I was on the O’Reilly Radar home and clicked over to the Web 2.0 page: http://radar.oreilly.com/web2/. At the very top is an interesting and refreshing definition of Web 2.0:
“…..Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterized by harnessing collective intelligence, openness, and network effects.”
I really like that. Web 2.0 is not about technology or AJAX or video sharing or blogs. It’s about:
a) collective intelligence;
b) openness (which I think goes hand-in-hand with collective intelligence); and
c) network effects (a wide, easily available, easily accessible and open network makes the collectivness and openness possible).
If you haven’t heard already - Microsoft has made a major leap forward towards open source. See this article from O’Reilly Radar.
I am not sure if the right words are “leap forward towards open source”. I think it is more of an acceptance of open source. There are far too many applications, OS, products on open source. From a pure ecnonomics MS is never going to be able to compete with the price point that open source provides - free or near free. And no matter what, the legions of open source programmers are not going away.
I am a very happy open source user. While I haven’t donated money back to any open source projects (when I went to give OpenOffice some money they would accept only PayPal), I have become a huge proponent of open source and am regularly recommending it to my customers (if it meets their needs).
I am not sure what to make of the approach MS is taking with open source. You can read more about it on their new open source site. They are touting VS Studio Express edition and MS SQL Server Express editions. Which is great that those products are free and available to everyone, but the real power of open source is that the source code is available freely too (under GPL or some other open source license).
My prediction - over the coming years, most if not all the software applications will be a) hosted (which means annual subscription); and b) be available as a free basic version, along with two or three paid versions, each stair stepping the prices higher.
Its interesting about how much buzz is given to social media marketing…I must have read ten articles over the weekend about it. But the more I read about marketing on sites like myspace, friendster, facebook, blogs, etc. the more I realize that it is primarily B2C companies taking advantage of this new medium with the B2B crowd staying cautiously out of the fray.
Why is that?
Of course it is inherently easier to mass market a consumer product. You have a much larger pool of potential customers and the marketing is less complex than that of B2B. It will always be easier to go viral talking about the iphone instead of email marketing deliverability rates. And you can market the iphone to millions while an email marketing solution is limited to hundreds of potential clients (maybe thousands if your lucky).
So does it make sense to abstain from social media marketing then?
In a word…no.
The B2B approach to this kind of marketing should not follow that of B2C. You don’t need to rely on huge buzz to drive interest in your product so don’t feel the need to employ trendy video gimmicks, silly contests, or controversial blog posts in an attempt to “go viral”. Its not your style man!
Here are some simple mistakes to avoid.
Resist the urge to create a “company” myspace account. This will just make you look silly - especially when no one signs up to be your company’s friend.
Don’t try to accumulate a mass amount of friends. You will look as desperate as the high school geek trying to build a friend empire online.
Don’t waste your money advertising on myspace. I don’t think many high school and college students are in the market to buy your products or services.
Like I said before…no cheesy you tube videos. You will never be able to compete against a guy getting hit in the crotch or the cat playing the piano.
Don’t blog because everyone else is doing it. Alot of people wore a mullet in the 80’s too. Know when something makes sense for YOU to do…we can’t all be Billy Ray Cyrus.
Instead, just simply encourage your employees to use them.
The best way to approach social media in the B2B world is to actually use the social networks that all of your friends, colleagues, and business associates use. Specifically, Linked In is fast becoming the “professional” alternative to sites like myspace, friendster, and xanga. It is a social network site specifically for maintaining business and industry contacts.
But it is not the only resource. If a lot of your contacts are using myspace, get on myspace. In the end you want to stay in touch and be accessible to those people you know and have relationships with. And by using those social networking sites you will find additional contacts…who may even eventually buy something from you.
I’m not saying that there is not a larger marketing opportunity with these sites either. The potential for brand building is great and well thought out strategies exist for making the most out of marketing on them…even if your B2B.
But in the end it’s always been about building relationships …and its no different online.
I have built alot of Flash presentations in my lifetime and they can be really effective at getting a point across, especially if you have a complex story to tell.
The problem was that developing those presentations either in house or outsourcing it to an agency quickly costs a lot of time and money. They were “nice to have” but always fell into the ever elusive “3rd Phase” when talking about our phased online strategy. No one ever wanted to commit the resources and budget to it.
Lately I have been marketing a lot of software and putting together an effective presentation whether it is in Powerpoint or Flash has become as important as ever. An online demonstration can help prospects a great deal when they are narrowing down their selection. The more info you can show them…the better.
So thats why I was very impressed when I came across this little tool called “Wink”. Its extremely simple to understand and use…and the best part is that its free!
You can get up and running almost instantly. You just download the application, fire it up, and press play. It will immediately start recording your mouse movements and you can narrate by simply talking into your microphone. When you are done, you can add descriptions, pictures, arrows, sounds, interactive buttons, and even links to urls to help you further tell your story. It makes putting together an effective presentation quick and easy!
If you dont want to get deluged with scheduled email reports and dont want to have to login to Google Analytics every time you want to recieve your favorite metrics then this little tool may be for you.
I actually found that the Yahoo Widget Engine 4.0 to be a very cool application and have found a number of tools that I am using it for so its worth checking out on its own. There are hundreds of widgets available for it and its increasing every day.If you take VivAlytics for a test drive let us know your experiences here!
There was a great article posted by B2B that does an outstanding job of discussing Web 2.0 and I wanted to share it here. If you have time check it out - its a very good article.
Luke Newton (who has his own blog here) made a good comment about my earlier post. Luke mentioned how several companies are switching over to free or open source apps.
I personally considered something similar when I had to buy my new laptop. I was thinking of going all thin client - in other words, use only hosted applications. So I would use Y! Mail or something similar instead of Outlook; use Google Apps online instead of Word/Excel. Adobe plans to come out with an online version of their product. All my work would have been done through a IE or Firefox window. However I have taken a more prudent approach. I tried out Google Apps and found it quite lacking in functionality. And my biggest problem was always on Internet connection. I did not want to be left in a lurch if I was in a spot where the Internet connection was weak.
I still like the idea though. I don’t want to carry my data around with me and worry about back ups every week and such. Maybe in a few years….
Several weeks ago when I was getting ready to buy my new laptop, I started to research what it would cost me to buy a new laptop. What I quickly realized is that in addition to buying just the laptop itself, I am going to have to spend significantly for the software - Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and my favorite application Outlook; my development tools such as Visual Studio and SQL Server, anti-virus software etc. etc.
The MS Office suite costs about $500, not terribly expensive but definitely on the high side. Instead I decided it was time for me to try out OpenOffice - the open source word processing, spreadsheet and presentation authoring software. They even have a Access-like database and a couple of things beyond that. My experience has been very good so far. Not once have I had to go back and open a document or spreadsheet or PPT presentation in MS Office! I have gone out and done it just to make sure they look exactly the same - and they did every time. The user interface of the OpenOffice products is very similar to the Office XP suite of products. All the same options are available. They are pretty much in the same place an called pretty much the same thing too. Only thing I miss is the huge bank of templates that Microsoft makes available on it’s site.
I am sold on OpenOffice. I am going to give it 30 more days. If I don’t run in to any issues I am going to a) uninstall Office from my laptop, and b) make $$ contribution to OpenOffice.
I received this article in my InBox today. It’s a good article about how Web 2.0 is now more mainstream. Towards the end Tim O’Reilly also talks about the “Web 2.0 attitude”.
