Content Marketing Today

What the Heck is Web 2.0–and How Does It Relate to Content Marketing?

What’s often called Web 2.0 involves lots of leading edge technology and tools that drive two way communications on and beyond the Internet.

Great, but why is all this relevant to your content marketing strategy?

These Web 2.0 tools enable information to flow from your customers back to you. What I think of as the third generation of websites will go beyond providing vital content to customers. Your customers will provide content to you.

They will contribute to your company by adding value to your products and services through interactive communication devices. Blogs and wikis are good examples.

Blogging began as a way for individuals to share their best thinking on topics about which they felt passionately—even if it was just their own lives. Today, business Blogs are wonderful ways to keep your customers current about what your company is doing. Even better, they enable customers to provide easy and immediate feedback. The excellent content marketer, Miller Electric, offers timely and relevant information on welding issues in order to encourage a dialogue with their customers. For example, a post on ‘Resistance to Technology’ sparked a number of thoughtful replies that probably taught Miller some lessons about how its customers think. They even let readers rate the quality of the Blog posts. It’s worth noting that the post had nothing to do with selling Miller equipment.

Wikis offer the ability to create a collaborative body of knowledge through a structured tool. Wikepedia is the most famous example. It offers many times more information than the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica—and is arguably just as accurate. Every bit of its content comes from volunteer experts all over the world.

A wonderful wiki example from the business realm is highlighted in Don Tapscott’s excellent Wikinomics. He tells the story of struggling gold mining company, Goldcorp, which opened up its intellectual property to the world in order to find more gold in its Northern Canadian properties. On the verge of bankruptcy and unable to find enough gold to stay afloat, Goldcorp offered big prizes for the best solutions. Outside the box thinkers by the thousands entered the contest and ultimately delivered solutions that showed the way to huge reserves and billions of dollars in revenues.

As I see it, the most important trend has more to do with philosophy than with technology. We will see extensive global collaboration enabled by easy to use tools such as blogging and wiki software. In the second generation of websites, you provided invaluable content to your customers. In the third generation, your customers are beginning to return the favor by actively collaborating with you to improve what you do and how you do it.

Get a sneak peak at Tapscott’s book Wikinomics here.