White Paper Pundit

Funny how marketing terms come in and out of style. Such is the case with the marketing term “2.0″ that is frequently used as the title for many white papers.

In the early 2000s, the first use of the term 2.0 was applied to “Web 2.0″ which was coined to demonstrate the dramatic new applications of the Internet after the bust in the late 90s. Instead of websites being static pages of text and graphics used primary for ecommerce, Web 2.0 represented a new category of interactive, collaborative web applications such as blogs, wikis, forums, webinars, video, multimedia and web analytics. The main point was that 2.0 represented a quantum leap, a dramatic change, not just something developed for the web.

Now it seems that everything new qualifies as 2.0. Some of the latest applications are Sales 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Mobile 2.0, eLearning 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0. It seems that if you improve something to any degree and have some degree of web-centricity, you can attach the term 2.0 and it’s suppose to be perceived as wholly innovative. The problem is that everyone is using the term, so the bloom has come off the rose.

So my question is that if 2.0 represents a new web-centric application, what’s has to take place to qualify as 3.0? Are we ready to see the next generation of white papers called Web 3.0? Sales 3.0? Enterprise 3.0? Doesn’t this get boring after a while?

Just like the rash of new movie re-makes that never seem to be as good as the original version, the preponderance in the use of 2.0 terminology shows that marketers that continue to use the term have lost their creative spark.

If our industry can’t come up with something new rather than than re-use a number and attach it to every category, we risk reducing white paper titles to a level of blandness on par with the color of the paper that it’s printed on.

I think our industry is capable of much more.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under Industry Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.