Early adopters to Web 2.0 will be richly rewarded as is typical of all those who move before their competitors in new opportunities. Those who wait will most likely be doomed to a lot of head-scratching as they try to catch up to the new leaders. The most difficult part about being an early adopter is uncertainty. Companies who typically like to have all the data and all the answers before making a move will find it very difficult to be an early adopter in Web 2.0 technology and strategies. The truth is; so much is still unknown about how the market will respond to socially enabled companies and how consumers may use or misuse the new medium?

More than anything, the fire beneath the boiling pot of Web 2.0 is about freedom and honestly. The history of commerce reads much like a communistic community of tight controls and rigid rules fueled by the insatiable lust for power and dominance, where the consumer (the source of power) was treated with suspicion. You’ll find many companies out there today still trying to operate under the old rules which is most evidenced by the phrase, “We can’t do that it is against our policy.” What companies like this are saying is that they have decided to create rules to limit and control their customers… at any cost. For years, the commercial world has been saying the customer is king and the customer is always right. Web 2.0 philosophies has changed that hollow slogan and pointed it back to the corporate world in the form of, “I am the king and the bringer of all your power and if you don’t think I’m right, I will take by business elsewhere along with everybody I know and everybody within my social network.” In some cases, that social network can include the world.

During the 1920’s in the U.S., one of the hot issues before congress was how to break the bank trust and limit the control of big corporations. Perhaps born out of that era (and arguably due to some of the bad decisions that were made), the world public has grown more suspicious and cautious of large corporations.

Back in the early 80’s, snowboards rose to popularity and became the choice of the rising X generation over skiing. While the fundamentals between snowboarding and skiing are vastly different, even more pronounced was the attitude of the teenaged snowboarder. The attitude of the snowboarder was typical for most of the X generation which was centered on antiestablishment and distrust, not unlike their parent’s generation in the 1960’s (history does repeat itself).

The most interesting thing about the early, antiestablishment snowboarders was their buying habits. Small start-up snowboard manufactures (in the minds of snowboarders) were viewed as making the best and most preferred boards. However, when the small manufactures became too large and too successful, they were all of a sudden seen as inferior to the new comers. Some of the ski manufacture giants such as France-based Rossignol tried to enter the snowboard market, but failed due to this untrusting mindset. This was also true of even the retailers. Snowboarders preferred the small specialty snowboard shops instead of the sport superstores. Snowboard manufactures quickly learned that they couldn’t appear to be “big” to their customers. Twenty years later, these antiestablishment teenagers are now thirty-somethings and their attitudes, while tempered somewhat are largely the same. Unlike their parents who were also antiestablishment and their grandparents in the 1920’s, these thirty-somethings have a voice, they have the Internet, they have power. And because of the Internet, all consumers now have the same power, which spells huge changes for world commerce. Enter Web 2.0.

Preparing for Web 2.0

Check your internal attitudes
I provided the foregoing to help you realize the nature of change that is on the horizon and what that will mean for businesses everywhere. The first and arguably the most important effect Web 2.0 will have on your company is how your company views and treats its customers before, during and after the sale. In the past, when companies made a sale, it was viewed as the attainment of the goal, and happy hour shortly followed. Today, making a sale is a double-edged sword and while still the goal, it could be the very thing that will cause you to loose that customer forever, and countless other potential (and even existing) customers. In today’s world, consumers talk and everyone listens. Even more important, consumer talk is prized and valued higher than a company’s carefully crafted marketing messages and smooth PR.

To fully embrace Web 2.0, customers need to be viewed as they really are: the provider of all company goals, dreams and aspirations. They are no longer just a means to an end. Stellar examples of Web 2.0 ready companies include JetBlue, Nordstrom, Tesco, Johnson & Johnson and many many others. I encourage you to Google any of these companies and read what industry analysts have to say and especially what consumers say about them. Across the board, you will find a common theme: consumers are people, our scarcest resource and exceptional products and services (especially services) are the only thing that will keep us in businesses.

Appoint or hire a talker
I’m going to make a prediction that within 10 years, we will see a new type of PR manager whose responsibility will be to socially interact with the industry. This person will know all there is to know about the company (the good, bad and ugly) and be expert in dealing with and communicating with others –finally a job description that really requires a “people person.” We will see new titles like, Social Communications Manager (SCM), or Consumer Ambassador (CA) creep into the workplace.

Leave the office
Your new SCM or CA’s job will be to manage the social interactions of your company. They will oversee the set up and manage the day to day interactions with consumers on social Web sites. Start with a company page on MySpace and Facebook or better yet, allow your SCM or CA set up a personal site as an employee of your company. Search the Web for other social networking sites such as vertical social networks specific to your industry. These type of Web sites are springing up almost daily and it will soon be more than a full time job to maintain them.

The goals for your new SCM or CA is to get out of the office in a cyber sort of way, and interact, chat, listen and report to the company what is being written on the walls of the world. In order for your SCM or CA to be taken seriously and not just another polished PR robot, you need to give them license to talk about the bad and the ugly and not just the good, or worse, allowing them to only talk about the euphoric vision you want your customers to believe. Being honest and forthright about mistakes will endear customers to you not drive them away. Remember the Tylenol poisonings in the late 80’s? Though not their fault, McNeil (the parent company of Tylenol) took responsibility, pulled every bottle off every shelf and took the punch square in the chops. The result, they are still in business today and still the industry leader. When polled, consumers said they trusted the Tylenol brand more after the incident, than before. That’s what’s called, turning a very bad, out-of-business situation into a major win.

The other thing your SCM or CA should do is manage your company blog and manage its distribution. New posts to your blog should happen at least every 48 hours or sooner. There are many blogging services and software packages available that make writing and archiving easy and painless. Many will also help manage distribution and set up RSS feeds, which is a must.

Tear down the walls
How many entry points does your Web site currently have? While most Web sites can technically be entered at any page if one has the correct URL realistically, most have one or two home or landing pages where traffic is funneled. Working with your SCM or CA, create new entry points that make sense with the social networks you are participating in. This might mean setting up an RSS feed to your blog, your discussion boards or your internal and external newsletters. Maybe it’s opening links into your picture library, or open feeds (video clips) of a press conference or even your company holiday party on YouTube.

Next, evaluate your search engine strategies and rework them to be more socially friendly. Look at what pages are being indexed and see what you could add to your indexed pages based upon the social networks you are now a member of. Look at what is being spidered by other social networks and make sure your best foot is forward. Lastly, determine if new landing pages or even whole new sections of your Web site need to be created to support your new social initiatives and make sure they are being submitted to the search engines.

P.J. Fusco described what I’m talking about very eloquently when she stated, “Where search engine optimization is about building a solid foundation for building strong search strategies, social media optimization (SMO) is primarily about knocking down your site’s walls so content can be readily discovered, distributed, and shared by diverse online communities and social multimedia search portals.”

Implications of what you’re getting into
The implications of social marketing is putting fear into the hearts of many corporate managers and I suppose that emotional response is warranted for some corporations who have much to hide. However, I don’t think social marketing and Web 2.0 is akin to undressing in public, but it is about coming out from behind the counter, showing what’s in our pockets and talking candidly about what we used to call “off the record” stuff. I believe this can be accomplished with our corporate self respect attached and our dignity in check.

What we all need to be prepared to do in Web 2.0 is first identify what the truth is. Second, be able to strategically tell it and like Tylenol, always do the right thing by the customer. This requires walking the walk and not just issuing a news release. Many things are still yet to be discovered and learned in this new frontier of Web 2.0, but what is certain is one disgruntled consumer can have tremendous power and influence and a company that is not actively participating in that conversation will be assumed guilty. It is an uncertain world out there, but the rewards for the early adaptors are huge. There is also one other thing that is certain about Web 2.0 and that is it will create a new generation of Wall Street leaders, it might even usher in a more mature version of dot com all over again. We can only hope.

Since the advent of the Internet, the English language has gained hundreds of new words and created many new definitions to existing words. Today a person no longer needs an ocean and waves to surf and a browser is no longer someone who aimlessly wanders around a shopping mall. New words and new meanings continue to evolve, for example, if you said you had “Googled” someone just three years ago you would have had a lot of explaining to do.

The problem with this rapidly expanding landscape of new words and meanings is the resulting loss of communication. Most of us have heard of Web 2.0 but at least 80% of the population has no real definition of what it is. Web 2.0 is less about technology and more about how we use the internet. Like the English language, the way we use the Internet has also evolved over the past 15 years. Up until about 2003, the Internet was a very siloed (another new word used to describe a Web site or business that is an island, with marginal interaction with other businesses or Web sites) place. Web sites stood alone with an occasional link to the rest of the world. The only Web sites that offered any amount of links to the Internet at large were directories and search engines, which functioned like the yellow pages. To understand this evolution, it helps to think of the Internet in terms of the brick and mortar retail evolution, since both have evolved along the same lines.

Traveling across the vast open spaces of the United States in 1850, your shopping experience in every town from New York to San Francisco would be the same, the only difference being quantity and selection. In every town, you would walk down a wooden boardwalk and visit each store independently. This was also true when purchasing food. You would have to visit the butcher for meats, the green grocer for produce and… you get the idea. This was akin to the online surfing experience in 1993. Then along came the variety store of the 1930’s and the eventual invention of the shopping mall. This evolution (like the evolution of the Internet) was based upon convenience, price, ease of use, and access. For the Internet, this was the era during the mid to late 90’s where a funny company called Yahoo shocked Wall Street and the fabric of the World Wide Web wrapped the globe. Web sites were still siloed but they were all connected, much like the stores in a shopping mall. Then, some 58 years after 1930, Sam Walton had a monstrous idea, the super center.

The super center has been so successful it has almost achieved a religious status. I actually have a good friend who speaks of going to Wal-Mart as “going to church.” Frightening! This era of the Internet is the online experience that we all know and love. Super sites and super networks offer us cheap stuff and it all arrives at our door within days or hours (there was a company in the 90’s called Cosmo that would even deliver products within 30 minutes in larger U.S. cities). A very interesting and perhaps sobering note about our little history lesson here, is the time span. In the offline world, the evolution from the small specialty store to the super center took approximately 188 years (looking at modern retail history from about 1800 to 1988). The online world only took 15 years to cover the same distance. This means the Internet has evolved about 12 times faster. The implications of that statistic for your online business (no matter how you look at it) mean you have to move quickly and stay alert.

Web 2.0 describes the online evolution beyond where off line retailing has been.

After about 2003 is where the online evolution surpassed off line retail evolution with the help of a little Web site called My Space. My Space was actually started in 1999 but evolved to its current state and loyal following a few years later. In 2006, they added their 100 millionth user and today boast over 300 million users. Following My Space’s lead, many other copycat sites have come on the scene confirming one thing, the social network is powerful, extremely lucrative, and here to stay. In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is all about social networks and how we humans have formed our societies for thousands of years.

It’s hard to image off line retail evolution beyond the super center, but that’s because we currently shop in one. Web 2.0 isn’t the super center exactly however; it goes a step beyond it (which is why the lines cross in the graph above). Imagine a super center that has a group of actual consumers and industry experts surrounding every product (sku) in the store –there ready to give you user experiences, manufacture information, official reports, where to find the lowest price and the best service, and all the urban legends and rumors that surround every product. If you can get your head around that, you are beginning to understand what Web 2.0 is all about and how important it is that your product information is in a place and format that enables it to become part of the social fabric of the world.

The future of Web 2.0 and the implications it will have on business isn’t crystal clear but we can be certain it will change the status quo online and that we will also have a few new words to learn. One such term gaining momentum out there is the acronym SMO, which stands for Social Marketing Optimization. SMO is similar to SEO (search engine optimization), which is the strategy of getting high organic rankings in search engines. SMO is about making your site flexible enough to be infiltrated and accessed by many different social networks and serving your marketing messages in such a way that they will be welcomed by your target audience and served to them through the right social vehicle so that they will be valued and trusted.

I believe one more historical analogy is warranted. Route 66 was an old highway built in 1926 in the U.S. that winded its way from Chicago, Illinois to Los Angeles, California. Unlike modern freeway systems, Route 66 often became Main Street in many small towns complete with stop signs and traffic signals. When the modern freeway systems became the standard, many small towns that were once connected by Route 66 and other like highways were literally cut off from the world. The Disney/Pixar movie Cars follows this true to life situation of many small towns in the U.S. and Europe after the introduction of the modern freeway.

Web 2.0 introduces a similar situation for online businesses. The social networks of the world speed word-of-mouth advertising faster than ever before. In addition, marketers can get their messages distributed to their target markets faster and cheaper than ever before. Deciding not to participate in this global conversation could cut you off from your marketing audience and the world at large.

I expect to see many new applications, online services, and strategies evolve over the next 3 years that will help businesses capitalize on the numerous and ever-expanding global social networks. But to wait for these new tools before making your Web 2.0 move could cost you, and there are plenty of history lessons about that.

What is Web 2.0 really? (part 2) – “How can I prepare and capitalize on Web 2.0?”

About the author
Greg Meyers is an Internet veteran of 16 years and an e-marketing expert. Greg is currently the Director of Marketing at WestHost and has consulted for such clients as Microsoft, Novell, McAfee, General Motors, HP, Volkswagen, 3M, United Health Care, and others. Greg currently lives in the Cache Valley (Northern Utah, USA) area with is wife and four children.

When I sit down with companies to talk about their web site strategy, one of the first questions that I ask is “Why did you originally develop your site?” Often, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before someone replies, “because our competitors all had one”, or “our customers kept asking for our web address”, or one of my personal favorites “to get our name out there”.

In addition, some companies build a web site for branding purposes, or to provide information to potential clients, thinking that one-way communication is a valid goal. I’m afraid that I disagree. Using a web site merely to provide information is like using an airplane to drive around town without ever leaving the ground - you’re missing the real opportunity to help your business ‘take-off’ by creating leads and sales.

After all, a web site is a corporate resource, and like any other resource it should provide a return on investment. That return should be immediate and measurable, meaning that the bottom line for any website is – how specifically has the web site grown my business today/this week/this month, and so on. Enter the concept of ‘conversion’.

What is Conversion?
For a business web site, there are three primary goals:
- generating leads
- selling products via e-commerce
- generating referrals

The reason that I say this is because these are the only actions that lead to real dollars. So, they’re the only way for your web site to produce a return-on-investment. When a visitor takes one of these actions, that is counted as a ‘conversion’ (as in converting visitors into leads and customers).

I do understand that websites can accomplish other less-tangible benefits. I call these secondary goals. Typical secondary goals might include:
- building credibility
- supporting existing customers
- recruiting partners or affiliates (this may be a primary goal if your business is largely affiliate based)

I consider these goals secondary because if this was ALL that your site did, then you’re probably missing the real potential of a company website.

Conversion Aids Site Development and Management
Deciding that you want/need a conversion web site is actually a tremendously empowering moment. For example, your new goals can actually help you to determine what should or shouldn’t be included on your site (removing much of the politics of website development). In a sense you build your site backwards – start with your site goals and then flesh out the structure and content from there. As you use your goals document as a set of criteria for determining site content, there’s much less room for disagreement.

Secondly, having specific web conversion goals allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site after it’s completed and live. That’s key because if you can’t measure web site performance, then improving it becomes much more problematic. So you’ll find that measurement and improvement are the keys to that ROI you’re looking for.

Tips for Improving Conversion Rate
Here are few tips to increase your conversion rate:

1. Give Direction
To build interest in a product or service, consider structuring your website as a logical sequence of information, rather than a maze of optional navigation. The way to accomplish this is to reduce the number of links, and identify the best next click for each page. Then provide a specific link which is essentially a signpost pointing where you want your visitor to click once they’ve read the page they’re currently on.

2. Trade Value for Value
For lead generation sites, collecting visitors contact information in exchange for something is the desired outcome. The exchange should be high perceived value to the recipient, low cost to the provider, and have a low perception of commitment. Typical on-line exchanges of this sort include free-trials, product demos, and whitepapers. Be careful not to ask for too much information in the exchange (this raises the perceived commitment level). Ask only for information that’s essential to you.

3. The Work’s Not Over
Once your web site is up and running, the work isn’t over! Pay careful attention to the results you’re getting. Establish a baseline of results and then begin making changes to impact your conversion rate. Make sure you allow enough time for changes to show an impact, if your site gets only a few visitors, each test element might be in place for a month or even longer.

About the Author
Mat Greenfield is the founder of Conversion Results, and has been in marketing since 1996. He is recognized as a website conversion expert by a number of industry organizations including Inside Sales, Register.com, and Constant Contact. He is a regular contributor to a number of print and e-magazines, and is a monthly columnist for Practical e-Commerce Magazine.

Visit www.conversionresults.com for a free eGuide to Improving Website Conversion Rates.