. And not by chance.

In fact I received an alert from a music app which knew two key factors: 1) I like this band; 2) the city I live in. Facebook never needed to ask that information to me. I told it everything spontaneously. I did it because I want people to know where I live in order to allow them finding me by place. And I told them my music favorites because I want visitors of my profile to know which music I like (actually I think music is one of the best match making factors).

These are probably the main differences between modern web marketing and old web marketing techniques. And this is probably why Facebook is valued 15 billion dollars and many other companies are raising huge funds everyday, as in a new dotcom bubble.

But this is no bubble. Developers such as Mark Zuckenberg have found new, smart ways to profile their users (a condicio sine qua non for marketers). Nowadays you sign up on Facebook with your real name, you fill in real info about you, and you have tons of applications related to movies, music, favorite drinks and quizzes in general which are all games people play eagerly. Not minding about the fact that while you play Facebook gathers information about you and profiles you in detail. In the beginning of the social internet most applications didn’t even know the real names of their users since every info was fake. The result is: Facebook knows my music tastes exactly!

On the other hand marketers have refined the ways in which they store and process those data. Nothing is left out and everything is used to feed the marketing strategies of hungry investors starving for new targets.

Marketers have access to a “breadth and depth of information” unimaginabile before (remember Epic?).

The managers of my favorite artists know where I live and simply have to match the artist’s tour dates with their customer base. Once they’ve done that they just have to send one message at the right time, and the result is: me buying the ticket and thanking Facebook for the useful information (the show was awesome and I had a wonderful time!).

These are useful pieces of advertisement because they are really relevant for the customer. And his is exactly the aim of marketers: not bother targets with “noise” (unrelevant messages) or spam, but give them useful information which have a higher probability of turning into a sell. This is the only way they have to increase revenues from their investors.

The end result is a happy customer (me) a bigger audience for the artist, a richer investor and… Facebook being valued 15 billions!

This is marketing 2.0, and it is no bubble.

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