Social Media and Web 2.0

This article is an easy read and is a must read for entrepreneurs.

 

Web 2.0 Internet Marketing: Strategies for Quickly Building an Audience with Social Media Excerpt from article By Gary Smith (c) 2008

 The Web 2.0 social media revolution is in full steam. Are people finding your website?

As an entrepreneur, how do you make your business website stand out amongst 435 million other websites and more than 1 million blogs competing for your audience’s attention?To begin, let’s look at the demographics of Web 2.0 social networking sites, Myspace.com, Facebook and YouTube.com. This will give you an idea on how to position your message in the Web 2.0 World.

The Web 2.0 Social Networking Revolution

Web 2.0 is a real revolution on the Internet. And these aren’t just college kids…

• 62% of MySpace visitors are older than 25 (40% are 35+), and 83% are making over $30,000 a year. Nineteen percent (19%) are making $100,000 and up…
• On Facebook.com 46% are over 25 and 34% are 35+, but they’ve got deep pockets. Eighty-eight percent (88%) make more than $30,000 and twenty-three percent (23%) make $100,000 or more.

In the years ahead these numbers will get ridiculous…

• Social media giant Facebook is currently ADDING a million 25+ (non-student) adults per week to their rosters. That’s 52 million new users a year.
• YouTube.com gets over 50 million unique visitors per month. That equals over half a billion a year.
• Facebook and MySpace have the equal daily traffic of Google. Experts predict within the next year they will DOUBLE the daily traffic of Google search.

So your prospects are there. The traffic is there. The spending power is there. So NOW is the time you want to establish your presence on the social networking websites. Web 2.0 Strategy: Why You Should Be a Maven, Not a Marketer

As a website owner, how should you position your message in the Web 2.0 world?

The increasingly savvy buying public will quickly shun marketers. Internet readers want information from the Internet. They don’t want advertising, marketing, or a “pitch”.

According to Schefren in his Attention Age Doctrine, the solution is to become a social media “Maven”.

A Maven is a trusted authority, like a friend, on the social media websites. As you gain their trust, your audience will return to you over and over again wanting to invest in your advice.

Five Steps to Becoming a Social Media Maven

Social Media Maven Step 1: Get in the Game

Begin blogging immediately. Create a video explaining how to solve a problem and put it on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook with links back to your main website. Just those two things alone will establish more Web 2.0 presence than 90% of your competition.

Social Media Maven Step 2: Share your passion

Build your Web 2.0 website around your passions. Thirty-two year old Gary Vaynerchuk transformed his wine knowledge to his video blog. It now has thousands of subscribers and does $50 million dollars a year in wine sales. Social Media Maven Step 3: Be Controversial

Your audience will remember you more when you challenge the status quo. Controversy sells. Think like the tabloids and the local news channels here. For example, Web 2.0 Business Coach Rich Schefren challenges traditional marketing wisdom in each release of his Attention Age Doctrine special reports at www.attentionage.net/doctrine.

Social Media Maven Step 4: Create World Class Content

You will drive repeat traffic to your website by offering top notch “how to” information. Gary’s wine tastings are highly educational on the benefits of wine, how to cook with wine, and how to choose a wine for your special occasion. Rich’s reports teach Web 2.0 marketing principles.

Remember, as soon as your audience feels that you are “pitching” them, you’ve lost them. So provide content not advertising.

Social Media Maven Step 5: Engage in the Conversation

Web 2.0 is a dialogue not a monologue. Internet businesses profit more when they observe and listen to their communities first before they broadcast their messages. Savvy mavens such as Gary and Rich encourage their audience to ask questions. The answers to these questions then become part of their user-generated content.

How Marketing in a Web 2.0 Social Media Environment Is Exciting.

Visualize it like a big radio or television station or movie screen where you’re the star. You’re building a fan base so you need to entertain, inform, and deliver consistently for your audience.

You have more publishing power at your fingertips right now than at any time in history.

So use it.

Share your passions.

Reveal your trials and tribulations

Tell your story.

And, watch how quickly your audience builds.  

What about search and Web 2.0?

I found this article as I was doing research for Interchanges.com 

Web 2.0 cometh: Are you search 2.0 ready?

The genesis of search 2.0Traditional search engines are based on information retrieval technologies. They use a combination of boolean queries, link popularity, and text relevance amongst many other factors. Each one of the traditional search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Ask jeeves and Google use their own proprietary algorithms to rank search listings.

Search 2.0 isn’t just a new fangled term coined to brand newer search engines. It refers to engines such as Wink and Clusty, which in reality are third generation search engines. Just to explain the term third generation search engines in more detail:

First generation search engines included Altavista that used page content as the basis for search rankings

Second generation engines included Google that used page content as one of the many factors to rank a website, along with link analysis and quality of content. besides ofcourse their own proprietary algorithms

Third generation search engines include Rollyo, Clusty, Wink, and Lexxe, amongst others that are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models and they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, and a rich UIX, to help information work for youA peek into the world of search 2.0

Let’s walk through some of the search engines, making loud noises as the forbearers of new fangled search.

Swicki
In short, swicki advocates community search. The results are apparently uniquely tailored and tagged to your community and the information produced is apparently more usable that information retrieved otherwise. All of which makes me wonder what I will do if I don’t belong to a community of web searchers, so to speak. Jokes apart, the swicki community is growing rapidly, and is projected to grow to about 1 million users by the end of the year 2006.

Swickis allow you to build specific searches tailored to your interests and that of your community and get constantly updated results from your web or blog page. Swickis scan all the data indexed in Yahoo Search, plus all additional sources you specify, and present the results in a dynamically updated, easy to use format that you can publish on your site – or use at swicki.com

Clusty
Clusty is a metasearch engine: it queries multiple search engines and combines the results to be displayed and clustered on one screen. Clusty retrieves results from Ask, Open Directory, Gigablast and others

Profiled above are 2 of the proponents of search 2.0. There are a few more, but we’ll walk through what they are doing in another article.