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Web 2.0: In case you wondered what it was all about

Most people have lives. they are interested in real things and every now and then a computer generated buzz phrase rises without trace and everyone expects you to know what it’s all about. One of the recent ones is ‘Web 2.0′ (pronounced “web two point oh”

Web 2.0 is a techie joke for and by techies. If you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation with a computer programmer, you’ll realise what an oxymoron the term ‘techie joke is’. The side splittingly funny thing is that when you release a piece of software it is called ‘software 1.0′ minor patches and upgrades will be given the suffix 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, etc., etc. When a major change, overhaul and shift in the product is released it will be called software 2.o. So there we have it web 2.0 means a major change, overhaul and shift has happened on the web. But we have apparently overhauled and upgraded ourselves as much as anything else, because web 2.0 describes both new types of web sites and recognises that people are using the web in a different way. Now take some time to breathe deeply and get over the uncontrollable laughter.

Back in the day you could have a web site and tell the world to buy your stuff. You could sell from it and make lots of other things happen, including inviting two way dialogue with customers and others.

Then sites which specialised in two way dialogue appeared. You have probably heard about FaceBook and MySpace. But other sites were also doing it – forums and wikis. These days if you want to find out about something, you will often look it up on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. If you disagree with the definition, you can change it, add to it or create a new entry for the world to see. If you want to find out if a product is any good, you don’t go t their website – that is just propaganda. You do a search and look on a series of forums or blogs and find out exactly what is being said then make your purchasing decision.

This new generation of websites that enable conversation and content sharing both underpins and is web 2.0.

And there are lots of these things. Twitter to microblog, from your Flickr for pictures, Vimeo, Delicious. You really Digg it if you want to. So how do you work out what is relevant for your business?

Building an effective presence for your brand online these days requires far more than a brochure-style website. Yoiu need a web strategy – a series of activities designed to achieve something beyond workds and pictures on a screen. When you consider that the web is built on technology primarily designed for communication, it makes sense that the exchange of information should be two-way i.e what web 2.0 does.

David Yates, the MD and founder of Realitus, has found such tools invaluable. “I use all these tools to build up my personal brand and move my message beyond my own website and onto places where people I want to communicate are likely to be.”

Finding the right medium

Video might be very useful for some people but her style is more “wordy”, he explains. It’s important to find a channel which you’re comfortable with. It’s perhaps no co-incidence that David Cameron appears far more often on the Conservative party’s YouTube page than Gordon Brown does on the Labour party one.

Whether one person in your business is involved or many, a blog is a great way of communicating with your customers, potential customers and peers, and getting feedback from them. Remember: communication is a two-way thing. There’s no point in having a blog if you don’t allow people to comment on what you’ve said, or (almost as bad) don’t reply to some of those comments.

Talking about Twitter

Twitter is a fascinating tool that takes some getting used to, but has a large and growing group of fans who swear by it. It works rather like a very large, open version of an instant messenger programme. You can build up a list of interesting Twitterers to follow and some will start following you. You can post questions and interesting links, or give advice and discuss topical issues (in 140 characters or fewer. Brevity is crucial in the Twitterverse).

Twitter has around six million users, and there are hundreds of brands using the service including WholeFoods, JetBlue and Dell. Just as with blogging, Twitter provides a platform for you to talk to people with the same interests as you and build credibility for you and your work.

Keegan has found that the service is a lifeline if you work at home or in a small office – it can act as a virtual water cooler so you can chat with like-minded people about the issues of the day. “There are musicians, researchers, consultants and journalists using Twitter – it would be churlish to dismiss it as a geek tool,” she says. “We all have technology as a big part of what we do now.”

When we think of social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace usually leap to mind. They’re a great way of sharing photos, videos, links and news with your friends and family, but many people have found it tricky to juggle personal and professional identities on them. You never know who might see those drunken pictures of you with the crazy face paint at that music festival last summer. LinkedIn is a safer option, as it is structured specifically for the business community. It enables you to present your CV well and build up some useful contacts. It also comes with some handy recruitment tools – the site has seen one new member sign up every two seconds since the economic downturn began.

Keegan has overcome the reluctance many feel when dipping their toes into the social networking world: “I think women, in particular, can be more reluctant to reveal details of their personal lives online, though I gave up trying to keep a separation between work and home a long time ago. But it is becoming essential to have a LinkedIn profile … I’ve made between 50 and 100 contacts through the site.”

Don’t fake it

It is hard to generate any direct revenue from social media tools. What they do do, says Keegan, “is create a brand that is front of mind in people’s heads” and cut marketing budgets to a fraction. Above all, many web 2.0 tools are designed for one-to-one interaction, which is why the best examples of their deployment in the corporate world are from articulate, energetic individuals with the skills to write, engage and inspire interest. Hiding behind a brand name just doesn’t work.

There are some other pitfalls to avoid. Andy McLoughlin, the co-founder of Huddle.net, itself a web 2.0 service that provides a web-based collaborative tool for businesses, says: “Don’t do [the online equivalent of] a Gerald Ratner – go on TV and say your customers are bloody idiots.”

Keegan also has some words of warning: “Common mistakes on Facebook and Twitter are people being too pushy – only sending out links to their blog posts and not joining in the conversation.”

It’s also hugely important not to fake it. Don’t pretend to be something, or someone, you’re not. Some very large and (apparently) sophisticated companies have had their fingers burnt trying to fool the online community.

But McLoughlin is adamant that there are few firms who would not benefit from exploring these tools: “Take a long hard look at your business – you are probably spending a lot of time and resources trying to do all these things in a different way. It’s easy to be cynical, but if you’re a very small brand, social media is all you’ve got. Like anything, you will start to see the benefit once you’ve used it for a while.”

It takes skill, patience and no small amount of bravery, but putting yourself out there in the digital space could be the best thing you ever did. Just keep an open mind and enjoy the conversations. You’ll be amazed at what you learn about your industry and your brand.

Based on an excellent article in The Guardian 22 January 2009

22. January 2009 | Business Blogging, Marketing on the Web, Social Media | Comments (0)

Corporate Blogs are for PageRank not ChitChat

So you have got yourself a brand new shiny social media consultant. They jump right in talking about corporate blogging as meaningful connection with “the community”. Here’s what you now do: Fire that consultant.

Your corporate blog is wood warpingly, paint dryingly banal and boring to most people, probably including yourself. If not you are wasting your time, because as interesting and concise and readable as you make it, it still won’t be read.

A corporate blog has one main job: distribution. This is not corporate marketing brand distribution through dedicated followers of your worthy blog. No one else finds it interesting – I’ll let you into a secret it is really boring. Take a look at the Google blog now …I bet your back in ten seconds. Its all about ‘Me” as in Google talk about themselves, their products and their greatness. They try to be relaxed and chatty. They come across a anal and a bit boring.

So if a blog = distribution but not branding? How does that work? PageRank. Use your blog for link-building and SEO.

Take a look at Mint.com’s blog. Mint is a finance tool – software for bookkeeping. Mint publishes massive articles about personal finance to their blog, and have legion readers. Not a bad trick, but the main thing is that their content is useful. It’s a mag about personal finance without the advertisements. Social media channels cannot help but find picks Mint’s content, there is lots of it, mush of it useful and it gets refreshed frequently so it receives lots of inbound links.

Mint milk these inbound links. That’s the trick. At the bottom of every blog post is a list of key words which link to internal pages containing high level snippets about the topic

Mint is maximising their PageRank with the popularity of the blog. If you’re a personal finance website, you will want to optimise around some of these keywords. And it’s really working for them.

Take a look at Google’s Keyword Tool and look at the traffic for these keywords. Then put them into a Google Search and see where Mint appear in the return. Then multiply keyword traffic by the distribution of clicks for the top results in Google, you’ll see that Mint is getting at least 100,000 uniques per month from Google for these keywords.

If you hire a copywriter to post on your own corporate blog, you could achieve the same result. You need a writer whose words are worth reading. A decent freelancer churning a blog post of 1,000 words, at least once per week. 5 posts like this per month will cost £1000 – £2000.

You could buy the traffic from Google by bidding on these keywords. A generous estimate of a bid price for keywords like this is 10p (if you are lucky). To buy 100,000 uniques would therefore cost you £10,000 per month, and you will not get the PageRank.

Of course, the success of this strategy isn’t as quantifiable as buying ads, but it will get you traffic. Any decent writer will be able to garner attention via social media sites like Digg and Reddit, generating backlinks. All you need to do is find out what keywords to optimise for, and put them in the blog template.

This Article is based on a brilliant article by Ted Dziuba on January 19, 2009

Corporate Blogs: It’s The PageRank, Stupid

20. January 2009 | Business Blogging, Copywriting for the web, Marketing on the Web, SEO, Social Media | Comments (1)

Social networks threaten advertising growth

Two-thirds of advertising agencies have been taken by surprise by social media, a report has found.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, shows ad agencies fgrowing just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 unless they can get to grips with the impact created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Social networks enable consumers to pass on information about products and services, and recommendations from friends are more influential than traditional forms of advertising. This completely undermines the traditional marketing model of a one to many communication line, replacing it with a many to many matrix of communications about products and services, but not directly involving the purveyors of those products and services.

Advertisers have had some impact with e.g. the Cadbury “Gorilla” spot being viewed over 10m times on YouTube as well as being aired on television.

The Dove “Campaign for real beauty”, which advertised Unilever’s cosmetics range, was also boosted by a YouTube video showing a high-speed transformation of a model’s natural face to the made-up and touched-up final version which appeared on a billboard.

But not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world, the IPA warned. In its worst-case scenario, the resulting decline in paid-for advertising space could see £16m ($23m) of revenues lost by the industry by 2016, if agencies fail to create new products and services to cater to the social media world.

However, the report says that two-thirds of that decline could be made up by creating new forms of web content that contains branding messages, and by analysing the data expressed on the web.

Clients’ investment in new content and rapid data analysis will increase by around 5 per cent, according to the IPA’s survey. Other sources of revenue derived for social networking include consultancy and e-commerce.

“The current downturn will accelerate these trends in agencies as everyone is looking to innovate and stand out from the crowd,” said Moray MacLennan, IPA president and chief executive of M&C Saatchi Worldwide, an agency.

“I don’t think [social media] is a replacement for paid-for media, it is just going to be a challenger for [consumers’] time and attention.”

David Yates of Realitus, Social Media consultants and designers commented,

“Social networks themselves are still figuring out how to make money from advertising on their sites. Pricing for generic banner advertising on social networking is relatively low compared to other sites, because their users are logging in for communication rather than commerce. But the strategy, the generation of content and the placement of that content is of more direct use to the marketer. The monetisation of sites is less of a concern. It may create room for a commercial platform if the content is attractive enough. But as it stands social media is here to stay, people are visiting and referencing the sites and advertising agencies are going to have to work out a place for themselves in this mix.

David Yates continued.

“New media take-up has prompted both networks and advertisers to look for more innovative ways to connect with consumers. People do not really believe advertising any more. It has little more credibility than propaganda. So, as people go about purchasing decisions differently, they now seek information themselves rather than just receiving it, and advertising agencies are increasingly talking to the walls they usually stick their ads on” he said.

Based on an article in the FT By Tim Bradshaw, Digital Media Correspondent: January 15 2009

19. January 2009 | Marketing News, Marketing on the Web, Social Media | Comments (1)

Corporate Social Media – making an honest company of you

Social Media makes an honest organisation of you. If your company screws up, someone somewhere will be saying it and most people will believe that rather than the propaganda driven corporate web pages. People warm to companies who can say “yep we made a mistake, we’re sorry, particularly if you are saying it from within the same social networking communities as your customers.

All social interaction is essentially about being open and honest. After all, these were the principles that my parents and grandparents instilled in me and ever was the case.

But it is difficult for companies to behave like individuals and social media is also a poor moniker for what we have here; it is just new media – Web 2.1 (or some such). From a corporate perspective you are trying to talk with people you don’t know, while you are not there. It hardly passes for polite conversation. It is difficult to offer a firm hand shake and then pass round the Battenberg. What started as way to underpin social relationships has been invaded by a load of corporations saying “I’ll be your friend . Let me send you endless spam all about me and regale you with tales of how great I am “. It’s not going to work is it? The interaction has to be two-way, personal and on the customer’s terms – which means putting the customer first, defending your mistakes and creating a lot of feel-good factor rather than sales leads.

Right now everything is in transition. Corporate websites are a series of walled gardens each protecting its own content. It is difficult to abandon this practice since it is an extension of the way things have always been done. The Social Media landscape assumes an open parkland where the content is used freely by any and all, no matter who created it in the first place. There is a sea-change in culture required. Being closed and protective is the behavior of someone with something to hide and the ebb and flow of social media simply by-passes these sites. Increasingly this will become more so. Initiatives such as Michael Chisari’s Appleseed project which has been picked up by the World Wide Web Consortium under the title of The Future of Social Networking will technically bypass corporate walled gardens making them rather barren places on the web compared to the parkland content everyone else will be working with.

To be seen, heard and able to influence in this new landscape means completely knocking the walls down. It is difficult to simply dabble in social media, you have to make a commitment to it and take a large cultural jump.

Users are currently a lot further ahead of business in this regard. Inevitably businesses will follow the users and equally certainly it will keep them honest.

16. January 2009 | Marketing on the Web, Social Media | Comments (0)

Social Notworking (2009 a [My]Space Odyssey)

You know how sometimes you’re out walking the dog when a bunch of alien interlopers abducts you. Before you know it, you’re warped off to the planet Q’Zog in the Fourth Quadrant, your brains picked clean en route, only to have other vile experiments visited upon your person on arrival.

Yeah I know, it happens all the time. So what’s new? Well this week, during one of these otherworldly episodes, my alien hosts subjected me to experiments based on research into web-based social media patterns on Earth. It turns out that a few millennia back they went through the same thing themselves and were interested to see if we were making a mess of it all yet.

Eventually, I cracked under pressure and told them about spontaneous uptake, web 2.0, multi-channel integration, SEO benefits, corporate blogging, Mobile blah, micro blah, digital blah and so on. They rubbed their chins, nodded sagely and did that thing with the sides of their mouths that universally means “If only they’d bothered to ask us, we’d have told them how to avoid getting everything wrong”.

So I did ask them. “Where did social media go wrong for you guys?” Quickly followed by “…and do you mind if I pick your brains for a change ask your advice”. It seemed to do the trick. The big alien, the one who usually does all the cross-species sexual experimentation (but that’s another story) picked up his MacBook Core DecaQuadro, running OSMXM Sabretooth and fired it up. He pressed a few keys and Hey Presto! They launched qzogblog.com and clicked onto the category entitled ‘Social Notworking’.

And they talked me through the tale of woe that once passed for social media on Q’Zog.

Once upon a time the ordinary aliens of QZog found it fun to keep in touch and cement friendships through social media sites. A load of them sprang up – TrouserBook (they use a different body-part for speech and visual recognition), Twaddle (like us, there are lots of them with nothing important to say and they like to say it a lot), Flockr (they like pictures of sheep) and so on. Eventually people thought they could make money out of these sites with PPC and other propositions. In time, corporates started to notice that they were being cut out of the loop. No one was going to their websites to find out about their products. The alien masses were asking each other and liberating their buying habits. So the corporates moved in to try and find a place in this great new SpaceBook. And for a while all was well on QZog. But it didn’t stay that way.

The first problem was all about money; isn’t it always? Social networking, it seems, was just too difficult to monetize.  Strangely, back on Earth, this dynamic is now beginning to show its face also. Google has begun to make less than optimistic noises about it. Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes has said. “We have found that social-networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected”. Which is Earth-speak for “Oh Shit”.

My alien hosts went on to talk about too many players flooding the market. Particularly white labeled channels (i.e. a site full of pre made functions which can be branded so that people can create their own versions of e.g. Facebook). The more this happens, the more dispersed and fractured the user base becomes. And sure enough, free, open source and plentiful white label options have also made it to earth

It was noticeable that my extraterran hosts were pretty ticked off with corporate intervention in social media. Over commercialization was clearly a killer in the Fourth Quadrant. What started out as a one to many tool, became a corporation to consumer tool and all the people got fed up with being sold at and went somewhere else. I thought about this for a while. Surely as social communities form, Earth’s marketers would not dream of piling in, taking over and crapping all over the experience. Would we?

There was a problem as well with inaccurate member data on sites. This is less important to socialization so users didn’t care. Additionally, identity fraud in the fourth quadrant led to users purposely loading inaccurate data. From a commercial perspective, this began to create problems; CRM is only as good as the data validity. All that effort aimed at the wrong people! Strangely, on earth this seems to be happening. Some say as many as 33% of users load duff info into their profile.

Another issue over in the Fourth Quadrant was the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of these social media strategies. As with earthly hosting, if you want to deploy a campaign via a social network, you can’t access the host’s server data and logs by automatic right. You can manually monitor the interaction on the site, or measure click through, but it is almost akin to redeploying slate and chalk as a core technology.

Data privacy also started to unravel the network. You may think that this could not happen on Earth, what with all the regulatory concern and cautionary tales. But then again,Facebook had already been caught tracking and releasing user habits back to developers and others involved in advertising initiatives. And what if your average Joe Alien wants to leave. Well have you noticed that no matter how often you opt out or don’t opt in, the level of spam keeps going up? You have to think that the data options are being somehow abused. Surely not on Earth? Well think again, it’s a bit like a religious cult. Once you’re in, they don’t let you leave. These are the very things that eventually dissuaded Q’Zogians from joining social media sites and led to their abandonment followed by collapse of the network platforms.

Here’s a new phrase for all of us on Earth: “Social Network Fatigue”. It started on QZog with people getting fed up with maintaining multiple spaces on multiple platforms. It further manifested itself with people just falling out of love with the whole thing because, like nostalgia, it just wasn’t what it used to be. It might not sound like we have that problem down here, but on closer inspection, there are people writing PhD theses about it.

The QZogians also started to experience a slow-down in the use of social media platforms. It peaked over a few years and then declined. Perhaps because of the tedium of the operation, or something else happened, but it stopped being the next best greatest thing. And, you guessed it …Earth is seeing the same pattern.

The Q’Zogian saga continued to get played to me out like a Greek tragedy. Networks had inconsistent performance, companies got fed up with employees cyber-sciving, so they started locking social media sites outside firewalls. The sites variously suffered: scaling issues; user overload leading to downtime; hacking and scandal. The social media moguls largely fiddled with their Geek-Up PowerPoint presentations while their empires burned.

“So”, I asked. “If you had your time again, how would you make sure that this didn’t happen?”

“Easy” they answered “We could have kept it all together, increased the marketing value to business, re-enfranchised the users and made a packet on the way. We’ll drop by next week, pick you up and tell you how you get this entire social media gig right.”

“Oh and by the way…” they said as they dropped me back by my still walking dog, “… Has anyone talked to HP about their pay-per-post digital camera social media campaign on YouTube. It really sucks”

11. January 2009 | Business Blogging, Marketing on the Web, Social Media, Wordpress | Comments (0)

BtoB Marketers finally beginning to find ways to monetize feeds and measure results

RSS could be relevant to BtoB marketers – more relevant to their audiences than other feeds might be for consumers. BtoB marketers could send product updates and announcements, staffing changes-all without inundating their customers and prospects and with 100% guaranteed delivery.

From: http://www.press-feed.com/results/news/news.xml
Go to Source

07. January 2009 | Business Blogging | Comments (0)

RSS as an SEO Strategy

RSS and SEO panel at SES Chicago will be about how to syndicate web content – news, updates, tips etc – to increase search visibility

From: http://www.press-feed.com/results/news/news.xml
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07. January 2009 | Business Blogging | Comments (0)

What’s the difference between PRESSfeed and a blog?

Blogs have exploded on the Internet in the past two years. What started out as a personal journal online has evolved into a sophisticated marketing tool. But an online newsroom is just as important. News content in an RSS feed can give you many of the benefits of blogging without the constraints.

From: http://www.press-feed.com/results/news/news.xml
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07. January 2009 | Business Blogging | Comments (0)

RSS adoption – Forrester study

Forrester Research relased a new study on the adoption of RSS and says it is peaking at 11 percent. Steve Rubel of Edelman says this mean RSS is not going mainstream anytime soon. Strange – now that all browsers read RSS and RSS is the underlying backbone of all online content syndication, I thought it already was mainstream.

From: http://www.press-feed.com/results/news/news.xml
Go to Source

07. January 2009 | Business Blogging | Comments (0)

Chatting with someone who never reads blogs

Blogs for business I had the pleasure of having some friends over this weekend – it was great to see them, as it seems so long since we hosted at home following the arrival of our first born aka “he who shall be obeyed”!

After dinner, I was chatting with one of my friends and we touched on something that I wanted to share with you because it’s just so relevant to what we are doing.

He kindly asked how my “blogging business” was going and I replied that at the moment there seemed to be a growing interest in both social media and blogging which meant that things looked positive for the coming year. He was very pleased for me but he went on to tell me that the while he knew of my interest in blogging, he had never actually read a blog himself. ~~“Bollocks,” I thought.~~ I said that I’d be surprised if he hadn’t, as I knew he was someone who liked to keep up to date with the news in general and the financial news in particular.

So I asked him if he read the Business section of the BBC news website. “Everyday”, he replied. “I particularly like Peston’s Picks – it’s the best bit of the whole site.” (That’s written by the BBC’s Business editor, Robert Peston).

“Yep, one of my favourites too”, I replied. “What do you like about it?”

“Well, he always seems to have written it that day so it’s got the latest news – exactly what I’m looking for – and you know that he’s got the inside track on the stories because of his reputation from the TV. I also like that fact you can also leave your own opinion at the end of the article and, to honest, some of those are really interesting too.”

Well, if those all sound to you like key characteristics of a blog then you’d be spot on and indeed Peston’s Picks is one of the most read blogs on the BBC site, particularly in the current economic climate, for exactly the reason my friend cited. But the fact is that although there are references to it being a blog, it just comes across as the place on the site where you can read what Robert writes. The fact that the technology he uses happens to be called a blog is frankly immaterial – it’s just the name we currently give to it.

So, in fact my friend is an avid reader of a blog (and no doubt others) without even knowing it. Perhaps he’s also exactly the sort of person that we should be seeking out and listening to as we start blogs for our own businesses. Rather than focusing on creating a widely read “blog”, I believe that he reminds us that instead we should be looking to write widely read articles or to engage in conversations or create connections with people we want to associate with. The fact that we do so through something called a blog happens to be because it’s the perfect tool for the job.

So when we plan our blogs, let’s put ourselves in the place of my friend and look at what matters to him – that’s all about content, authenticity, discussion and relevance. And it’s very little about the technology that we choose to use to supply him with those things.

Tags: Business Blogging, Social Media, Robert, Peston

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