New Venture Marketing

Larry Weber Web 3.0

Larry Weber, Chairman of the W2Group, was one of the keynotes at Red Herring's CMO 2006 Conference.  I was so excited by his ideas -- and in violent agreement.  Weber built the world's largest high tech PR firm, Weber Shandwick, then sold it off to begin again with a new effort focused next generation marketing services.

Weber began by saying that he thinks the Web is not in its 2.0 phase but in 3.0.  The first phase was site building, the 2nd, eCommerce and search and the 3rd and current phase, the Social Web, the world of communities.   

In the traditional PR model, Weber remarked, a company tries to influence the media, analysts, investors, customers and partners via the mass media. The role of marketing is to influence opinion.  In Web 3.0 companies, and marketing people, will be in turn influenced by their digital constituencies. 

"What characterizes a community?" Wikipedia defines community "as the sharing of ideas, intent, belief, resources, preferences or a multitude of other conditions that that the members share in common...."

Red Herring's CMO 2006 Conference

I just came back from Red Herring's CMO 2006,its elite conference for Chief Marketing Officers, and I was blown away by the quality of the program and attendees.  DASAR, Red Herring magazine's holding company, a former client, hosted the event.  But I attended for myself.  I wanted to learn what other senior marketing people were thinking about, how they were addressing the challenges of their markets and their increasingly complex roles.  And I also wanted to meet Larry Weber, one of the conference keynote speakers, a personal hero, the man who built Weber Shandwick (the world's largest technology PR firm) and a real visionary in how the Internet is changing the way we communicate. (I will do a separate post on him shortly.) What an amazing experience.

Lead by Alex Vieux the visionary founder and head of DASAR, I listened to an All Star line up of who's who in the marketing world and thoroughly enjoyed the interviews, presentations and panels and discussions in and around the event.