I’m giving my Web 2.0 stump speech at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City today; a few weeks ago, I did the same at the Fast Search and Transfer Fastforward user conference. In each case, the organizers reported a huge surge in attendance, from three or four hundred last year to well over a thousand this year.
Now Omniture (a web tracking company) and Fast (an enterprise search company) are clearly part of the tech industry, but their customers, the people who are thronging this event, are clearly not. One only needs to look around to see the different demographic: 50/50 male/female ratio; 95% business attire — a sea of suits; no wi-fi, my laptop maybe the only one in the room. And the sponsors and attendee companies are from far outside tech: consumer goods companies, auto makers, newspapers, food, home decor…
In short, the renaissance of interest in the web that we call Web 2.0 has reached the mainstream. As Gail Ennis, the SVP of Worldwide Marketing for Omniture told me, “these are mid-level marketers trying to figure out what they can learn that will make them a hero in their organization.”
Of course, I don’t have any simple answers. Web 2.0 is about harnessing network effects to build applications and platforms that get better the more people use them. So many companies think that means figuring out how to get users to work for them, but it’s actually the other way around: figuring out how to make your products work better for your users, giving them more control over the direction of your product and your organization, and harnessing technology to ride that wave without wiping out.
Consider Google, the pre-eminent Web 2.0 company. Their breakthrough innovations in search — the refusal to run banner and popup ads and instead the insistence on relevance in marketing, the relentless focus on performance and search quality — were about providing value to their users, not harvesting it from them. And where they do harness user activity, as with PageRank or analyzing search patterns to understand user intention — they do so without ever asking their users for anything.
Doing that does require amazing infrastructure for real time monitoring and intelligence, such that Google automatically responds to constantly new information, as if it were a living thing (even exhibiting signs of sickness and immune response). But putting all of Google’s tools into place won’t make you a Web 2.0 company. Having the “Web 2.0 attitude” will.
In my talk, I point to threadless.com and our own Make magazine as examples of two very old-school businesses — selling t-shirts and a print magazine respectively — that act as, and succeed as, Web 2.0 companies. How? They put their users front and center.
Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make, reminds the staff constantly that it isn’t about the technology; it’s about the people and what they do with it.
That’s true of every successful web 2.0 business: it puts its customer first.
Correction: Gail Ennnis, whom I quoted above, wrote in: “The quote that you attributed to me … isn’t an accurate representation of our customers or the audience of the summit. The customers attending the conference are marketers, but their positions range from CEO’s and VP’s to managers and analysts -certainly not all mid-level. They are the people who have made and are continuing drive successful web analytics and online marketing initiatives in their companies – many who lead their industries. It struck me that the quote did not really capture their profile.” Apologies, Gail.