Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Although the Internet is renown for embracing new ideas, chewing them up, spitting them out and moving on to the next one, a few concepts keep coming back, albeit in new forms.

The most resilient of these is the concept of communities.  They’re in vogue again, for exactly the same reasons they have been in vogue in the past – the concept of community aptly describes the nature and the potential of the online environment.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a piece for the “My Five” column in the Australian Literary Review, where people write about five books that have influenced them in their career.  The first book I listed was Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities.

Net Gain was one of the first books that put Internet communities into a business context: not surprising, since authors John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong were both McKinsey&Company consultants. They argued that the web is used for three basic purposes – to find content, to interact and to complete transactions – and they correctly predicted online communities would grow around these purposes.

The book was strongly criticised by purists when it was published; they said that on the Internet there was commerce and there was community and never the twain shall meet. Not long after this, of course, eBay appeared. eBay is the textbook example of the type of virtual communities predicted by Hagel and Armstrong: a vibrant, self‐regulated community where people barter and sell, and make friends (and dollars) along the way.

They also forecast the disintermediation of industries such as travel, describing a future that looks a lot like travel sites such as Zuji, Wotif and TripAdvisor.

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Recently there’s been a fair amount of chatter about Web 3.0. So I thought I’d start to put a little context around this.

It could be argued that in Web 1.0 users were consumers; in Web 2.0 producers; and in Web 3.0 optimisers.

What do we mean by “optimisers”? Think of it as being the difference between tweeting about the texture of a new type of Cornflakes you had for breakfast (as if the general population really cares) versus telling all of the Cornflakes aficionados in your local vacinity.

The Digital Inspiration tech a la carte blog sums up the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 as:

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

And they go on to provide a series of excellent slide show presentations from various authors who all seek to explain Web 3.0 from their own point of view. Well worth a look if you’re interested in demystifying Web 3.0.

It’s a common refrain from nearly everyone I speak to in business: If I can collect so much data via my website, how come I can’t see the ROI on my digital investment? The fact is, you can – it’s just not as straightforward as we’d all like.

Forrester Research has been doing a lot of work in this area. Forrester analyst Charlene Li, co-author of the book Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies, has produced a couple of reports showing how companies can apply a three step process to measure return on investment (ROI) for their corporate blog. She writes:

“What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of a blog? It starts with the goal of the blog. I strongly suggest that companies start with the goal, develop metrics that measure the attainment of that goal, and find ways to assign value to those metrics.

“Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.”
To answer the argument that companies should set up a corporate blog just because they know it is the best way to start conversations with customers, Li says, “At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.”

An example of the three step process (reproduced from her blog) is below:

For more on measuring return on digital investment and the three other hottest digital media topics today, download the podcast of my interview with Personal Life Media founder Susan Bratton.

When Fred Reicheld and Satmetrix invented the Net Promoter Score they put the science behind what we all instinctively know: that recommendations rates are linked to growth.

“One simple question - Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague? - allows companies to track promoters and detractors and produces a clear measure of an organization’s performance through its customers’ eye.”

The key to driving recommendaitons is to exceed expectations. As Seth Godin says in his book The Purple Cow: “Something is remarkable if it’s worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow. Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow……..Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service.”

One of the ways to exceed expectations is to engage in participatory marketing. An example of how Web 2.0 can enable us to ignite recommendations is through crowdsourcing. Four examples:

• Online brainstorming: Dell Idea Storm
• Threadless - top voted designs get printed
• Muju Awards - taking pre-orders for top voted content
• Springspotters - using “idea blogs” to crowdsource insight