Web 2.0 Marketing Gains Momentum: Flickr, Blogs, Tags
Since last October's conference, Web 2.0 has gone from an insider phrase to something marketers are watching. A look at the momentum building in early 2005.
Five months after O’Reilly and MediaLive’s first Web 2.0 Conference, the term has moved out of insider circles and into ordinary marketing conversations, mostly because the things it describes keep getting harder to ignore. Yahoo just bought Flickr, the photo-sharing site that barely a year ago was a scrappy startup experiment in tagging and public albums. Podcasting, a word that didn’t exist before last February, is turning into a genuine habit for a growing slice of internet users. This is a look at what’s rising right now, not the theory behind it.
The acquisitions are the tell
When a company like Yahoo pays real money for a photo-sharing site built around user tagging and public sharing rather than private storage, that’s a signal worth reading. It means the value isn’t in the photos themselves, it’s in the structure users create around them: tags, comments, public galleries that turn a personal hobby into a searchable, browsable network. That’s a fundamentally different kind of asset than a traditional media library, and acquirers are starting to price it that way.
Blogs have stopped being a niche hobby
Technorati, the blog search engine that launched a couple of years back, is now tracking a number of blogs that would have sounded absurd in 2002. Six Apart’s Movable Type and TypePad, along with the newer WordPress, have made starting a blog a matter of minutes rather than technical know-how. What used to be a hobbyist’s project is turning into standard infrastructure for anyone who wants an audience, businesses included.
Tagging is quietly becoming a discovery layer
Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, and Flickr both bet on the same idea: let users label content with their own words instead of forcing it into a fixed category tree, and something useful emerges from the aggregate. Search engines built rigid taxonomies from the top down; this approach builds a messier, more honest map of what people think content is about, from the bottom up. It’s early, but it’s a different way to organize information.
MySpace is growing faster than most people are watching
MySpace, not yet two years old, has been adding users at a pace that’s starting to draw real attention outside its core teenage and young-adult audience. It’s easy to dismiss as a fad site for profile customization, but the underlying behavior, an entire social network built and populated entirely by its users, is the same pattern showing up everywhere else this year.
What this means for a business paying attention now
None of these platforms are mature marketing channels yet. What they share is a bet that’s paying off: give users real tools to publish, tag and connect, and they’ll build something far larger and more engaged than any single company could build alone. Businesses that start experimenting with blogs, tagging and participation now, even in small ways, are going to understand this landscape far better than competitors who wait for it to become obvious.
More strategy coverage is here, along with everything published in 2005 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
