Like new confections spilling out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, the brain trusts at Web companies big and small over the last three years or so have spun out a brand new Web. Like candy, this version of the Web is flashier, full of speed, comes in a cool wrapper, has good stuff inside and is highly addictive.
But unlike the dot-com crash of six years ago, it seems these new companies (and some old ones thinking in new ways) have figured out how to make the Web user king, keep the eyeballs and make money.
Think about what has happened since 2001: Google has put search front and center; online affiliate marketing was born; smaller computer programs on websites have made shopping and collaborating easier; and user-generated content has redefined entertainment and online marketing. With redefinitions come labels, and since 2004 these innovations in the Web experience have been called Web 2.0 – to mean a second generation of Web-based services and technologies.
Angel Djambazov, marketing and business development manager of affiliate management tool Popshops, says, “Web 2.0 lends itself to more interactivity between the user base and the site.”
Web 2.0 also has been called the “participatory Web” that involves consumer action, not just reaction to your website or message. Web 2.0 has been called the explosion of video – homemade and commercial video slathered freely and easily across the Web. Web 2.0 has also been called the rapid rise of blogs (highly personal websites), widgets, RSS feeds and the podcast.
Web 2.0 is really all these things. Tim O’Reilly – founder of O’Reilly Media, publisher of technology books – coined the term and in essence meant it as a perceived shift in the Internet as platform.
He has defined it this way: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
Where 1.0 was HTML Web pages you read like a book, 2.0 is Ajax-coded pages where mini-programs are swirling away on your desktop telling you the weather, what to eat, showing you videos or – most important to marketers – reporting your traffic. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, craigslist, Wikipedia, Digg, Photobucket and del.icio.us would all be considered Web 2.0 sites.
Adapting for the 2.0 World
For online marketers, now is the best time to be in a Web 2.0 world. There are hundreds if not thousands of companies who claim their technology or service is Web 2.0-enabled. Pundits say it’s not just another bubble. Venture capitalists are expressing their confidence with their checkbooks, sending $844.4 million into Web 2.0 companies last year, according to Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne. Advertisers are also coming on board and they are predicted to spend $1.5 billion on online video alone by 2009, according to eMarketer.
Mike Moran, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., says there are three main changes for marketers and advertisers in a Web 2.0 world: You can now target even the smallest group; you can measure every single message’s effectiveness; and you must change your message in response to what customers say and do. Fortunately, he says, Web 2.0 helps you do all of these.
The most recent Web 2.0 lightning rod is the widget or Web widget. It is a kind of mini-program that can be embedded into a Web page and operates separately from your website. Widgets can contain anything from updated weather to interactive ads, videos and photo slide shows, to calendars, feeds to games and polls. Widgets are often Adobe Flash or JavaScript, which make them lightweight and easy to embed.
Because widgets are transportable – meaning a thousand folks can place the same widget with the same information on a thousand different websites – marketers are nervous of the threat to their business. “Widgets allow for individuals to take or use parts of the content from a marketer’s site and apply that content to their own Web page,” says Sam Harrelson of CostPerNews.com. “Of course, that can be threatening to a large segment of online marketers.
“For those marketers attempting to monetize their sites or programs with page view metrics, it should be threatening.” He says that YouTube did not become a major Web property and bring a billion-dollar price tag because it just had funny clips of people doing funny things.
“It provides a perfect example of how a company can grow quickly, in terms of numbers of users and advertising dollars, through the use of these democratized or decentralized ways of serving unique content.” Harrelson adds that marketers should be on the cutting edge anyway, looking for ways to measure what is going to happen on the Web, with or without widgets.
Currently there are thousands of widgets available – most of them free – on the Web and some that are embeddable media players come branded with advertising. Recently MySpace.com banned the use of most kinds of widgets that come with ads in them from being placed on MySpace profiles. Critics said the move was made so that MySpace could control the ad messages to its 90 million monthly visitors.
Making Technology Work (Well)
Another Web 2.0 technology in search of scale is the RSS feed. An RSS feed is a format that allows certain content to be pushed to your computer. Newsletters, favorite blogs or columnists and news sites use it when they have frequent publishing schedules. Users can subscribe to a feed and receive only that information they sign up for. Usually, Web users must install a feed reader to subscribe to the content. While use of feeds is popular, Feed aggregator FeedBurner also sees great potential for the ad market in feeds. “There are a lot of blog authors creating great content on a variety of topics, but advertisers are challenged to find flexible and scalable deployment of a blog ad campaign,” says Brent Hill, vice president of business development at Feed- Burner. While FeedBurner continues to extend its ad network for RSS feeds to include ads on blogs, Hill says that advertisers need to realize that quality sites, reach and effective placements of feeds will help drive advertisers to the well.
As companies are adapting their messages for the cell phone, so is Web 2.0. Mini-blog site Twitter, for example, is making it easier to use connected mobile devices to add to Twitter threads. Twitter basically only allows 140 characters to be posted at a time. This limitation seems well-suited to the legions of text-messagers already sending short notes to each other. In addition, Twitter now has a short code or abbreviated message system where the word “weather” and your ZIP code will get you back the information you seek.
This is just one example of the user-centric mobile Web experience that’s exploding. Companies such as Mobio, SoonR and Loopt all allow cell phone users to receive specific kinds of information directly to their mobile device, usually event or dining listings, physical locations of friends in your network or data pushed to your phone.
All these technologies are part of the greater social Web or social media; usually video, audio or other content that users can interact with. Web 2.0-styled social media applications can be found at sites such as Wikipedia, Second Life, Digg, MySpace. com and Flickr. The media can usually be shared, rated and oft times edited by visitors. This is also called user-generated content and is defined as content on the Web influenced but not necessarily created by visitors to those websites.
Consumers = Participants
The impact of user-generated content on marketers has been great. As Moran points out, Web 1.0 users were considered consumers by marketers; now with Web 2.0, they are participants. He says that now readers “comment on your blogs, change your wikis, create blogs of their own, create hate sites if they don’t like your products and produce ‘mashups’ of your content and functions.”
This sea change has given rise to the term “social media optimization”; what Rohit Bhargava, vice president for interactive marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, calls “changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and .” He says that while that sounds a lot like search engine optimization, the difference is that Web 2.0 will make it easier to get your message out through tagging and bookmarking sites, widening your linkability, helping your content fit onto more niche websites and blogs and encouraging users to blend your message with other messages, or what is called the mashup.
On a participatory level, wikis are the exemplar of social networks that don’t require fancy technology. Wikipedia, for example, has taken the concept of building an online encyclopedia that every visitor can contribute to and made it very successful. Now there are wikis devoted to paleontology, linguistics, Swedish and Russian textbooks, law-student life, Star Trek, maps and collaborative novels, just to name a few.
While blogs and podcasts (downloadable audio shows) are also considered Web 2.0 innovations, the blog or Weblog technically has been around since just before the dot-com crash. Blogs and podcasts are beginning to be embraced by marketers also. Blog tracker Technorati reports that as many as 75,000 new blogs are created every day. While sites such as PayPerPost.com have made it easier for marketers to simply pay a third party to create a blog about their product, the effectiveness metrics are absent in that arrangement. Recent research has begun to balk at the reach of podcasts. Pew Research released a study that said only 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast and Forrester Research says that as few as 1 percent of all North Americans have downloaded a podcast.
A Web 2.0 spin on broadcasting information on the Internet is a company such as Userplane that enables webchats, webcasting and instant messaging. They sell themselves as a very Web 2.0 sort of company. Michael Jones, CEO, says that “Web 2.0 companies I come across all started as Web services companies. We saw an interesting need to have an online communication tool, and we started to say maybe there is an interesting way to turn on the lights in these rooms.” The company is beginning to host live webchat town halls with political candidates, which they hope will grow as the political season heats up.
Ad network MIVA also identifies itself as a very Web 2.0 company and has even outlined trends for 2007. Seb Bishop, president and CMO, has stated that mobile video sharing will offer an even greater level of immediacy than the Web, that mobile search will become localized – meaning mobile search will be less about browsing and more about fulfilling a need in real time and that advertising will become “democratized.”
Some critics have said that Web 2.0 is nothing but a marketing slogan itself. Russell Shaw, a columnist for ZDNet.com, has simply said that Web 2.0 “does not exist.” He says that things labeled Web 2.0 “are forward lurches of various standards and technologies; some compatible, some not, some revolutionary, some evolutionary, some impractical. Some are collaborative; others are highly competitive with each other.” He agrees with skeptics who say that the term is essentially meaningless and irrelevant.
CostPerNews’ Harrelson, however, perceives loads of relevancy in the new Web, especially as it relates to marketers. “Once marketers realize that the inventory available on publisher and affiliate sites is growing at near exponential rates, they will realize that metrics based on limited inventory such as CPA or CPC are increasingly inefficient,” he says. “That, more than anything, will lead to a re-examination of traditional marketing methods online and move the equation of metrics toward something more 2.0-ish.” He adds that “attention data is the new black. ” My practical advice to companies is to start developing attention metrics. That’s where the next black gold lies.”