The scarcity was in the barriers to entry to mass
communication. Millions and billions of dollars to buy air time over
television, radio and print-media.

Those barriers are gone.
Anyone with a computer, within a few minutes (literally) set up a web
page and have the potential to reach millions of people all over the
world.

So, turning things around and putting content creation in
the hands of consumers creates another problem. There is TOO MUCH OF IT!

A need to filter all this stuff then arises.

It
turns out that web 2.0 technologies and communities are very good in
filtering the wheat from the chaff through a few core technologies.

1. TagsEvery
   time someone posts a blog, they have the ability to “tag” their post
   with a number of keywords that help categorise the articles.

   Services
   such as technorati subscribe to a millions of blog posts and make note
   of what tags are being used, and use these to categorize posts, and
   often display what is known as a “tag cloud” (one taken from
   technorati.com shown below) to show what’s hot and what’s not.
   

   The
   way it works is that the bigger the size of the font of the tags, the
   more popular it is. This blog post is being written a few weeks before
   Christmas, so it’s no surprise to find that “christmas” and “shopping”
   are two big ones!

   The ability to easily see the real-time trends of the “herd” is priceless from a marketer’s perspective.

   Your
   role is to gather the herd. To find out what they want. To give it to
   them. Well.. now my friend it’s served up on a silver platter.

   Here’s a tag cloud from another service called del.icio.us:

   

   In this case it shows what tags people are using when they bookmark sites using the del.icio.us social bookmarking service.

   This
   is a marketer’s goldmine. Where in the offline world can you get such
   up-to-date real-time trends of what people are interested in. You
   can’t! This is exciting stuff guys and gals!

2. Info-DemocracyThe
   converse to information dictatorships is info-democracy. No longer do
   you have to settle on the news networks deciding what is “new”… now
   the voice of the people can be heard.

   Take for example the website digg.com:

   

   The
   top 3 news stories are there because they had the most popular votes.
   Anyone can submit a link to a news story, but only the top voted stores
   make it to the home page.

   This is a brave new world!

What does this mean for you:

A few things:

You
should be making a regular stop by social bookmarking and tagging sites
to get a “pulse” for the marketplace. Particularly if you are looking
for new niches to get into.

Also, you should consider replicating a democratic news site in your niche.

Many
of the sites that I’ve shown you are probably heavily slanted towards
the technology or early adopter market. But mark my words, they are
becoming more and more mainstream everyday. Three years ago no-one had
heard of a “podcast” - now virtually everyone has.

There are
“white label” software scripts that you can get or you can simply hire
a programmer to build your own digg.com clones for your niche.

Remember, what works for the general market often works in a niche, even more successfully.

You won’t be the next digg.com, or youtube.com but you could be troutfishnews.com or troutfishtube.com and own that market.

Now go forth and conquer.

– Euge

powered by performancing firefox

Technorati Tags: web2.0, market-research, youtube, digg, social bookmarking, marketing

I hate welcome posts… they are all cheesy… meant to build anticipation and excitement to the possibilities of what will unfold. But here goes

There’s a big wind of change that is occurring as a type this post -

- that change is called web2.0

Yes - it’s a buzzword.
Yes - it’s hype.
Yes - in reality all that’s been talked about could be done about 5 years ago.

But…

Yes - it WILL change the internet, and more importantly - It will change the face of online (and offline) marketing forever (well - until someone works out what web3.0 is!)

So, I’ll try to give you a dummies guide to what web 2.0 without stealing from the a wikipedia entry and ripping off what everyone else has said.

In short: web 1.0 was about taking businesses and business models that were possible offline, and simply moving them to the Internet.

web 2.0, conversely, is about creating websites and businesses, and new business models that can ONLY exist, or are unique to the Internet.

Very rough definition - so I’ll try to throw some more buzzwords in to give it some more structure:

Some of the key features of web 2.0 are as follows:

• User Generated Content - web 1.0 was all about editorial dictorship. I write - you listen. I’m the guru - you’re the follower. In web 2.0 editorial power over content is given to the people. Everyone can start a blog and publish, and syndicate their content all over the web. There are news sites where everyone gets to cast their votes on what the most popular stories are. No more politics and biases interfering with the editorial process. Stuff is popular because it legitimaly is voted to be popular in a generally democratic fashion. You are me - we’re all equal dude! Examples are Youtube (for user contributed video content) and digg (for a democratic news site)
• Social Networks - No man is an island. The fundamental need for 99% of all people is the need to “belong”. Social networks are simply web sites that allow you to stay in touch with your own group of friends and those who share the same interests and whacky passions that you do. Communicate, publish content to, run events within your community - meet the friends of your friends. Social networks all you to do all that - and have a lot of fun at the same time. The king in this field is myspace - which is popular with youth and all in the dating scene - but in less than a few years it has become one of the highest trafficed sites on the Internet. Do you think that might be of interest to all those Internet Marketers out there? Yup. We do too.
• Rich Media - In 2005 something amazing happened. 50% of all online uses in the US were on broadband. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re over the hump, and as a result the Internet has been transformed from being a textual medium to being a full audio and more importantly - VIDEO medium. If you’ve ever wished that you could own your own TV station - well - don’t laugh: YOU CAN! The implications of video for traffic and conversion and product creation are massive.
• Rich Interactive Experience - If you’ve ever used an online application like google mail and wonder how they cram an entire application into a web page - then you’ve just experienced AJAX - another undefinable buzzword for a way of building full-blown applications through your web browser. This kind of things was forecast about 10 years ago, but has taken this long to really reach critical mass. More than that, the ability to deliver web based services and rich user experiences to your web sites has really been untapped by online marketers and will lead to a whole new way of interacting with your prospects and customers. This is exciting stuff!

There’s a lot more to web 2.0 - and if you really must go ahead and read the wikipedia article. But for my vote, these are the most fundamental shifts, and if you ignore web 2.0 then you’re going to pay for it in spades?

Why? Because web 2.0 impacts fundamentally the fabric of business which is:

1. Market Research
2. Traffic
3. Conversion
4. Product

It’s no coincidence that youtube has been around for less than 18 months but has become ubiquitous - everyone has heard of it - and just sold out to google for $1.38 Billion (yes - read the “B”). And the same with myspace - even more so. If you’ve ever used myspace it is a usability nightmare! But it’s the highest traficked site on the Internet, and did it within 18 months!

Do you want to be king in niche? Do you want to be a household name in your business area? Then you need to harness these principals in your business and marketing.

And that’s what this blog is about.

Helping you to kick butt and gain the unfair advantage by applying web2.0 strategies to your online businesses.

Watch this space!!!

– euge