ContentRobot

By their very nature, blogs are the building blocks of Web 2.0. For those of you who don’t know, the term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly back in 2003, and is defined by wikipedia as:

… a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

Read the Entire Post >

So, what does it mean for marketing in a Web 2.0 world?

Market Drivers of Web 2.0
More people are getting online for a wide variety of tasks, including shopping-related activites. Broadband access has become mainstream and ubiquitous, and people are using the Internet more and more for even small tasks (even on different devices).

Trends
The trends show that customers will subscribe to RSS feeds and have RSS preferences, bypassing spam-filled email boxes. This shows that “word-of-mouth” or participatory marketing will be important when planning your campaigns. Blogs, rather than, web sites will optimized for search engine traffic.

Customers will now get treated like adults who have legitimate views and participate in conversations. Therefore, companies now must unobtrusively and gently shape conversations, where collaboration and organic discussions emerge.

Marketing Impact
Marketers must enter the conversations and communities via blogs and wikis by providing transparency, personalized, appropriate messages wherever and whenever. Ultimately, they are responsible for creating a satisfying online experience.

Marketing Toolkits
Companies should use blogs, podcasts, and RSS to deliver interactivity and extend or complement existing marketing activities and react in real-time.

Web 2.0 Lessons

• Leverage customer-self service to reach out to the entire web.
• Users add value, and can be treated as co-developers of a brand.
• Consider your brand in “perpetual beta” and engage your users as real-time testers.
• Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection.
• Cooperate but don’t control the emerging conversation.

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages, personal diaries, and personal opinion, have been around since the early days of the web, so what is the fuss all about?

RSS Extends Web Page Viewing Away from the Browsers
It used to be that web browsers were the only way for people to view web pages. Now RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology extends that capability. RSS aggregators can be web-based (like Bloglines), desktop clients, and even portable devices allow you to subscribe to constantly updated content.

RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability.

Permalinks Point the Way Toward Discussion
But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. The permalink (or the ability to click through to the entire post’s page) effectively turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities.

For the first time it became relatively easy to point directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussions, chats, and friendships emerged or became more entrenched. Therefore, the permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

The “blogosphere” then can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.

Web 2.0 Harnesses Collective Intelligence
An essential part of Web 2.0 is turning the web into a kind of global brain. The blogosphere becomes the equivalent of constant mental chatter or voice we hear in all of our heads.

The blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, and bloggers (as the most prolific and timely linkers) have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results.

Considering what Wikipedia does, blogging then harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter or what James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” or Dan Gillmor calls “we, the media.”

What it Means for Your Blog Efforts
Your blogs, which will evolve into a multi-authored, broad channel collaboration site, where it becomes your focus group and spokespeople for your brands. Because they are leveraged, not a regurgitation of the web site content, you’ll get input, reviews, shared pictures, etc. as you control and manage the conversation.

Adapted from Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0

So what tools and technologies make Web 2.0 possible? With a little bit of help from the Wikipedia, here are the terms and their definitions.

Social software
Social software enables people to collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. It can encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but more recently it suggests genres such as blogs and wikis.

Social software can also be referred to the use of computer-mediated communication to create communities. People, then, will form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.

Blogs
A blog (a shortened form of weblog or web log) is a website in which content is posted regularly and displayed in reverse chronological order. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging.” Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries.” A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger.”

A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows new pages to be easily created simply entering data into form and then submitted. Defined emplates allow you to add the article to the home page, create the new full article page, and archive via date or categories. It also allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.

Wikis
A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing. A wiki system provides various tools that allow the user community to easily monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki and discuss the issues that emerge in trying to achieve a general consensus about wiki content. Wiki content can also be misleading as users may add incorrect information to the Wiki page.

A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account.

Podcasts
Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to download or subscribe to, and also the content of that feed.

Podcasting’s essence is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.

RSS feeds
Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator. Web feeds are widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries’ headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files.

Simpler web design
Design becomes focused on developing a community rather than selling to an individual. Whereas alot of web sites are rich with Flash-based presentations and other “bells and whistles,” the design in the Web 2.0 world gets simplified. Think of how sparse the Google home page is and how well it does with community-building with its offerings.

Blog templates, which are customized with CSS, are designed to showcase the content more than other elements on the page. This simplicity allows for the colloboration of many authors who don’t need to know much more beyond the basics of HTML to publish content.

Folksonomy
Folksonomy, which combines “folk” and “taxonomy,” refers to the collaborative (but unsophisticated way) that information is being categorized on the web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging.

Examples of web services that use tagging include those who allow users to publish and share photographs, personal libraries, bookmarks, social software generally, and most blog software, which permits authors to assign tags to each entry.

Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

What’s Next?
Now that the techy portion of Web 2.0 has been defined and examples given, we’ll explain how blogs fit in and how marketing teams must repond to this new environment

Web 1.0, built in the 1990s, is characterized as static web pages that were built and marketed by web professionals. Sites were found by typing in a domain name and hoping that a particular company had a site (hence the rise of domains such as pets.com).

Web 1.5, created around 2000, brought dynamic sites and ecommerce into the fold. Marketing campaigns are pushed via email and banner advertising.

Web 2.0, building in 2006, offers a place where customers are treated like adults and are valued for their opinions and views and are talked to in a human voice.

To further define the differences, the tables below summarizes the techniques and technologies that surround the Web 2.0 concept.

Web Marketing Techniques

Companies

Last Thursday, I listened to an interesting American Marketing Association (AMA) web seminar, Invisible Marketing: 3 Things Every Organization Needs to Know in the Era of Blogs, Podcasts and RSS Feeds. This has got me thinking about the concept of Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? I’ll summarize what how the Wikipedia defines it:

Web 2.0 … has come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).

They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis.

Read the Entire Post >