A great truism of writing about business and technology is that whenever you try to inject sanity into the discussion of some over-hyped techno-fad, somebody is virtually guaranteed to respond with computer industry conventional wisdom. Earlier this week, I posted a criticism of Web 2.0. (It’s HERE.) Predictably, it elicited in the discussion chain a literate and well-thought-out comment that happened to pretty much sum up the conventional view of Web 2.0.
Because the writer of that comment clearly spent time and effort on the response, I’ll use the original comment (shown in italics) as the basis for my answers:
I think the author of this story has a slight grasp on what Web 2.0 is. He cites the John Mackey postings on Yahoo! Finance - but message boards have been around since 1996. Also, Web 2.0 isn’t a “technology;” it’s more a description of how people are using the Internet slightly differently than before, which this author cites, like creating communities and participating in collaborative efforts (think Wikipedia).
You are correct that “Web 2.0″ is not a technology, but I did not say it was a technology. The exact term that I used was “techie talk” — which is apt because “Web 2.0″ is a only a buzzword that’s being used to position a set of technologies that have recently become more popular.
Those technologies are ALL repackaged versions of stuff that people have been doing with computers for well over a decade. There was all sorts of “community building” going on back in the dot-com days, and a blog is just a message board with a moderator who posts every day. Online group authoring (like wikipedia but without the noxious addition of anonymity) was being regularly conducted in corporate environments in the early 1980s.
The point isn’t what iteration of the technology is being used, but the behavior that it produces — like sock puppetry — which is potentially damaging to sales.
“Web 2.0″ can be very good for sales if a company understands what it it is and how to use it. No, you can’t stop or ‘filter out’ negative comments about your company - but you can use it as free ‘market intelligence’ to improve your marketing efforts, product development, and brand strategy.
Web 2.0 communities are like the “reader polls” that magazines often run. Those polls often come up with startling data, but real social scientists completely ignore them because self-selected sampling always ends up with skewed data. Gathering statistically valid data always requires random sampling of the target demographic.
All the activity that takes place in a Web 2.0 “community” is self-selected, which means that it has absolutely no statistical validity. All that you have, when you roll it up, is a collection of anecdotes and opinions, possibly from customers, possibly from sock puppets. That’s utterly worthless for market research purposes because 1000 anecdotes are just as meaningless as one anecdote. That’s why the fact that there are 10,000 anecdotes about people getting kidnapped by aliens doesn’t prove that UFOs exist.
In other words, you can’t find out anything useful about your customer base by looking at what the “community” says, because the community only represents the segment of the customer base that participates in the community. And that community could just be (and probably is) a vocal minority that’s completely off the curve or even completely over the twist.
And you can build Web 2.0 applications or widgets that people actually want. Or you can even create communities that people want to join. Several large brands have done this successfully in places like My Space & Second Life.
Have you ever looked at a corporate page on MySpace? They’re like your grandfather showing up at the Rave. My impression is that the people who think that a corporate presence on MySpace is so wonderful are the marketing dweebs who are building the corporate MySpace pages.
In any case, a Myspace page is, uh…, a web page. Yeah, it’s easier to cross-link but it’s still just a freakin’ web page with some built-in features. Sure, there are some people — porn stars mostly — who have a million “friends” on Myspace. But I’m not sure that anybody’s going to be generating big B2B sales as the result of trading comments with CoOlDuDe69 and StarTrekLassie.
Finally, you can just celebrate it.
Ok. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re being sarcastic, because the idea of “celebrating” technology sounds like something out of a Apple advertisement during the Sculley era.
The classic “Web 2.0″ viral moment was when two mad scientists up in Canada re-created the Bellagio Fountains with Mentos and Diet Coke, and the video was posted on Revver & YouTube. The marketing brains at Coke were upset by this (because they weren’t in control of it, essentially), but the Mentos people loved it. They saw it as a way to present their brand in a whole new light that captured the imagination of people - and, oh, by the way, sales of both products shot through the roof in the wake of this viral video.
Most viral videos are, like your example, serendipitous, which makes it pointless for corporate marketing groups to try to create them. More importantly, even though that particular video generated a sales increase, I doubt that a YouTube-posted cellphone video of the CEO in his car necking with an intern would have the same positive effect. And, frankly, one is just as likely as the other to become a big hit on YouTube.
The point I’m making is that Web 2.0 can be dangerous and that it’s not some propeller-head panacea. And if you check the subsequent two posts, you’ll see EXACTLY how easy it is for a corporate to get involved in a blog discussion and end up looking foolish.
Anyway, in a future post, I’m going to set out some guidelines for using Web 2.0 safely and intelligently, like how to get good stuff in and bad stuff out of your corporate wikipedia entry without getting caught. So I’m not “against” Web 2.0. I just think that — like most high tech fads — it’s being wildly oversold.
