“..it would be a mistake to think of the social networking and user generated content phenomena as a simple fad. It’s as much of a flash in the pan as the Internet was in 1995 or as the PC was in 1985.”  Analyst Tom Austin – Gartner 

Why do online communities work? 

•  People have always had a need to join communities – sports clubs, social clubs, churches, business groups to name just a few
• Individuals need to communicate their interests, hobbies, accomplishments, goals, beliefs to others         
• We all have a deep subconscious urge to belong to something 
• Web 2.0 opens up new opportunities to share pictures, video, journals, email, chat, and more
• They are places where people gather to share their passion
• People gather to find or offer assistance to and from others   

What are the benefits of building a community?

•  User generated content eliminates the cost of creating information
• It facilitates the growing of your mailing list 
• It can be a beacon for thousands of potential customers 
• It can be a direct source of income 
• Related products and/or services can be sold through it
• It’s an easy source for surveying and research
• It can act as a vehicle for you to communicate with current and potential customers 
• You can email members to promote anything 
• Idea generation from the members
• Open communication from company to customers builds trust and long term relationships

“Our expectation is that ten years from now, the primary use for information technology even inside enterprises is going to be to facilitate social interactions among the people in the enterprise and the business ecosystem.” Analyst Tom Austin – Gartner 

If you have an existing business web site and wish to add a community to it then careful consideration needs to be given as to how the community will benefit your company

• Do you want to have it known as the industry community and not directly promote your company?
• Could it be a gathering place for your existing and potential customers?
• Do you want to run it as a revenue generating exercise or not?
• If you do how are you going to generate income – advertising, selling product, membership fees?  
• How are you going to set the community up to encourage members through an engagement funnel? The ones at the base become your site evangelists 

When you establish an online community you set yourself up as the facilitator for those interested in your niche to gather and share.  This in itself is a powerful place to be if you are managing the environment where your market meets.  The secret of success in the new era though is to not abuse this power but to allow the users to determine the content as much as possible.  This can make the community a double edged sword in that it may mean users promote your competitors or criticise your products.  You can post answers to criticisms or allow others to do it but don’t over police the forums or your members will react to the lack of openness. There are many benefits possible through online communities but the first step is to work out how exactly it will benefit your company.  Then put a plan in place to build it to achieve your goals.  It may be the single most successful marketing strategy you ever action, if you get it right.

The idea of Web 2.0 can also relate to a transition of some websites from information islands to interlinked computing platforms that function like locally-available software in the perception of the user. Web 2.0 also includes a social element where users generate and distribute content, often with freedom to share and re-use. This can result is a rise in the economic value of the web as users can do more online. Tim O’Reilly regards Web 2.0 as business embracing the web as a platform and utilising its strengths.
Characteristics
Web 2.0 websites allow the user to do more than just retrieve information. They can provide a platform, allowing users to run software applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may encourage users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in sharp contrast to the old control model, where site owners categorise users into roles with limited degrees of freedom or functionality. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax, Flex or similar rich media. The sites may also have social-networking aspects.
Technology overview
Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:
• rich Internet application techniques, often Ajax-based
• semantically valid XHTML and HTML markup
• microformats extending pages with additional semantics
• folksonomies (in the form of tags or tag clouds, for example)
• Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
• REST and/or XML- and/or JSON-based APIs
• syndication, aggregation and notification of data in RSS or Atom feeds
• mashups, merging content from different sources, client- and server-side
• weblog-publishing tools
• wiki or forum software, etc., to support user-generated content
Economics and Web 2.0
The economic implications of Web 2.0 applications and technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production all depends on mass collaboration. Termed “Wikinomics” and would depend on the principles of openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Organisations could make use of these principles and models in order to prosper with the help of Web 2.0-like applications. Companies can design and assemble products with their customers, and in some cases customers can do the majority of the value creation. In each instance the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising take active, participatory roles in value creation where masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors co-create value in the absence of direct managerial control.
Summary
In conclusion, there are a few key areas to understand and focus on, for any organisation wishing to make capital out of this new Internet world.
Ajax
The advent of Ajax applications means web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop ones. As you read this, a whole new generation of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax, good examples being Google Maps and all the new social network sites. This is opening up a host of opportunities to do old things in new ways. The limits are bound only by the imagination.
Democracy
The web has always been the ultimate “power to the people” medium. Web 2.0 has taken this even further by demonstrating that the new wave of online super-businesses are generated through user interaction.
We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.
To use this to your organisation’s advantage, ask how you can open your company, product, service, website, blog, or whatever to allow the influence of the masses. It may be through feedback to a blog from your customers that you take prompt action on. Understand that the next generation of consumers are going to expect much more say in the businesses they purchase from.
Don’t Maltreat Users
Structure your online offering to provide the easiest, most pleasant, enjoyable, experience to your visitors. If you can provide free stuff, then do it in spades. Show generosity, don’t seek immediate gratification. Aim for the happy relationship with your consumer and trust that will eventually lead to money changing hands. If you make dealing with you hard, guess what, they not going to do it. Look at the way you treat visitors to your website. How many hoops are you making them jump through? How much are you giving away to sweeten the relationship?
Never let the competition fly under you, meaning never let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. Another way to fly low is to give users more power. Let users do what they want. If you don’t and a competitor does, you’re in trouble.
Apple iTunes is Web 2.0ish in this sense. Finally you can buy individual songs instead of having to buy whole albums. The recording industry hated the idea and resisted it as long as possible. But it was obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels.
The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craig list has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the previous generation of dating sites.
Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms, “Don’t maltreat users” is a subset of “Don’t be evil,” and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.
Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google does. That’s their secret. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels.
Google doesn’t try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what’s going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. That’s the way to approach technology-and the right way to do business in the Web 2.0 era.

Sit down and work out exactly what goals you have for your website.  The clearer these are in your mind the more effective the finished result will be.  Once you have the target in mind, work backwards and determine exactly how the site will form up to achieve what you want.  If you are selling a product and the target is to increase sales, look at the steps you will go thorough to achieve this, e.g. attract the right targeted visitors, grab an email contact, send a newsletter or free offering, send repeat emails promoting your product, close the sale.   Who’s your Target Audience? Determine who’s looking for what you are offering.  If its females between the ages of 18 and 30, your site will reflect this and be very different than if you were promoting to males over 50.  Knowing this should change the way you put the site together.  You need to understand what the makeup of your typical client is and incorporate this in the site design and the experience it offers. If you have a broader target audience in mind you may need to ensure the site has a broad appeal, or carries different flavours for each segment. What’s the Competition Doing? Start researching your online competition.  These are the other sites that will appear when you enter your major search terms in Google.  If they have been at it longer than you they will have incorporated many of the lessons already learned in their site.   This will save you the time and pain of having to learn the hard way.  Study their site and don’t be afraid to use their best ideas, without infringing copywrite of course. ·          How are you going to position your site against the competitor sites?·          Are they doing something well that you can borrow?·          What pricing are they using? ·          What is their marketing strategy?·          What principles are they using in their site design and why?·          Go to compete.com and see what their traffic levels are The Written Message How do people read web pages?  They actually don’t read them, they skim-read them, skipping from link to link, subtitle to subtitle, using the back button frequently, especially when confronted with large blocks of text. Knowing this allows you to adapt your design to suit the average web surfer psychology.  You only have a few seconds to convince the visitor that they have come to a site of interest. ·          Aim for a simple, clear and direct writing style·          Avoid long text blocks·          Use larger fonts for ease of reading, but not too large·          Break text up with shorter paragraphs, sub-headings and bullet pointed lists·          Use a graphic here and there to break up the text·          Give the reader’s eyes convenient resting points – bold headers, bullets,  bold keywords  The Need for Speed If your pages take more than a few seconds to load you are excluding a large percentage of your potential visitors.  In this age of widespread broadband, we are used to instant access to web pages and some will not have the patience to wait long for a page to load.  The page construction is one way of determining the speed your pages load. ·          If you use graphics, always use gifs or jpegs and minimise the file size using a good photo editor like Photoshop·          JPEGs are good for detailed photos with lots of colours, but they lose quality when over compressed. Gradually reduce the compression until you get the optimum look and size·          GIFs are best for smaller images, or images with less detail and fewer colours. Ideal for buttons, icons, or graphs. For smaller files, try reducing the number of colours in your GIFs·          Provide layout information for graphics in your source code, e.g. <img src=”picture.gif”> this tells the computer that the page includes an image·          Include image sizes in your coding, e.g. <img src=”picture.gif”  width=”50” height=”25”> this tells the computer how much space to allocate for an image·          When using tables specify the table size, for the same reason as above·          Use the image at it’s actual size, this may require you to edit it beforehand·          Using JavaScript or Flash for videos can make your site more appealing, but take into account how incorporating each of these elements affects the speed Navigation Visitors may arrive on any page in your site first, so consider this when planning your navigation.  This is done by structuring your site simply and putting some thought into how visitors will find their way around your site. ·          If using a menu have the same menu system on each page·          Use more than one menu so they don’t have to page up to select an option·          Keep the menu choices clear, simple and easy to understand·          If you need to use sub-menus ensure the hierarchy is simple and intuitive·          If the site has a flow from one page to another, ensure all the links are obvious and easy to follow   Other Useful Tips ·          Test your site on all the current and most popular browsers so you don’t limit your range of visitors·          Ensure your pages are scalable to the size of the browser window·          Check regularly to see that all your links are working·          Keep all your content up to date·          Spell check and do a thorough proof reading of the whole site Marketing Considerations When putting a site together the means that people will find it needs to be considered right from the start.  Good site optimisation needs to be built into the layout and page construction.  It is through this that the search engines will find your site and rank your pages. The better you achieve this, the higher your visitor numbers will be. Here are a few tips to get you started. ·          Determine your major keyword search terms and research how popular they are using a tool like Keyword Research·          Check the keywords the competition are using·          Code your top keywords into your home page in the meta tags, no more than about 20·          Put a clear description of what the site offers in the description tag, use some of the major 2 or 3 keywords·          Incorporate the main keywords in the page content where possible, but don’t overdo it·          Do the keyword research for every other page you want as a landing page and repeat the description and keyword coding/loading process with each of them·          Use graphics with keywords in their titles·          What opportunities are there for people linking to your site? The more genuine links the better, but don’t use link generators·          Where can you add graphics, video and music to offer rich content? Use the keywords in naming the media content. This will help raise your Google ranking, but remember the speed implications        

Companies maintaining websites today have an incredible wealth of customer information available to them in the form of implicit clicks, actions and behaviours.  Recent studies have shown that best-in-class companies use web analytics tools widely to track these metrics and increase conversion rates.  They also better appreciate the value of analytics data and disseminate the results throughout their organisations more fully than the less successful companies. Web analytics is the gathering and analysis of data via the Internet; this may include clickstream data from your website or online campaigns, customer, business or industry data. Encompassing any information that can help you to measure exactly how successful your marketing is, or to give you more intelligence to hone business and marketing strategies.  The targeted result usually being some measure of increased income generation or reduction in costs. Clickstream analysis is the most common use of web analytics.  Which includes reporting on the number of clicks, time on a page, entrance and exit pages, cost-per-click, campaign costs, number of sales, conversion rates, revenue per sale and total revenues.  You can see which part of your site is performing and producing sales and which isn’t.  It also shows you how long visitors stay on a page so you know whether the page interests them.  It presents all this information in graphs and pie charts to make it easier to get an immediate grasp of trends and comparisons.   
“89% of Best-in-Class companies currently use or plan to use analytics as a method to measure corporate goals such as compliance with sales and marketing objectives and elevation of customer experience.  This majority group uses analytics data to influence decisions and impact change across multiple business units.” – Aberdeen Group  
The best use of analytical data is had through comparing campaigns, people and time periods.  This is called traffic segmentation and it lets you see who your visitors are and what they do at your site over time.  Which campaign is bringing the best success, whether newsletters, banners, pay-per-click, organic search engine traffic and from multiple sources.  Which group of people brought the best sales results, perhaps Google brought more visitors than MSN, but MSN had the higher sales conversion rate.  This kind of data helps you make intelligent budgeting decisions on where your advertising dollars are best spent. You can do split testing, using more than one landing page, email subject, page format, copy format, or any other aspect of your online marketing.  Gather data from the different result streams and see which gives better results, giving you another way to target greater success.  Offline analysis of campaign data often takes months to assimilate. With web analytics this data is available almost instantly, due to online response times and tools available. Once you have the data, you need to be able to interpret it to make the decision on what to change to increase success.  It all comes down to competitive advantage.  Most online companies are still not using analytical data to their advantage. Any organisation that masters web analytics can steal a lead on their competition and benefit from the subsequent cost-savings, increased brand awareness and increased sales.   
“In the Best-in-Class companies segment 75% measured percentage of new visitors, 83% improved the average page views per visitor, 75% measured average visitor duration, 68% improved customer conversion rates, 67% measure percentage of returning visitors, 64% improved the number of visits per visitor.” – Aberdeen Group   
Goals for using Clickstream Web Analytics ·          Compare pages by the amount of time, clicks and conversions to see which are popular or not.  Test different page versions to see what works best. Never stop improving. ·          Compare different groups of customers.  Do customers from different geographical locations prefer discounts?  Do women have a higher conversion rate than men?  The testing breakdowns are endless, so you need to know why you are doing the comparison beforehand. ·          Compare time periods to spot trends, whether it be daily, monthly, annually.  What is causing the trend?  Can you amend any aspect of your marketing to improve the figures?  ·          Compare campaigns, pay-per-click, email, banner, newsletter. Monitor the visitors, clicks, page visits, registrations, sales.  Run multiple campaigns and track the progress of them all, then decide how to re-allocate your marketing funds. ·          Use funnel analysis to track the visitors through the steps in your sales process, from initial page hit to conversion.  Where are they leaving the site?  What in the sales process is enhancing, and what blocking, the ultimate conversion rate? ·          Compare the profits and ROI for each campaign, time period, customer group, etc.  What does this tell you can be improved?    
“Early findings.. showed that over half of the 1300+ senior executives surveyed, reported that analytics would be one of the top two technology investments supporting their sales and marketing efforts in 2007. Businesses now realise that analytics hold the key to identifying customer behaviour and will use this intelligence to convert more customers and elevate experience across all facets of their business.” – Aberdeen GroupSummary The amount and variety of data available with the online tools of today is enormous.  The smart online marketer will know which data is useful and which to discard though careful planning.  It is very easy to set up a host of reports until you are drowning in information you never look at.   When starting to incorporate web analytics in your marketing, start simply.  Gather some basic stats on how your website is performing, and has been performing historically.  Try to discern the strengths and weaknesses in your site.  What small improvements will bring the biggest changes?  As you get to know the workings of your site better and how it processes visitors, you can start to widen your intelligence gathering.  Never gather any analytical data that you do not know the value of or what you are going to do with it. 

Good business networking has always been a fundamental asset of any individual or company seeking to get the best from those one-to-one connections.  LinkedIn is a social networking tool for business that super-charges the networking process making it easy.  Drawing on the power of the net and Web 2.0, LinkedIn has streamlined the process of connecting to suppliers, potential customers, employees, employers, even staff and colleagues.

There are145, 000 CEOs on LinkedIn and all 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented.

Like all social networks, you register and set up your profile and then invite contacts to be linked to your profile.  All your contacts have contacts of their own and you are linked to these with one degree of separation. The benefit of this is you can tap into new resources via the relationships your friends or colleagues have with others.

More than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries

Here are some of the potential benefits of using LinkedIn:

·          Promote yourself or your business to a vast network

·          Recommendations from others can be placed against your profile to enhance your trust levels

·          You have the option for your profile to appear on Google with a high ranking, enabling you to influence how you are being perceived online

·          Use it to search for new staff or contractors

·          Ask for recommendations from your connections if you are after a new supplier or service

·          Research companies or individuals you are thinking of doing business with. Employers can check employee references and employees can seek out previous employees of the company they are thinking of working for

·          Check out the competition, potential customers, potential employees, partners

“I’ve seen huge benefits. Myself or colleagues have landed more than $2M in contracts via LinkedIn. I’ve hired and been hired via LinkedIn. I got a book deal via LinkedIn… when I need someone for a gig, if an individual doesn’t spring immediately to mind I turn to LinkedIn, ping someone, done.” – Jeremy

How to get the best from LinkedIn:

·          Add more connections – you’ll increase your visibility and appear the nearer the top of search results

·          Include as many jobs, associations, awards, educational establishments, affiliations on your profile, this will build your connections

·          Include a link in your email signature to your LinkedIn profile. This will show more details of your background to those your emailing

·          Ensure all your important relevant keywords are included in your profile so you appear when they’re searched for

·          Make your profile public and choose ‘full view’ to have your profile appear on Google and other search engines

·          The more personal information you include in your profile the more appealing it will be

·          Connect to current clients and colleagues to broaden your network

·          Change your url to include your name, this will raise the search engine ranking of your profile

·          Use the ‘Answers’ section to get input on absolutely anything. For example, you can leverage thousands of others to assist and give feedback with your latest idea or project

LinkedIn grew by 189% over the last year making it the fastest growing social network, better than MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and YouTube – Nielsen Online

There are many new opportunities that open up when using a tool like LinkedIn, the fact that you can search on any individual, company, industry or job can lead you to a wealth of possible information resources not previously available.  With a bit of creative thinking the ‘Advanced Search’ function can be experimented with to find a host of useful data. LinkedIn is the 21^st Century way to build a successful business network.

• Who is the site aimed at?
• Have you considered what appeals to your target customer base in terms of site content, look and feel?
• Does the site successfully deliver what it was it was developed for?
• If not how can it be improved?
• Are you using analytics to see what is and isn’t working in your site?

Relationship Building Building a long term relationship with a large network of potential customers is the sure way to ongoing profits and a website is one of the best tools to achieve this. 

• What’s the difference between pushing for an order and building a relationship?
• Do you have a generous offering of free stuff for your visitors?
• Do you have a forum to promote the development of a community?
• Can you become the owner of the “net conversation” that relates to your product or service?
• Can you turn your site into a place where people choose to hang out because it has so much on offer?

 Using data intelligently There are a host of excellent analytic tools readily available to all website managers.  Tools that can present detailed traffic analysis and break it down any way you wish.  Smart use of data analysis tells you how your site is performing and what changes are called for to improve results. 

• Do you get regular site traffic analysis reports?
• Do you know what information is important to you?
• What decisions are you making from your analysis?
• Are you testing different site scenarios to improve effectiveness?

 So what other aspects do you need to consider if you seek to turn your crusty old site into a dynamic, dollar printing domain?   Here a few more areas where small, intelligent changes can produce dramatic results.Landing PagesWhen a new visitor comes to your site what’s the first thing they see?  The arrival point is called the landing page, the design of this is crucial in determining whether or not the visitor completes the desired action or not.  That desired action maybe purchasing something, registering as a member, entering their name and email into a form, joining an email list or a number of others.  You need to decide what you want from the visitor and then construct the landing page to guide them to that result as directly as possible.  Where too much information, cluttered design, unclear messages, unclear calls to action all take away from its effectiveness and success. 

• What pages are constructed as landing pages?
• Where do they source their traffic from?
• What search terms (keywords) are these pages built around?
• Can you change, or broaden, the use of keywords to bring more traffic?
• Does the page present a clear message?
• Does the page present a clear call to action?
• Are you testing different versions of the page?
• Are you using analytics to ascertain if the page works?

 Site OptimisationSite optimisation is what makes your site more successful with search engine rankings.  Understanding the small things that the search engines consider important makes a big difference.  Universal search was adopted by Google this year to revise the way its algorythms assess and rank websites.  Content rich pages with video, pictures and soundbytes are rewarded with higher rankings.  The site that keeps abreast of the changes in the search engine industry will succeed in achieving higher ranking and higher traffic.

• Have you set the keywords in each page of your site? 
• Are these keywords relevant to the page content? 
• Have you researched the keywords to ascertain how popular they are? 
• Is you site content rich, are you using pictures, videos and podcasts in your site?
• Have you used the search terms in your page content?
• Do your pages continually offer new content?
• Have you got a site map?
• How many other sites link to yours and how can you increase this?

 Email marketing Using email allows you to stay in touch with your prospects, build stronger relationships, build brand awareness, and generate sales.  To succeed this requires a good system to develop, transmit, analyse and manage the campaign for your email marketing. 

• Are you offering a freebie to capture name and email information?  
• Do you have a well-managed database of all your clients and prospects?
• Are you designing powerful messages in your emails that have clear calls to action?
• How do you capture the information generated from each email campaign?
• Do you split test different titles, content, calls to action in each campaign?
• Do you have the data to be able to analyse and refine your campaign effectiveness?

 BloggingThe explosion of blogging on the world wide web shows just how popular this communicative format has become. The corporate world gradually caught on and began incororporating business blogs in their sites to connect to their target client base.  Although not initially a business medium, blogging has evolved into a positive method for keeping the message alive.  The best blogs on the net are those written by bloggers with a genuine interest and passion for their topic.  Companies that present dry corporate content blogs are not going to tap this rich resource with any effect.  The only cost in running a blog is the time and resources required to post the articles. 

• Have you set up a blog on your site?
• What aspect of your business activities could you generate regular articles of interest about?
• Is there a passion in your organisation that needs broadcasting to the world?
• Is there someone in your establishment that has a passion and could write your blog?