Web 2.0 growing in popularity for online marketers

Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, social networks and wikis are becoming an increasingly important tool for online business to business (B2B) marketers, and are transforming the way that they market their products.
That is according to a new report from Direct Impact Marketing, a B2B outsourcer of Web 2.0 products, which revealed that blogs (64 per cent) and RSS feeds (58 per cent) are the most popular Web 2.0 tools used by business marketers, particularly the smaller companies that are proving quicker to adapt to these new and interactive resources.

Paul Dunay, a sponsor of the study from interactive marketing agency BearingPoint, said that the report will help other marketers just entering the world of Web 2.0 to find out which strategies work best.

"We view it as an adoption aid. It will let marketers go and jump-start the process to gain knowledge about the top tools," he told BtoB magazine. "If there´s one piece of advice for marketers I´d give it´s this: ´Lather, rinse, repeat´. Get in there, mess it up, get comfortable. It´s all about trying and experimenting."

A new study from Forrester Research, meanwhile, suggests that many businesses are cautious to adopt Web 2.0 marketing solutions because it is incredibly difficult to accurately gauge their value with traditional metrics. While RSS feeds were considered as valuable by one in four companies, only 11 per cent placed much faith in the power of blogging.
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