Andreas Weigend, Amazon.com's Chief Scientist until January 2004, is a leading behavioral marketing expert and Stanford University lecturer with some unique perspectives on the challenges of marketing and leveraging data to drive critical business decisions. "Data is the digital air that we breathe. Everyone is a publisher. Every company is a publisher," Weigend said at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

We are in the midst of a social data revolution, he shared, and living in a world that first sought to connect computers, then to connect pages and now, increasingly through social networks, to connect people.

The new marketing challenge for businesses in today's economic climate is to understand the drivers that have shifted the starting point from business to consumer in Consumer-to-Business marketing (C2B), Consumer-to-Consumer marketing (C2C) and Consumer-to World marketing (C2W), with the latter growing in influence as consumers share their brand experiences and sentiments with many thousands of people online.

"Amazon.com helps people make decisions based on [consumer] reviews and helps people make better decisions, such as, 'Customers who bought this also bought that,'" Weigend said.

The web is making it easier for marketers to sort data on consumer intentions, consumer attention and consumer connections and the needs driving their online behaviors, all of which present new and innovative opportunities to meet those needs and track sales.

In the 1990s, Weigend said, we lived in a "data scarce world." In the 2000s, data grew exponentially, but it also became cheap. Now, in the 2010s, competitive advantage is all about acquiring data that others don't have. The key to effective C2B marketing, he explained, lies in "sniffing the digital exhaust" and following data trails to make marketing to target consumer segments more proactive than reactive. The data-overloaded world we now live in, Weigend said, reveals that the key to C2C success is grounded in the "Four C's of marketing -- content, context, connection and conversation."

The web enables consumers to inform each other's buying decisions; and since birds of a feather like to buy together, there is significant opportunity for marketers to reach into specific, influential consumer groups and attempt to build some affinity toward their product or service.

"We have moved from e-business with the firm at the center, to me-business with customer-focused web 2.0, to we-business with a community focus and web 3.0," Weigend said. The web and websites like Twitter enable consumers to share their experiences with the world, so customer service has become a focal point for marketers who want to harness the power and reach of C2W communication.

So what's the bottom line for today's marketers? Weigend offered that success depends on creating, sharing and experimenting with live, web-enriched data about consumer behaviors and experiences and less on the kind of dated or "dead data" often found in spreadsheets that can lead to analysis paralysis.

Robyn Greenspan
Robyn Greenspan is the Editor-in-Chief at ExecuNet, where she is responsible for setting and driving the editorial content engagement strategy across the private business network's publications and expert-led programming. She is also a Huffington Post blogger. You can follow her on Twitter @RobynGreenspan

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