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The sub­ject of cus­tomer loy­alty is guar­an­teed to get the atten­tion of vir­tu­ally any­one involved in mar­ket­ing. The cost of acquir­ing new cus­tomers always mas­sively out­weighs the cost of retain­ing exist­ing ones (although sadly reten­tion is still given too lit­tle mean­ing­ful atten­tion by too many com­pa­nies). And with so many tech­nolo­gies approach­ing par­ity, switch­ing brands has never been eas­ier.

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I’m not around for the next week so no post­ings. Nor­mal ser­vice will resume on the 30th (as soon as I’ve deleted sev­eral thou­sand emails and caught up on an encyclopedia’s worth of RSS feeds).

This is rather lovely. Yahoo! has worked with Jonathan Har­ris to cre­ate a dig­i­tal time cap­sule. The cap­sule is open for 30 days end­ing 8th Novem­ber and allows Yahoo! users to con­tribute con­tent (writ­ten, pho­to­graphic, video, audio) under 10 broad cat­e­gories. After this date, the result­ing cap­sule will be will be ‘sealed’ and entrusted to Smith­son­ian Folk­ways Record­ings based in Washington.

The capsule’s cre­ator explains:

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As promised, we’ve cre­ated a video of the high­lights from the Inside the Bub­ble event. It’s on b1.com but I thought I’d put it here too.

Enjoy.

You can also read thoughts from one of the pan­el­lists here and one of our atten­dees here.

So you’ve heard about the tech­nolo­gies, you’ve read a few blogs, and watched some­thing hilar­i­ously funny on YouTube – but from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive, what should you actu­ally be doing about Web 2.0? And where do you start?

Some­times it can seem as though unless you imme­di­ately launch a blog, put up a wiki, tag all your con­tent and host an uncon­fer­ence, you’re being left in the dust. But there are some rel­a­tively sim­ple things you can begin doing right now.

1: Hear the con­ver­sa­tion

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Thank you to every­one who came to the Inside the bub­ble event last night. It was great to see so many peo­ple (there were over a hun­dred of you) look­ing to get to grips with what Web 2.0 means for marketing.

A spe­cial thanks to our pan­el­lists, Jose Adams of Visit Lon­don, James Cash­more of Google, Simon Grice of eTribes, Ian Jin­dal and Sam Sethi of TechCrunch UK / Vecosys for open­ing them­selves up to inter­ro­ga­tion. We filmed the event and will put it online at b1.com as soon as it’s edited, com­pressed and all that other good stuff.

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Con­tin­u­ing to set the scene for our Inside the bub­ble event, today I’m going to look at open source. While open source is not strictly speak­ing core to Web 2.0, the think­ing and phi­los­o­phy behind it is. And, I believe, it is the open source way of work­ing which will have more impact on the way clients and agen­cies work together in future than any­thing else.

Of course, open source for many of us in tech­nol­ogy is syn­ony­mous with soft­ware and the high pro­file of Linux, OpenOf­fice et al. The open source ethos has also spawned the Cre­ative Com­mons approach to licens­ing intel­lec­tual prop­erty and the release of the APIs that have been used to cre­ate so many mashed-up appli­ca­tions and ser­vices.

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In part two of our run up to the Inside the bub­ble event I’m going to be tak­ing a whistle-stop tour of blogs within a mar­ket­ing con­text. It’s a big topic so I appol­o­gise in advance for not doing it justice.

So much of the back­ground to blogs and blog­ging has already been writ­ten (mainly on blogs) that I won’t do the whole 101 thing in this post. If you want a good overview look here.

The debate for mar­ket­ing is around just how impor­tant blogs are in the mix. This tends to get pretty polarised.

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In the run up to our Inside the bub­ble shindig, I’m going to start look­ing at some of the tools and chal­lenges of mar­ket­ing within a Web 2.0 world. First up: social networks.

It seems as if you can’t move right now for talk about social net­work­ing. Of course, what most peo­ple are really talk­ing about is MySpace (with some state­side widen­ing this to include Friend­ster and Face­book). MySpace gained its 100 mil­lionth account this August and is reck­oned to be the world’s 4th most pop­u­lar Eng­lish lan­guage web­site. It has also attracted mas­sive mar­ket­ing atten­tion among those look­ing to tar­get its users (who are the same peo­ple who are switch­ing away from tra­di­tional media) as well as a pretty lucra­tive deal with Google for search.

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