COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 267-4

COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 267-4*,this course is cross-listed

COURSE TITLE: Marketing in Web 2.0: The New Data Revolution

UNITS OF CREDIT: 1 Unit

INSTRUCTOR: Andreas Weigend

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION (HTTP URL): http://www.weigend.com/Teaching/Berkeley

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Sundays, 4/6 and 4/27, 9:00 am to 6:00 pm

PREREQUISITE(S): EWMBA Core Curriculum and an open mind and genuine interest to explore consequences and opportunities for Marketing of Web2.0 and the New Data Revolution

CLASS FORMAT: Lectures and break-out sessions with active student participation

REQUIRED READINGS:
See http://www.weigend.com/Teaching/Berkeley

FINAL GRADE:
Participation and active contribution to class (70%), as well as results of team exercises (30%).

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES: Download PODCAST, mp3 format

This one-unit course explores the new profound possibilities for customer centric marketing in the Web 2.0 era. We move away from traditional customer segmentation and clustering and address the individual as individual and as member social networks. This shift has been enabled by quantitatively and qualitatively new data companies are collecting on individuals, as well as new communication platforms of interaction companies can use to reach out to individuals. On these platforms, individuals have also been empowered and incentivized to generate and disseminate information, in turn fueling the expectations that they be treated as the individuals they are.

Web 1.0 collected data to cut costs and help optimize business processes. Web2.0 has enabled a New Data Revolution. Whether intentionally (e.g., as blog posting) or unintentionally (e.g., as Facebook feed), whether explicitly or implicitly, users are contributing a wide variety of both quantitative and qualitative data, including transactions, intentions, social relations, sentiment, attention gestures, location and much more. With these previously unavailable data, companies now have incredible opportunities to create new technologies to innovative services. Social recommendations and behavioral targeting are examples of recent usage of these forms of data. What are the implications for new business models, products and services? What are the insights and intuitions about what will work in practice? And what are the risks?

Along with this data revolution and the empowerment of the individual, a new type of customer is on the rise, having strong expectations of relationships with companies towards transparency and accountability on the side of the company. The new consumers demand truthful conversations instead of one-way PR messages. They are keenly aware of the value of the data they are providing, and expect highly individualized services and qualitatively new features.

Companies need to dramatically adjust their marketing strategies: Visionary companies will fully embrace these new data and communication possibilities to engage and genuinely understand their customers, treating them as individuals, making each and every one a potential trusted partner, thus adding unprecedented value to both sides.

COURSE OUTLINE:
Day 1 morning
- Review of the Digital Networked Economy: Underlying principles, consequences and opportunities for truly customer-centric firms
- The Previous Data Revolution (Web1): Purchase data, click data, etc. Search engines as platforms for monetizing intention data (e.g., Google).
Day 1 afternoon - The New Data Revolution (Web2): User contributed data: Platforms for generating, sharing, and aggregating data, and for crating relationship data by interacting with other users (e.g., Facebook).
- Economics of Data. Reputation, identity, privacy (trade-offs).
Day 2 morning
- Recommender systems 1.0 and 2.0 for products.
- Behavioral targeting 1.0 and 2.0 for brands.
Day 2 afternoon
- The New Consumer Revolution: Expectations, opportunities and risks.
- Markets and Marketing as Conversation.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Dr. Andreas Weigend was the chief scientist of Amazon.com where he helped create an invaluable customer-centric, measurement-focused culture. He now works with both visionary multinationals and innovative startups. Using innovative product and business models based on the current consumer-driven data revolution, his expertise and experience helps his clients to understand their data on a deeper level and creates actionable outcomes.

He has been fortunate to work with some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs and executives around the world. He has helped them gain specific, relevant and actionable new insights, as well as incorporate them into their strategy and vision. Examples include Myspace (leveraging the social graph for marketing and advertising), Alibaba (coaching the company towards a data focused organization), Swiss International Airlines (developing their online strategy), and gay.com (creating interaction features based on analysis of user behavior).

Andreas is not only passionate about developing principles that guide companies in creating their customer and data strategies, but at the same time, he loves creating possibilities for innovation in the digital networked economy. He is also an investor in Founders Fund II, where he works on deal flow, due diligence, and startup investment decisions.

Andreas started as a physicist (Stanford PhD), analyzing and explaining the traces of elementary particles, turned (as Associate Professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business) to the traces of traders on Wall Street, and subsequently to the traces of users on the web. He has published more than 100 scientific papers, and shares his insights at Berkeley, Stanford (Data Mining and Electronic Business course), and Tsinghua/INSEAD (Information Management EMBA course).

Andreas lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, and on weigend.com.