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Well not exactly but I think perhaps Donald and his team of bloggers may be able to teach a lot of Web 2.0 companies a missing lesson in their planning and implementation.  Trump blogger Don Sexton just made a post called, Your Marketing Is Your Company.    There were two points made in this post I found to be of particular interest in relation to Web 2.0 and success or failure, they were.

"Targeting - Know exactly who your customers will be. Not sort of, but exactly. Understand their needs. Then decide how you can satisfy those needs more effectively than your competitors can."

Positioning - Identify one, two or perhaps three benefits that your specific customers want, and that you can provide at a level superior to your competitors. If you are opening a health club and want to target young mothers, for example, be the only club in your area that provides childcare. Positioning requires you to know who your target customer is, and what your competition is offering.

Now if you are thinking that both of those statements sound an awful lot like Marketing 101 and not super wise, sage level advice from the mind of a billionaire, well that is kind of my point.  Think about how many Web 2.0 companies are just "improvements" on other Web 2.0 Companies. 

In fact how many versions of Del.icio.us do we have now?  Some are OK, some are not really very useful but who is the target and how are they going to make any money?  More to the point if you forget the part where Yahoo bought Delicious, has Delicious even made a dime?

The issue is most Web 2.0 successes have relied on passive viral marketing for their success.  So most start ups just seem to thing the same thing is going to occur for them.  I think if many web businesses be they Web 2.0 or not could learn a lot from those two key points off the Trump blog.

Target your customers and position your offering for them.  Simple you bet but the crux of the post was to begin thinking about this before you develop your product or service, in fact to be thinking about these two key points from the very beginning and let it guide everything you do.

Honestly, I don't think Trump or even most of his team know Web 2.0 from AOL Dial Up Service, but they do know marketing.  They know how to build companies and they know how to position a product.  These are basic marketing fundamentals that many Internet Based companies and just plain old web sites tend to ignore.

You need to ask yourself as you develop a product or a site a few questions…..

1.  Who does this speak to?
2.  What do they want, how can I make them want it more?
3.  How will I reach them, how will they know to find me, how will they know they want to find me?
4.  How will they make me money?
5.  What subset of this group is currently ignored and/or underserved by competitiors?

What is your opinion on this?  Are basic marketing fundementals just ignored in the online world by many websites and companies?

~  Jack Spirko

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