SmoothSpan Blog

Along with SaaS, the other big trend facing businesses is Web 2.0.  If you haven’t heard about it by now, let me refer you to the seminal O’Reilly blog post that really frames the definition of Web 2.0.  In the meantime, think of Web 2.0 as all the ways the web enables collaboration.  This is a big deal, and there are many services out there that are thriving on collaboration.  Good collaboration is participative and it involves your friends and associates.  It is fun to the point of being addictive, which is why it is growing virally.  It involves back and forth, the ability of your co-collaborators to influence you and you them, whether for entertainment, enrichment, or both.  As we will see, it involves a certain loss of control too, which is difficult for many businesses to come to grips with.

What’s a real example?  Trusted Opinion recently added Netflix queuing to their service (and Mashable’s write up too!).  Trusted Opinion is all about collaborating on recommendations for various things.  Imagine how natural to be able to read someone’s opinion about a movie and with one click add that movie to your Netflix queue.  It’s a perfect example of a good application of Web 2.0 to business with just one minor fly in the ointment:  Trusted Opinion had to do all the work themselves because Netflix has no Web 2.0 api.

The Trusted Opinion example brings me to some concrete thoughts about how businesses can embrace the Web 2.0.  One thought is to try to build your own collaborative social network for your community.  That would be classic old school business thinking that’s born out of a need for control.  One of the less comfortable aspects of the Web 2.0 is that it involves relinquishing a lot of control.  Netflix has no control over what folks are saying over at Trusted Opinion, for example.  I don’t necessarily want to discourage having a special community for your users.  I’ve seen cases where this is highly valued, and even cases where the community itself wants to be a closed club only open to folks who do business with the company.  The example I’m thinking of is a CAD/CAM software company whose community consists of machine shop owners who’ve purchased the product.  These shop owners don’t want their own customers to see the kinds of questions they’re asking or the problems they’re having lest they be perceived as incompetent.  They want a closed community for privacy’s sake. 

That frames the trade-off pretty nicely.  If you want the emphasis on control and privacy, create a closed community that your business owns.  If you want the emphasis on growth, openness, getting your customers to be your advocates, and involving people who are not your customers, you will likely do better to enable 3^rd party social networks to play in your game.  Some businesses would do well to have both—a special community that only customers join, and as many tendrils as possible to embrace the open communities.

Let’s focus on the open communities.  These are the Facebooks, Twitters, Diggs, MySpaces, and countless others.  How do businesses play in those games and leverage the results for success?  Go back to the Trusted Opinion example.  Does your business have an api that does something interesting for those communities?  Is it possible for talented players in the community to bring you into that community as the Trusted Opinion people did for Netflix?

What about the next step, where you bring your own business into a community?  Let’s take Facebook, which has gotten huge press lately around its platform for creating Facebook widgets.  What sort of Facebook widget would play for your business?  Netflix could’ve created a review widget with a button that adds the movie to the Netflix queue for the user.  Now how to get the word out?  Take that internal community.  Start by getting the word out there.  Some number of your customers are also Facebook users, they have to be given how many users are on Facebook.  Offer them the widget via your community, and get the word out via the traditional tools that Facebook already provides.   The intersection of your community and Facebook will give your widget a real jumpstart over others that don’t start from an existing community.

Pretty shortly you are going to come up against another issue.  A Facebook user may not be immediately recognizable as someone who belongs to your community.  To overcome this problem, your community needs to allow its users to tell you their Facebook identity.  Ideally, you should let them switch to using their Facebook identity instead of the one they have in your community if they want to.  It’s a little thing, but it reduces friction further.  While you’re building this capability into your community, think about leaving it open ended so you can have users give their other identities as well.  Design your Web 2.0 widgets for the open communities to access and use this identity mapping information.  It’s another strength you bring to your users and community.

Now what about other Web 2.0 platforms?  It’s the same story.  Can you embrace their api’s?  Can you cross-reference identities between the two?  Have you published apis that make it easy for those communities to derive benefit from your offerings?  Going back to the Netflix example, can one of your customers Twitter about the movie they just watched and make it easy for their Twitter friends to add the movie to their queue?  Can they Digg those movies?  Can they bookmark the movies on Del.icio.us?  Can bloggers on the popular platforms quickly create movie review and embed a widget that ads the movie to the blog reader’s queue?  What can you give folks to insert into news feeds?  Are you using blogs as a tool to get the word out and building a community around your blog?  And do all these reviews allow the viewer who has already seen the movie to feed back their opinion and have that captured by Netflix too?

You get the idea.  I am by no means picking on Netflix, it’s a great service and I know the founders personally.  They’re some of the brightest folks around.  I’m just using them as an example that nearly every company I know can relate to about what Web 2.0 might offer.  Most companies today are concerned with Google ad words and Search Engine Optimization.  Plugging into the Web 2.0 central nervous system is the next essential step.  Don’t get left behind!

While I’m at it, this is a two-way street.  The big social networks can afford to wait for companies to embrace their apis.  Up and comers should follow Trusted Opinion’s example and think about how their community can benefit if they find ways to tie the network back to other businesses or even other social networks.  The other seed I’ll plant is someone needs to make it easy to embrace these platforms.  Companies can barely deal with blogging and search engine optimization.  Building widgits is a whole order of magnitude more complexity.