A discussion about the software industry and their coders

This post continues from my last post Redefining the 4Ps for Web and Social Web Marketing where I had discussed the case for having a new set of Operational Marketing "P's" to help navigate the Web / Social Web.

What have emerged lately are 3 new P's -- Personalization, Participation, Peer-to-Peer. They sound good to begin with but I am not quite sure that these are as rock solid as the 4Ps that served marketers for a long time.

Wikipedia has good coverage on these 3P's so I will refer to them here:

Personalization: the customization of products and services through the use of the Internet. Early examples include Dell on-line and Amazon.com, but this concept is further extended with emerging social media and advanced algorithms. Emerging technologies will continue to push this idea forward.

Recommendations done by Amazon for individual users, based on purchasing patterns of an aggregate of users is a form of Personalizaton. I "know" right away whats "ticking" with other consumers. But the Ads thrown by Google (even if lower bid yet better performing Ads are bumped up) -- is that Ad personalization or better Ad inventory monetization?

Participation: allows customers to participate in what the brand should stand for; what should be the product directions and even which ads to run. This concept is laying the foundation for disruptive change through democratization of information.

Participation is fundamental to Online Social Communities. Look at how consumers protested against the privacy breach by "Beacon" Ad feature from Facebook and Mark Zuckerburg pulled it out with an apology. (The Beacon system tracked web shopping on partner sites outside Facebook by users of Facebook. It then planned to sell ads alongside the messages sent to Facebook user's friends about the users purchases and activities on other sites.)

Digg.com and Indianpad.com seem to suffer from hijack by coalitions amongst specific user groups. If participation has been hijacked so easily -- is it a dependable metric for Marketers? If a small minority can control what a majority reads/uses is that dependable?

Peer-to-Peer: This refers to customer networks and communities where advocacy happens. The historical problem with marketing is that it is “interruptive” in nature, trying to impose a brand on the customer. This is most apparent in TV advertising. These “passive customer bases” will ultimately be replaced by the “active customer communities”. Brand engagement happens within those conversations. P2P is now being referred as Social Computing and will likely to be the most disruptive force in the future of marketing.

Wikipedia refers to a 4th Predictive Modeling -- something that I am still thinking about...

Predictive modeling: This refers to neural network algorithms that are being successfully applied in marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).

I am interested to hear your thoughts of a good model for Web / Social Web. What do you think will work?