Potential of Web-Mashups for Marketing 2.0

The ubiquitous use and availability of new media and the web dominates our social life and working environment. Hence, traditional advertising in a conventional way (television, newspapers, leaflets etc.) runs into a latent crisis caused by a flood of digital and analog information and impacts every single individual in our society. Web mashups, a concept and technology for mixing content and applications on the web, have a huge potential to establish a new way of marketing between the lines. Mashups carry great potential for subliminal and explicit Web 2.0-driven marketing, subsumed as marketing 2.0. There are many different ways to use mashups for marketing 2.0. A broadly used opportunity is to integrate freely available services (such as Google Maps, the most used API for web mashups) with the traditional content on a company’s website to create additional benefit for the user. Technically, mashups are designed to implement server-side style or client-side style. For server-side mashups on the company’s webpage, Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly, Google Mashup Editor and many others are available for free. To create a client-sided mashup, free tools such as iGoogle or Oosah can be used. These two mashup styles are briefly shown within a technological prospectus and their benefits and weaknesses are discussed. Furthermore, the potential of web mashups for marketing 2.0 is discussed and concluded in a geo-location mashup use case.