The Marketer’s View of Web 2.0

This is the first of a three-part series on the Marketer’s view of Web 2.0. In this installment we’ll look at what the heck Web 2.0 is and isn’t. Next installment is some hands-on grubbing into the guts of Web 2.0, and the third is a roadmap for where one might wander from here.

So what is Web 2.0? It’s a concept about a new level of Web services and capabilities, first formally articulated by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 but probably dreamed of and evolving from the heart of the machine itself. That might sound a little mystical and precious, but I think it’s really the source.

Wikipedia (itself a poster child for Web 2.0 thinking) says it’s a second generation of Web-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

You may be saying “what the hell does that mean.” One thing it means is that it’s not an infrastructure upgrade. No one is going turn on the new Web one day. It’s a change in the concepts that drive how people use the Web.

Let’s start with this video. I was going to produce my own version of this, even bought the software to do it and started scripting. But then I realized doing that was completely counter to a fundamental component of Web 2.0: The users are contributors. In other words, other people do much of the work of building value through content.

If your browser doesn’t display the video click here.

As a marketer, here’s what you need to know: The old Web was brochures, sell sheets, big Web sites that YOU built and YOU wrote. Email that YOU sent.

Web 2.0 is conversations.

Why would you care about that? It’s a question that we had to ponder for awhile too. Babcock & Jenkins is a very pragmatic agency. We like results that hit the top and bottom lines. When we tell a client “you need to pay attention to Web 2.0 approaches because it can make you a thought leader in your market” we get a little antsy. But it can. It can also push you to the top of Google organic searches without the snake oil approaches of SEO. We’ll show you how in the next two installments.

Content has value when it’s free

An extremely important aspect to Web 2.0 conversations is that the content is better. There’s a common notion that bloggers are just boring people who don’t have friends, and YouTube posting is a pathetic cry for attention. Real content comes from “experts” in traditional media.

Wrong. Not just wrong because you haven’t taken the time to find the good stuff, but wrong in the fundamentals. Diverse sources of information are frequently superior to pure expert sources. I’m not the only one that thinks so; a Google search of “diverse knowledge vs. expert knowledge” yields over a million references. Many say something like “one expert might have 1000 times the knowledge of an amateur, but the amateurs outnumber them millions to one.” If I’m having heart surgery I want one really good surgeon, not a mob of opinions. But the knowledge base of heart surgery does not grow from the experience of one expert, but from ALL the contributors, including people who are not doctors and who may simply know one important thing.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a tremendous amount of stupidity on the Web, but it does mean that there’s wheat in all that chaff. Web 2.0 is, to some degree, about identifying the wheat.

For example, I consider myself an expert in marketing, but I can find far more than I know about nearly any issue by doing a Technorati search of the many marketing blogs—far more than I could ever find in books or traditional media. But every time I read anyone’s blog, I find things I know are flat wrong, or even so stupid that they aren’t even wrong (to paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli).

The valuable content in the Web is not held in a few large Web sites. In fact, the big sites tend to be useless—they’re dragging around legacy junk in layers so thick they’ll never escape it. Try to find a solution on Microsoft.com. A basic search dredges up vast quantities of stuff that no one cares about any more. It would be daunting even for Microsoft to deploy resources to make the content relevant to each person’s search, and the task would never end. Web 2.0 approaches make it easy for self-service to thrive, for people to start their own conversations about issues that puzzle them or problems that confound them. The conversations start and end. Today’s hot topic on a blog is history next week. And the million little sites are where the conversations about you and your business are taking place. It’s what Chris Anderson calls the Long Tail.

Tagging and Ranking: A Social Value system

As usual there’s a lot of made up names that exclude the clueless. Folksonomy (tax-onomy by amateurs) is one, tagging is another. They’re both about the same thing—using the people who read an article or view a video or photo to describe what it’s about. The Web 2.0 aspect is that there is software that collects these tags and comments about the content and makes it searchable and personally relevant. In fact there’s not just one solution that does this, there are hundreds of people and companies competing to own folksonomy, just as Google owns data about the relative value of Web sites.

So Web 2.0 is about conversations, and tagging, and data-oriented software like Mapquest and Google maps, odd value indicators like pagerank or your reputation on eBay or a forum, or how many friends you have on MySpace or contacts in LinkedIn. It’s very much about blogs and how all bloggers talk to each other, and how Wikipedia grows because of the value of the knowledge it contains, which is created by trusting everyone to write the best description possible about every topic that anyone, anywhere cares about. It’s customer self service, users creating content, software that is constantly, incrementally improved because it’s provided as a service so perpetual beta is a good thing, and people create business models expecting to radically change them as they are exposed to the Web, to even fail constructively so something better and valuable comes from the ashes.

Three Simple Examples Worth Billions

eBay is nothing but a framework, the value of the company rests in a critical mass of transactions with the lifespan of a mayfly.

Amazon mostly sells products it doesn’t own, with the product descriptions written mostly by people who are enthusiastic about the product. Amazon has morphed into a Web 2.0 company and is using it’s democratic nature to beat competitors.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia built by its readers. The underlying notion of Wikis is enabling people to freely edit the content. Readers can even rearrange the structure and order of a wiki. It works wonderfully

Blobs of Blogs

Technorati, a tagging and indexing system for blogs has the tagline, “55 million blogs, some of them MUST be good.” Conceptually, blogs are just a home page in the form of a diary. But the associated software makes it extremely easy for the author to create postings or pages. Blogs beget blogs—people read blogs on topics they care about and create their own blog to express their own opinions and share their creativity. They link to each other and thereby share readership not only with standard links, but also track-backs and pings, which are automated comments to a posting that show when another blogger has created a link that references that posting. Blogs use a special linking structure called a permalink to ensure a link to a posting or page remains valid even when the home page has changed completely. With RSS feeds to connect new content to people who want to know about it, the entire blog universe is constantly, instantly updating itself and telling every one who cares when there has been a change.

Blogs harness collective intelligence very effectively and distribute it without incremental cost. It’s a very efficient information sharing mechanism. It’s also efficient in selecting for value. Bloggers who write about their cats don’t get linked to much, and their readership is limited to people who really care about cats. Quality rises of its own accord and tricks don’t work for long. There’s a recent posting on Seth Godin’s blog that addresses the issue directly, and of course Seth can track-back that link. How’s that for self-referential examples?

The screaming and gnashing of teeth, the lawsuits and copyright battles are the sounds of competition, not between traditional media and individual Web 2.0 companies or bloggers, or Web sites, but against the entire business models.

As a marketer, these are interesting times. Perhaps just as interesting as the late 90s when the Web was becoming populated.

In the next issue we’ll explore some of the tools and methods of Web 2.0.