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If your company isn’t yet leveraging Web 2.0, you could be missing a sizeable piece of your market. We can help you get started. Web 2.0 is a bit of a catch-all term for a number of uses to which the Web has recently been put, characterized more by collaboration and conversation than the one-way information transmission model of traditional websites. They include... - blogs (or their original formal name, weblogs)
- forums – an open-ended, unrestricted online Q&A session
- social networks – most famously, Facebook and MySpace
Any or all of these vehicles may be useful for your firm, depending on its goals and industry context. We’ll give each a very brief sketch here, but our B2B Web Strategy Blog has substantially more Web 2.0 information. Blogs
Recent studies show that blogging has gone mainstream – even for B-to-B's. According to a recent study (summarized in a posting on our blog), more than half of respondents say they get both business and technology information from blogs; and over 53% say the content they read in blogs impacts their business purchasing decisions. In addition, blogging all but ensures your creation of a wealth of timely and relevant content, which brings a number of other benefits: - Improved organic search rankings for your website
- Enhancement of your company’s reputation as a thought leader
- Industry visibility for some of your key staff members, which may lead to conference speaking invitations, opinion-seeking by industry analysts, etc.
If you’re launching a blog, it makes sense to seek the counsel of a company that’s been around the block before ...like eMagine. Drawing from our own experience with the B-to-B Web Strategy Blog – plus extensive work with other clients – our blog development service will help you develop a sound plan, frame the technical and other choices, assist with implementation ...even ghost-write it for you on an ongoing basis. eMagine will ensure that your company’s blog realizes your business goals. Forums
Forums actually began some years ago, well before the Web 2.0 term was much used. They provide a way for a subject-matter-defined community to exchange information in question/answer format ...where each question may engender numerous answers (and the answers may engender more comments, and...). As such, they’ve become hugely popular in knowledge-driven industries like infotech and biotech: consider, for instance, the communities interested in information on the beta-test of Vista, or the clinical trials of Erithromycin-L. As with blogs, eMagine can help you design and implement any number of forums appropriate to your company’s mission.
Social Networks
Social networks have come a long way since becoming all the rage among teenagers. At this point in time, they can be useful to B-to-B's in two ways: - Properly used, the more business-oriented public sites (including LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbleUpon and others) can help your company build its brand, turn customers into evangelists, nurture suspects, conduct viral marketing campaigns, and help raise your corporate website’s ranking ... all in a low-key, social sort of way.
- Private or “white label” social nets have the potential to do for internal affinity groups what extranets have done for B-to-B e-commerce and partner programs ...and then some. Such affinity groups might be all employees, or just new hires; skills-based functional groups like engineers or salespeople; task-defined groups (e.g., “the Omega Project team” or “the global Exxon account team”); or groups with a need to share new information and feedback quickly, such as a new-product release team and its beta-test site administrators.
eMagine can help you leverage the public social media sites and/or set up appropriate white label social networks, as your business and industry context requires.
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