At a recent round table hosted by the ESADE Alumni Marketing Club in Madrid, renowned marketing experts discussed new ways of understanding and applying marketing in the Web 2.0 environment.

Sonia Marzo, Vice President of the ESADE Alumni Marketing Club, opened the session by introducing the speakers and reviewing the club’s objectives. Marc Cortés, Collaborating Lecturer in the Department of Marketing Management at ESADE, gave a talk entitled ‘Web 2.0: From Mass Media to Social Media’. Mr. Cortés began by defining Web 2.0 as a space for sharing ideas: ‘Basically, it is an attitude through which you create, contribute and share content, although the most important things about Web 2.0 are its users, the customers, and their collective intelligence.’ In practice, he explained, content taken to the Internet can ‘create a huge impact, because the rules of the game are changing: we’re moving away from the concept of mass media and towards social media, which is an activity involving online applications and media that allow people to share their knowledge’.

Mr. Cortés observed that companies need to ‘build their presence’ because consumers and producers are merging into a single, active entity: the ‘prosumer’. In terms of communication and marketing, this concept has emerged as social media marketing, which manifests itself in a series of tools (e.g. for publishing, sharing, talking, social networking, nanoblogging, live broadcasting and virtual worlds) that make it possible to manage a presence in the social media.

The second speaker was Juan Luis Polo, Founding Director of Territorio Creativo, who discussed ‘the new rules of relationships and communication’. He drew a contrast between the traditional model and the current consumer-oriented Web 2.0 marketing trends. ‘Companies are now starting to have their own audiences’, he added. This was unimaginable until very recently, he said, because the audiences themselves were in the media that the companies used to conduct their advertising campaigns. According to Mr. Polo, these audiences ‘were forged through conversations with customers’ because users create their own content, mould the brand, and talk directly to brand representatives. ‘Companies that engage in conversation will earn their own space,’ he said. He then listed several steps that companies are taking to adopt a new form of marketing in this changing environment: researching, developing new concepts, participating, developing a digital brand identity, and measuring. ‘The audience that is driving this shift surfs the Internet over breakfast every morning,’ he noted.

The next speaker was Javier Godoy, Strategy Director for Inspiring Move, who talked about ‘creating communities and networks that are appropriate for relationships’. His remarks focused on what is - and what is not - a community. ‘Just because a website has functionalities that allow people to participate, it is not necessarily a community. People create a community,’ explained Mr. Godoy, ‘but they need a social object - that is, something that makes two people speak to each other, a topic that attracts people and makes them value the time they spend on it. Therefore, we must find a social object that interests the people we want to attract.’ When a company tries to build a community space, ‘the host must form part of that community’, he said. ‘The company must encourage the emergence of leaders within the community and give visibility and recognition to people and ideas.’

Mr. Godoy then turned his attention to the subject of brands. He highlighted the importance of building a brand identity - as opposed to a brand image - ‘that is real, consistent and identical in all spaces, and which knows what it is after and what it contributes’. He noted that projects that aim to build communities within social networks need to create an experience and, above all, invite people who are already customers to join the group. Mr. Godoy urged companies to begin by improving their product and to locate their current customers before trying to create a community.

Ícaro Moyano, Communications Director at Tuenti, was the last speaker. Mr. Moyano began by listing factors that helped the social network Tuenti become a success, such as a new marketing paradigm focusing on Web 2.0 consumers. According to Mr. Moyano, social networks are not just a fad - they are a reality. ‘This is a new player that has managed to draw a much larger audience than conventional media, because nothing happens in conventional media.’ He called social networks such as Tuenti ‘a new form of consumption’. It is essential that users of social networks be active, he said. Tuenti, in particular, has shown that ‘communities end up generating social movements’. As an example, he mentioned the movement against the Bologna process on Tuenti, which in just three months grew to 420,000 people.

Turning his attention to advertising, Mr. Moyano discussed new forms that do not involve banners, sponsorship or contextual advertising. These new forms of advertising use segmentation criteria - applied by the users themselves, in relation to privacy and relevance, and by the advertiser, in relation to segmentation and level. As a result, ‘advertising is segmented for the target audience, by age, by sex,’ he said. ‘In this way, advertising becomes more like a service that provides some sort of added value.’