Web 2.0 Marketing Before It Had a Name
The phrase Web 2.0 is just starting to circulate ahead of October's conference, but the shift toward blogs, RSS and user participation is already under way.
O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International have a conference planned for this October carrying a name that’s been floating around tech circles for a few years now: Web 2.0. Nobody has written the definitive essay on what it means yet, and most marketers have never heard the term. But the thing it’s trying to describe has been building for a while, and it’s worth tracing where it came from.
Where the shift started
The pieces have been arriving separately, without anyone declaring a movement. Blogger, acquired by Google last year, made publishing a post as easy as sending an email. RSS quietly became the plumbing that let readers pull updates from dozens of sites without visiting any of them directly. Wikipedia, barely three years old, is proving that thousands of strangers can build something more thorough than any single publisher, with no editor approving each entry. Flickr launched this February and turned photo sharing into a public, taggable, searchable conversation rather than a private album.
What connects all of it
None of these tools were designed together, but they share a premise that breaks from how the web worked in its first decade: users aren’t just reading anymore, they’re building the thing they’re reading. A company blog with comments turned on isn’t a brochure with feedback; it’s a conversation the company doesn’t fully control. That loss of control is exactly what makes it valuable. Audiences trust a space where they can talk back far more than one where they can only receive.
Why marketers should pay attention now, not later
The businesses noticing this shift early aren’t doing anything exotic. They’re publishing a blog instead of only a static site, turning on comments and answering them and syndicating an RSS feed so their most engaged readers don’t have to remember to check back. None of it required a big budget. It required treating the audience as a participant rather than a target, months before there was a name for doing so.
What to watch heading into the conference
Whatever gets said in October, the underlying pattern is unlikely to reverse. Publishing tools keep getting easier, storage and bandwidth keep getting cheaper and every year it becomes less unusual for an ordinary customer to have their own public voice online. A business that ignores that voice, or worse, tries to talk over it, is going to look increasingly out of step.
The practical takeaway before the term catches on
You don’t need to wait for a keynote to start acting on this. Start a blog if you haven’t. Turn comments on. Publish an RSS feed. Watch what your customers say when given the chance to say it publicly, and respond like a person rather than a press release. Whatever this era ends up being called, that’s what it’s going to reward.
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