E-NEWS VOL2 ISSUE 3

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a term that is flying around meeting rooms as “the new thing”. Web 2.0 is portrayed as a mysterious technology that will captivate visitors of your website. In reality, it is much simpler and more powerful than most of these portrayals make it seem.

Web 2.0 is very simply an idea that content on the web should be user-driven or user derived content. In “the old days”, everyone would throw around the saying “Content is King”. Content is still the single most important item of your website, but content has evolved and web 2.0 movement has led the charge.

Content is no longer great content unless it’s fresh content. Fresh content is sometimes something that is very hard for most businesses that do not have a dedicated web team to keep up with. So, if we as businesses do not have the time to continually update our site with content to be consumed, how can we keep our content fresh? This is one question web 2.0 aimed at answering.

Web 2.0 is built upon users helping users. The first question it answers with this approach is the above.  Users creating content on a regular basis takes the load off of the business. This does not entirely free the business from a content perspective but lowers the responsibility from content creation to content management. Qualifying the contributing users can greatly lower content management costs while improving content quality with a slightly higher cost on the front-end of user registration.

The other problem web 2.0 helps address is the age old problem of creating a “sticky” web site.  Obviously, we all want our web site visitors to come back to our site and visit us again. Creating a sticky website requires fresh content and sticky features. For example, the first sticky feature sites really began employing was offering email. If people had to come to their site (i.e. hotmail, yahoo, and the latest entry … gmail) to check their email, that would drive an enormous amount of traffic.

Web 2.0’s approach to creating a sticky website is close to the same idea as email from a 50,000 foot view. What you want to do is create fresh content that the user will come back to view as often as possible. Myspace (a social networking site) created user profiles where users could upload their information. This is not the biggest draw of myspace for a user. The biggest draw of myspace is checking on other people and also seeing what comments people left for them. This is when you start seeing interactions and, at the highest level, relationships being built between users. Now, instead of being a storage area of content, you become the place users come to meet, hang out, and exchange information. This is powerful stuff.

Obviously there is much more to these ideas and other applications of these methodologies. The over-arching theme though, is the user. The user is the center of success for a web 2.0 website. The question is what ways can you engage your users and allow users to engage with you and other users?  Ideas like encouraging employees to blog, answering customer questions in forums, and sharing media between users are revolutionizing the way we use and interact on the web.