Wikis, Blogs, and Search Engines are collectively fuelling a
huge inflection across theinterrelated realms of Technology
Marketing and PR.
When putting together a post
yesterday about "Virtualization", I instinctively looked to
Gurunet's "answers.com"
serviceforinformation on the subject: Enterprise
Information Integration (EII). Woe and behold! Here is what I found
at the tail end of the answers.com
article on this subject:
Now, I knew this was Wikipedia content repurposed by
"answers.com",and I proceeded to clean up the article. The
wikified article
took a while to complete, because true to the "Wikipedia" ethos, I
had to contribute knowledge as opposed to the originalweenie
marketing gunk. Its naturally easier to cut and paste marketing
fluff for a misguided quick win attempt than it is to embed links,
addknowledge,anddiscern Wiki Markup (but "Wiki"
don'tplay that!).
This little exercise has broader implications for marketing as a
whole, especially for the IT sector. The end of daysfor
"Misinformation based Marketing" are nigh! Wikis, Blogs,
Search Engines, Web Services, andSocial Networking are
rapidly destroying the historically prohibitive costs associated
with customer pursuitoffacts.
I am very confident that product quality will soon overshadow
market share as the key determinant for both product selection on
the part of customers (this is no longer a pipe dream!). I also
have increased hope that ITproduct development and associated
product marketing by technology vendors will veer in the same
direction.