#3 - How Do We Go Web 2.0?
Now that we see the importance of building a community on our site, how do we get there? This article explores a few common options, and one you might not have thought of yet.
In the previous article in this series we explored the relationship between word of mouth marketing and Web 2.0.
We've seen that community based Web 2.0 sites have substantial competitive advantages over the classic single author Web 1.0 site.
These advantages are too big to ignore, so the next question for many of us will be...
How Do We Go Web 2.0?
Please understand that I am in no way an expert on the ever growing number of software platforms designed to manage Web 2.0 sites. That's a subject for an entire site of it's own.
With that disclaimer in mind, here's just a few thoughts that might start us down the trail, plus an inside look at my own Web 2.0 plans.
Getting Started - Article Comments
If your publishing platform allows users to comment on your articles, you've already got a start on going Web 2.0.
Although the comment feature has been much abused in recent years by visitors whose only interest is getting a link back, this feature remains useful for authors who manage it well.
Each of us will have our own management strategy. The suggestion from here is that you:
1) Moderate your comments. Read and approve (or decline) comments before they are published.
2) Participate in the discussion, and reply to as many comments as you can.
The comment feature can be engaging (mostly for the commmenters) but it may have limited word of mouth value.
Remember, the point of Web 2.0 from a word of mouth perspective is that your visitors both take an ownership stake in your site, AND then act on their pride of ownership.
It's unlikely that too many commenters will tell all their friends to go to your site to read the commenter's brilliant remarks. The commenter just doesn't have enough ownership of the page, and their comment probably isn't easy to link to.
With these limits in mind, let's go on to the next Web 2.0 user participation technique.
A Forum For You?
Adding a forum to your site may be the most common way to elevate a site from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 status.
While article comments are generally limited to an exchange between you and specific readers, a forum becomes a place where your visitors can talk to each other, and build a real community.
Forum members may have their own profile pages, which they can send people to.
Forum members can start threads, and share a series of posts on a particular topic, which gives them a greater sense of ownership.
Common forum features like avatars and signatures are designed to build this sense of personal identity and ownership.
As we've discussed, this sense of ownership is a key ingredient of your visitor becoming an evangelist for their contributions, to your site.
The bottom line, visitors are more likely to give word of mouth promotion to their own content, than they are yours. Thus, allowing your visitors to generate content on your site can liberate a lot of word of mouth energy you may not get otherwise.
Hey, whaddya know! I just remembered, we have a forum for this site started. Be warned though, it's very young, and not yet a real community.
There's still time to become a founding member! Act now and claim your rightful place!! :-)
Chat With Us In Our Forum
Ok, you likely know all about forums already. I'm just reminding you to consider the word of mouth benefits of a forum, or any Web 2.0 device.
Let's continue on to a Web 2.0 concept that you may not have had a chance to encounter yet.
Moving Up To A Forum Network
A forum network is a community of communities.
It's perhaps easiest to explain with an example.
My long range plans for Nature-Talk.com include allowing my visitors to set up their own nature forums within my domain.
Each of the forums would be a completely independent forum, with it's own owner, logo, topics, policies, membership etc.
Each of these forums will exist with the Nature-Talk domain, and all the forums will be linked together through a common interface.
All of the forums will address some aspect of the broad topic of nature. There might be a bird forum, a beaches forum, a forum about national parks, a forum for whale watchers, and so on.
Ideally, this network of forums will someday become the easiest place on the Net to find a wide variety of nature related discussions.
I have the software in place ready to go, but first have to do the hard work of building the traffic up to where the site can support one or more communities. When I get to around 1,000 unique visitors a day, I'll start offering visitors their own nature forums on my site.
This is an ambitious Web 2.0 strategy, and it surely won't be right for everybody. I'm just mentioning it to perhaps expand your horizons a bit, and get you thinking outside some of the normal conceptual boxes you may be used to.
While we're on the subject of forums, and Web 2.0 in general, in the next article I'd like to share what I see as the biggest weakness in the Web 2.0 concept, and offer some ideas to address these weaknesses.
