"When there is no vision, people perish." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Improve Your Online Small Business Profits
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Have you heard the Web 2.0 term just once too often and in just too many variations to really understand what it means for you as a marketers?
To make all of this easier to understand, here's the nitty-gritty of what Web 2.0 really means for you:
* Anyone can write about you online and make his thoughts available to everyone else. And these thoughts don't just go away, but are indefinitely archived online. It's a sticky situation.
* Everyone is connecting with everyone. They share their experiences, their fears, their disgust, their love and everything in between. What they write about you they will share with their friends and the rest of the world.
* While all of these people are not strong by themselves, together they form a connected market that can spread your positive or negative news faster than any traditional media, and can collectively decide how good or how bad you are.
* Everyone is an influencer, and there are thousands of connected influencers. You need to influence them all.
* To capture attention and influence, you need to syndicate your online messaging and content to your online audiences and other websites.
Perhaps all of this is easiest explained with a simple story …
Jane is a salesperson at the local store, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and much much more. Like many today, she likes to keep in touch with her family using the internet. But not just e-mail.
She also keeps an online blog where she keeps her diary, reporting on the daily events in her life, and writing about her pashion, books. Why not, it doesn't cost her a dime …
Her blog is read by only about 20 people, her family, who like to see what she's up to, and some of her friends from her book club, who are interested in her opions of the books she reads every day.
The other day Jane ordered a fitness machine through a homeshopping channel, just amazed with all the promises of quickly shaping her body.
Her enthusiasm quickly turned into despair, as it took the company 3 weeks to deliver the product. But still, she kept her patience and started working out the same day she received the fitness machine.
But after three weeks of constant workout, the results were far from what she was promised. Angry at the company, she reports about her disapointment in her blog.
The blog is first read by her teenage son, who quickly tells his friends that the fitness machine doesn’t really work, sending an e-mail to the blog post to them. One of his friends is a fitness enthusiast, who goes ahead and posts the link to the story on his own blog, which is read by many of his friends in his fitness club. Some of them also have blogs, and most of them participate in online communities and forums.
Jane's most faithful audience, her 12 book club friends, also read the story. Again, some of them are active bloggers, who don't reach more than 100 people altogether, but they do reach some. And some of them also have blogs with their own audiences, and at the least participate in online communities.
The story quickly spreads beyond Jane's micro circle of influence.
It also gets picked up by the search engines, where it's displayed on the first page of the results when someone searches for this product.
The company loses some customers, and perhaps more importantly, gains an ounce more of negative publicity online.
If Jane is the only one with such a problem, the story will quickly fade out, and except for the negative search engine trail, the negative affects for the company might not be so bad.
But what if Jane is just one of the many customers having this problem?
These customers will spread the word through their micro circles of influence, detering some of their friends for making the purchase and spreading the negative news to a few hundred customers.
Eventually, these dissatisfied customers will find each other and amplify the negativism, bringing it further into the eye of the public.
The problem might not turn into an equivalent of Dell Hell, but it will spread and harm the company.
And just as with Dell Hell, it could have been avoided …
The company could have supplied Jane with a constant stream of information on how to use the fitness machine to get the most from it. It could supply additional tips, such as diet information, that would help Jane improve her results.
The company could have facilitated direct communications from Jane, perhaps preventing her from talking to her friends online and instead rather talking to the company.
The company could have monitored the internet for negative comments and responded to them directly, showing it actually cares for its customers and providing additional tips on how to get the best results from the fitness machine, and perhaps noting some reasons why Jane isn't getting the results she hoped for.
The company could explain on its blog why its having delivery issues and ask its customers for understanding.
And much much more …
Web 2.0 is not just about having a blog. It's not just about doing RSS. It's about embracing the new reality of how people communicate online and understanding the opportunities that arise from this, as well as the threats.
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