Social Network Marketing: Web 2.0 Explained
You see it everywhere: Web 2.0, but what is it, what does it mean, why should you care? There is more to Web 2.0 than meets the eye. While it is true that sites like digg.com, youtube.com and myspace.com are getting the most press and are the examples most people use to explain Web 2.0, they are only examples of the personal aspects of social network marketing, not the commercial side.
What Web 2.0 Is And How It Can Help An Online Business
From a personal standpoint, Web 2.0 can be a powerful and cool way to share your thoughts, pictures, songs, playlists, videos, or whatever you’re into, with your friends and family or even co-workers. This is the underlying structure of Web 2.0, bonding and communicating outside of the normal world wide web. Think about it for a minute. The world wide web is really based upon hyperlinking. Sites get built are linked to by other sites, listed in directories, and found through search engines. It is the same with products and shopping carts, or auction sites like E-Bay. All these commercial applications revolve around users entering what they are looking for in a search engine and then following the results to what they are looking for.
Things are much different with Web 2.0. It started a while back with forums. Places where people can share ideas and information even experiences. These forum threads are then spidered and can be found in search engines so new users are able to find other peoples answers and opinions on products, services or ideals. While forums were once very popular and in some industries still are, especially for technical support sites, the fact is they are hardly a secure solution for most of us. I personally have had quite a few forums hacked no matter how many security updates I did.
Besides hackers, many users also find forums to be hard to follow, update, moderate and maintain. Along comes blogging. At first blogs were personal web logs, online journals used to save and share ideas. They hit the big time when Google purchased Blogger. Now everyone and their mother has a blog. In fact more and more industries are moving much of their organic marketing into blogging. When you look at the commenting feature within most blogging systems again the ability for discussion makes a blog a community portal.
The real estate industry is probably the largest commercial community to fully embrace blogging as a sales tool. My wife Victoria and I both are strong in that industry, bringing social network marketing to the forefront of Internet Marketing campaigns.
While it is true that hyperlinks are still the most common glue that binds sites together, there is now a more powerful tool of communication that is the fuel that drives Web 2.0: RSS. Read my article RSS Syndication Explained for an overview of Real Simple Syndication.
With RSS a whole new way exists for users to obtain information. Through feeds, users can customize their home pages with updates about whatever they are interested in from news to home listings and product updates. RSS is the underlying foundation for Web 2.0.
From a commercial perspective social network marketing is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website as well as communicate with your customers. It is also one of the best ways to maintain support for your products by keeping online support journals.
My next article about social network marketing will go into excruciating detail about the commercial applications of Web 2.0. Below is a great video I found on one of my favorite blogs which is by Lawrence Lessig I think it is the best graphical overview of Web 2.0 I have ever seen.
