Wikis, Blogs, and Search Engines are collectively fuelling a huge inflection across the interrelated realms of Technology Marketing and PR.

When putting together a post yesterday about "Virtualization", I instinctively looked to Gurunet's "answers.com" service for information 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:

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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 original weenie marketing gunk. Its naturally easier to cut and paste marketing fluff for a misguided quick win attempt than it is to embed links, add knowledge, and discern Wiki Markup (but "Wiki" don't play that!).

This little exercise has broader implications for marketing as a whole, especially for the IT sector. The end of days for  "Misinformation based Marketing" are nigh! Wikis, Blogs, Search Engines, Web Services, and Social Networking are rapidly destroying the historically prohibitive costs associated with customer pursuit of facts.

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 IT product development and associated product marketing by technology vendors will veer in the same direction.