BIOS: Technology Means Business

Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube is clear evidence that Web 2.0 is here to stay, but what will be its impact in the business environment?

Web 2.0 has emerged as a hot topic in the enterprise space. It is more than just another consumer fad and those organisations that don’t consider its impact at a business level, risk being left behind.

Web 2.0 has been described by some as the ‘second coming’ of the Internet - it is not just about the technology, it is about a shift in the way the Web is being used. In many ways, the Web is now delivering the types of services that were promised in the late 1990s.

People are now collaborating and sharing information through a variety of new online services, such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs, video sharing and instant messaging. You only have to look at the rise in the popularity of Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace over the last 12 months to see the impact that Web 2.0 is starting to have. This in turn is starting to fundamentally change the way that businesses will need to interact with their customers and manage their content now and in the future, as Web 2.0 has raised the bar on the customer’s expectation of their Web experience.

Many of the young people who are currently using Web 2.0 technologies are today’s customers, but will also be tomorrow’s workforce. Therefore it is important that businesses embrace them today. A good illustration of how customer expectation will change is the emergence of instant messaging. For example, a user who uses instant messaging to communicate with friends or fellow employees will likely start wanting more ‘immediate’ communication with suppliers and so on. Compared to instant messaging, e-mail will soon be the electronic equivalent of a carrier pigeon! In the same way, many other Web 2.0 technologies will make communication much more ‘real-time’ and dynamic.

The term ‘customer experience’ is increasingly being used across many industries, as businesses look to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Web 2.0 will play an important role in this, and the challenge for organisations is to find the best and most appropriate way to enable customer participation. On a very basic level, many websites are now using user-contributed reviews to assist customers with their purchasing decisions. Good examples of this are Amazon and TopTable for media and restaurant reviews respectively.

Some of the most recognised features of the Web 2.0 era are blogging and wikis. Many people still just think of a blog as just a personal home page or diary; however, it can be a much more dynamic application thanks to technology such as RSS. RSS enables users not just to link to a page but to subscribe to it, with a notification sent out every time that page changes. RSS can now be used not only to push out notices of new blog entries, but it can also notify users of all kinds of data updates ranging from news and weather alerts to product and service updates. All of this means that content can be delivered to end users in a much more targeted and personalised way. From a business perspective, this will help to increase customer loyalty and provide greater up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, because the users have given permission to be notified of news as opposed to obtrusive spam.

Wikis are also a useful tool for businesses wanting to collaborate and share knowledge and ideas - for example, a wiki could be used to create a competitive analysis or review documentation online. As with any technological implementation, wikis must fit in with what the business wants to achieve. Rather than just implementing a wiki in isolation, it needs to be part of a wider strategy that includes knowledge and content management, collaboration and communication management, so that there are underlying processes and procedures to support it. Additionally, for a corporate wiki to work successfully it should seamlessly integrate with everyday tools such as Outlook and Word. If users have to go through several hoops to contribute to the system, it is soon likely to turn them off from contributing.

Wikis, blogs and RSS are only part of the larger Web 2.0 picture. The next generation of the Web is about IP technology enabling your TV, phone or other portable device to deliver content relevant to the consumer anytime and anyplace. With this in mind, it is becoming increasingly important that companies easily manage the content on their primary dot com domains and transform and deliver it to multiple devices such as personal computers and mobile handsets. By having the correct content management technology and processes in place to do this it will ultimately further enhance the Web 2.0 end-user experience.

Overall, organisations need to embrace transparency and openness for their Web 2.0 initiatives to be a success. Instant messaging, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites are changing the way people interact with businesses - it is no longer just a one-way process. The successful businesses will be the ones that open up Web 2.0 communication channels to customers, giving them an opportunity to provide feedback on products and services. By monitoring and responding to the ‘community’, businesses can start to alter and improve the way they work, which leads to both happy customers and growing profits.