I think that in a heavily cluttered market, customer participation and engagement is increasingly the ONLY way – how else will a company distinguish themselves from their competition? It will become an absolute minimum in order to compete, because at this stage in the Web’s evolution, NOT to be engaging and interactive (e.g. 1 way messages) will be a death sentence. I think an example of this can be seen in the development of large news networks (CNN, CBC, BBC, etc.) over the last few years. They realized that they needed to form communities online and have been active in incorporating toolsets that promote this (but in themselves already existed in blogs and websites)

You raise a valid point about duplication of ideas and innovation – the Internet really has few protections against ‘idea-stealing’ given how easy it is to access and reproduce digital data online. I don’t think this is anything other than business as usual though (e.g. Microsoft during it’s initial startup phase). Companies will have to continuously innovative in order to stay competitive. Especially so, given that things on the Internet will often generate a lot of attention when they are novel, but dramatically less so later on (when mainstream). If a company really wants to make a splash they’ll need to be among the first to introduce a new concept (or otherwise build upon the idea in new, unseen ways). That said, given how expansive the Internet is, I don’t think there will be any shortage of opportunities to capture people’s attention.

But one question: Will this Web model of customer participation & engagement work in a heavily cluttered market where imitation & duplication is just a step away for competitors i.e. I come up with a new innovative idea of brand communication and my competitor comes up with same..My USP is lost then! What do you propose?

–Sampad Swain