Categories: Articles

Web 2.0 – What You Need To Know

I just finished reading the article, It’s A Whole New Web – And this time around it will be built by you, which appeared in BusinessWeek on September 26th, 2005. The article’s main focus is around what people are calling Web 2.0 – where this whole internet thing is heading and it boils down to it being “less about places and other nouns, but verbs.”
Web 2.0 is all about doing. Whether it’s peer-to-peer sharing, collaborating, hooking up or, most importantly, creating stuff (think of Instant Personal Publishing media like Blogs, Podcasting, etc…).
So that whole one-to-one promise that made people paper millionaires back in the day is now actually happening and it’s being created by the users not the producers. Cool.
Whether it’s something like MySpace.com – which features over 21 million monthly users who spend a lot of time sharing everything from thoughts, music and photos on personalized homepages to Wikipedia, where everyone in the world is the Author of this online information resource – the gatekeepers are pretty much useless at this point.
So what does this mean to marketers?
According to It’s A Whole New Web: “If you can use the Web to find exactly the service, article, video, or podcast you want – and maybe even create it yourself, or with friends – who needs networks or newspapers or (gulp) magazines?”
Big, deep and tough business questions.
Think about what Napster and peer-to-peer technology did to the music business. At this point, I think the music should be free (let the artists make money from touring, merchandise and other more personalized offerings). Yup… it’s getting tough out there.
The Web 2.0 is something none of us can afford to ignore. It will be bigger than peer-to-peer and it will happen fast. Very fast. How you target, market and advertise within these spaces will be complex but will resonate with increased sales and a more solid relationship with your customer.
Ignore Web 2.0 at your peril. I’m not being paranoid. I was there when all of the search engines started getting gobbled up by major publishers. People thought that they would never, gasp, sell search results. Tell that to Google.
Here are some Web 2.0 primers:
– BusinessWeek – It’s A Whole New Web.
– O’Reilly – What Is Web 2.0.
– Web 2.0 Weblog.
– Flickr – Web2MemeMap.
– Web 2.0: The Power Behind The Hype.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.