NETTING IT OUT
Most of the buzz around Web 2.0 has focused on consumer-oriented Web sites.
Less attention has been paid to the many firms whose audiences are business
professionals. This “chalk talk” is an annotated presentation that
offers patterns and examples of Web 2.0 in action in the B2B world. You are
welcome to download and reuse any of the slides at http://www.slideshare.net.1
WEB 2.0 IS THE CURRENT WEB ETHOS
I view the Web 2.0 phenomenon2 as 1) a natural evolution of Web technologies
and 2) a way to open up your site to empower customers to shape your content
and offerings to better meet their collective needs.
What Are the Patterns of Web 2.0?
©
2008 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.
Illus. 1. The six enabling capabilities of Web 2.0 provide a rich interactive
playground for customers.
What Are the Patterns of Web 2.0?
©
2008 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.
Illus. 2. Some of the services and technologies that comprise the Web 2.0 ecosystem.
SIX ENABLING CAPABILITIES. The key enablers for empowering customers and partners
to roll up their sleeves, interact, and contribute are:
1. Executable Web. The use of rich Internet applications (Ajax, Flash, Flex)
using browser-independent programming languages (JavaScript, Python, Ruby
on Rails) to deliver interactive applications.
2. Customer-Contributed Content. The provision for visitors and customers to
contribute their own perspectives through ratings, reviews, discussions,
wikis, and, increasingly, videos.
3. Social Networking. The ability for users to share tags (interests), profiles,
links, and to find others with common interests or needed expertise.
4. Syndication. The ability for users to post content on one site (e.g., Flickr
or YouTube) and publish it on many other sites (your company’s site,
their blog). And the ability for users to subscribe to changes and updates
via RSS.
5. Published APIs. This syndication is enabled through open interfaces, mostly
written in human-readable XML, which makes it easy for moderately technical
users to modify and/or combine two or more services to create “mash
ups”—a Google map with geo-coded photographs, for example.
6. Web Services. Many organizations (Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, FedEx, UPS, etc.
have leveraged these open APIs to provide (usually free) utility services
each of which can answer a specific request (where’s my package, order
this book, map this location, post this on my calendar). Gadgets and Widgets
package Web Services into interactive templates (usually created using JavaScript
and XML) that end-users can customize and syndicate onto their own desktops,
Web sites, blogs, or hand-held devices.
HOW DO BUSINESS CUSTOMERS USE WEB 2.0?
Many of the early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies were consumer-oriented Web
sites like Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, and SecondLife. Business people who
looked at the frenzied participatory activity on these sites saw people with
a lot of time on their hands. They assumed that busy business people wouldn’t
care to invest their time in tinkering online. They were wrong.
What Are Business Customers Doing??
©
2008 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.
Illus. 3. How do business customers want to interact on a business Web site?
Common Activities
For business users, most scenarios start with finding the information or product
they’re seeking. Once they’ve landed in the right place, they
want to interact with it in order to accomplish their objective (learn, explore,
solve a problem, find resources, decide, buy, upgrade, renew, discover new
approaches). On Web 2.0-enabled sites, business visitors will rate products,
read and write reviews, organize and tag information in order to find it
again, share their tags and their needs, and even design new solutions or
publish their research findings, promoting your brand as they do so.
Typical Roles
Given a conducive environment, customers who identify closely with your brand
(your brand fits some aspect of their self-image) will play one or more of
these roles:
5 Roles Customers Naturally Play
©
2008 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.
Illus. 4. In my book, Outside Innovation,3 I
identified five roles that customers naturally want to play vis à vis a company or brand they care
about.
Nature Publishing Group Engages Scientists in Classifying and Linking Info
Howard Ratner, CTO of the Nature Publishing Group, created a tagging and sharing
utility targeted to readers of life sciences-related information—that
found on Nature.com and elsewhere. Scientists and researchers tag articles
with the current terminology in the fields they follow. Through RSS feeds,
they can subscribe to updates so that they’ll be alerted to any article
that anyone tags as pertinent to the topic they’re tracking (AIDS,
gene expression, etc.).
Readers Act as Guides by Tagging Scientific and Medical Info
©
2008 Nature Publishing Group
Illus. 5. Readers of Nature can tag and find the articles of interest based
on their fields of interest.
This report continues...
To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/ct01-31-08cc
**FOOTNOTES**
1) http://www.slideshare.net/pseybold/using-web-20-for-outside-i-nnovation-seybold-stm-dec-07/
2) Tim O’Reilly coined this term. See “Web 2.0 Principles and Best
Practices,” by John Musser with Tim O’Reilly and the O’Reilly
Radar Team, November 2006, p. 13, http://www.oreilly.com/radar/web2report.csp,
or, “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software,” by
Tim O’Reilly, September 30, 2005, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
3) http://www.customers.com/books_oi.aspx
**FOOTNOTES**