And then things became a little fancier and you could host a form on your site to allow people to send others links to your site. By email.

Plug-ins soon came along, and you could embed content from other sites in your site. And let visitors provide their own content (comments, etc) on your site.

All on your site. Or sent by email.

The great thing these days is that you can easily provide tools to allow visitors to share your content on other sites for you, and to follow your site on other sites. Its about moving the conversation.

Two tools which really illustrate this are Twitter and Add This. I’ve written before about Twitter and how I’ve integrated it into London for Free. I’ve already attracted quite a few followers – people who now don’t need to come back to my site to see info I’ve added about events. Instead, they will see my twitter post on either twitter itself or a twitter content aggregation site.

Add This is an excellent plug-in to allow visitors to London for Free to share it on other sites such as Facebook, delicious and more. And every time they do, it doesn’t just benefit them. It benefits my site. The more times my site can be linked to the likes of Facebook and other popular sites, the better. Though these links aren’t treated as proper inbound links by search engines, they help to advertise my site.

Two simple ways to promote your site on other sites and support conversations by visitors about it anywhere.

If you have good content to film, of course. And that’s the problem with user-generated content. The web is filled with rubbish – videos of pets (like my first VADO production), pointless blogs (er….. moving right along),  inane comments and so on.

Its not that the technology isn’t there to support the creation of great user-generated content – the current version of WordPress truly means anyone can create and manage their own stuff these days. And the changes proposed with the new HTML 5 standard will make it even easier for webmasters to enable it on commercial sites.

Its all about what’s published. And has been ever since the web really took hold in the late 90′s. Back then the mantra was CONTENT IS KING and its still the same today.

The big difference is that in these web 2.0 days, the “content” in question is far more likely to be user-generated.

USER-GENERATED CONTENT IS KING. I predict that will be the emerging message for 2009 and beyond.

And that presents interesting challenges but also opportunities for organisations that work to embrace user-generated content on their own sites.

Just how exactly to make money from it.

It requires innovative thinking – the idea of simply building your own community and hoping users will populate it and stick around has proven to be difficult for all but niche organisations. And adding ratings and reviews tools to sites is also now so commonplace as not to provide much advantage anymore.

There are some good examples of using user-generated content in non commercial organisations such as change.org. But I’ve not seen that many on commercial sites.

However, ideas such as inviting guest bloggers to post (Jamie Oliver perhaps, on a cookery site), and encouraging user collaboration around producing a film script (e.g. which a tv site could then fund the production of) might be worth exploring.

Basically targeting certain users as content creators or guiding users as a group through creating content that an organisation can then add the final touches to, to monetarise.

Just a thought. Right, better get on with publishing my next (bad) video to YouTube.

Back then, I think the media coverage was measured by how quickly organisations could update their web pages, capture and show film footage and photos, and locate people to interview. Blogs and YouTube weren’t yet mainstream, sure there were some newsgroups and forums but I suppose most people turned to the tv and other traditional media for their information.

Imagine if a similarly significant event happened today – using web 2.0 tools people could post updates on presence awareness tools such as twitter, send photos and videos from their mobile phones to flickr, youtube and so on, and share their feelings in social networking groups and blogs. And get newsfeeds on their mobiles.

News coverage would truly be by the masses. Our record of history would definitely be different – no longer just the “official” (read govt-endorsed, corporate funded) version of events but made up of real stories covered by real people who were in various ways a real part of the event. A social version.

A pretty big difference in a short amount of time.

Imagine back to other significant events, earlier in our world history – the end of world war 2, say.

And imagine how different the coverage and information sharing about future major events will be. Once mobile connectivity is more reliable.

Great for democracy, and more power to the people.

And it dawned on me that, unless I’ve missed something, the writers of Groundswell have made a bit of an assumption around customers and their use of web 2 tools.

Their book suggests that if you figure out who your target customers or users are, decide why you want to communicate with them (e.g. to get ideas from them for new products, to promote new services to them, etc), and then understand how these users make use of web 2.0 tools (ie. their “social technographic profiles”) – well then all you need to do is use these tools and magically customers will communicate with you.

Except that they probably won’t.

The piece that seems to be missing is what Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody. Its something he calls “Promise”. Another way of thinking of it is the “what’s in it for me” factor.

For example, just because an organisation has identified its target users as being “critics” (in Groundswell’s  social techno profile) – due to the fact that they tend to rate products and comment on blogs – doesn’t mean they will do this on matters of interest to the organisation.

Forrester charges for access to its detailed information on social technographic profiles but I wonder whether the info considers this dimension – not so much exactly which groups use what web 2.0 tools but also what they talk about when using them. WHY they choose to use them. The “what’s in it for me” element.

Maybe I’ll find out by the end of the book.

And interestingly, in France its the opposite: 21% read blogs and only 3% visit social networking sites. For  organisations trying to tap into the conversations their customers are having online, its important to know this.

In  Groundswell, the writers have defined categories of people (inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics and creators) based on what they do in the web 2 world. They’ve called it the Social Technographics Ladder.

They’ve then conducted surveys to profile different demographic groups across this ladder. Here are their results.

So what are the things that people do that puts them into one of these groups?

Well, Forrester suggests:

Its crucial for organisations to understand the categories their core customers fall into if they want to develop  a successful social media strategy. For example, there’s no point setting up a facebook group if their target customers are “spectators”.

Its not the only thing that drives a successful social media strategy but its a key starting point.

All this talk about people having conversations online with each other, forming groups, getting what they need from the community and other customers rather than from organisations, the challenges faced by organisations around driving value from it all…..

stop right there <looking over my shoulder at my book shelf>. Community Building on the Web, Communities of Commerce, Online Communities, Hosting Web Communities. All excellent books about online communities, all published in 2000.

There’s nothing really new about a lot of this at all – except that this time around, the technologies to enable it are so much better.

I remember back in 2000, when I was working on a project to develop an online learning portal. The big thing the client wanted was an online community for Alumni, so they could remain engaged with them after they finished their courses and could sell them a range of stuff. Among the many challenges we faced (finding partners, developing sensible revenue models, etc.) were with the tools that were available at the time.

Vaporware doesn’t even start to describe it.

This time around, the technology is such that the vision of online communities providing business value is definitely achievable. The tools are there, its just a matter of organisations being creative with the content they provide and courageous with using it to communicate with customers.

Imagine how different our technology strategy for this client would have been had we had the vision of facebook and twitter back then. Though we’d probably be living it up on a tropical island somewhere by now, spending our fortunes earned!

Written by two Forrester analysts, it talks about the importance of organisations paying attention to what their customers are doing online.

They define groundswell as a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

I’d add to this by saying its simply where people are freely having conversations online and sharing stuff with each other about loads of things including about organisations – but the organisations concerned are not part of these conversations.

And to unlock the business value they can gain from these conversations, they should be. Hence, organisations need to develop their social media strategies so that they can be.

People are using a raft of web 2.0 technologies to have these conversations and share information – everything from wikis to folksonomies to RSS feeds to social networking groups. And they are using these tools to say what they bloody-well want to. They don’t care about brand values, share prices, reputations, being sued and so on.

Here’s a great example.

Now, not surprisingly, the book talks about how Forrester has been asked by many organisations to help them develop their strategies for harnessing this sort of thing.

However, I’d say that developing your own strategy is not rocket science! Based on the book, here’s how I’d propose you did it:

1 – Start by understanding who your target audience / customers are (you should already know this).

2 – recognise the fact that they are most likely to be having conversations online without you and decide what you want to do about it. ie. do you want to listen / support / take part in / lead these conversations etc (Forrester calls these your web 2.0 business goals)

3 – research the types of web 2.0 tools they are using. For example are they creating Facebook groups, do they subscribe to RSS feeds, do they write / comment / read blogs, do they vote on product ratings, etc. Basically, where are they online?? And what are they doing??

4 – select the tools from step 3 your customers are using that will help you achieve your business goals in step 2

The book gives loads of examples of how to do this. e.g. There are thousands of groups on Facebook and myspace for MTV. If MTV wants to listen to the conversations their customers are having, they should at a very minimum observe these groups. If they want to take part, they should consider hosting a group.

But ignoring the conversations is probably not a wise option, as they will carry on happening regardless.

Web 2.0 truly puts power in the hands of customers – and organisations should pay attention. I can think of a few examples of web 2.0-friendly organisations that are already doing this. e.g. Amazon, Virgin Atlantic, Plusnet.

I wonder if McDonalds knows about this video …………

Thanks for reading this. I hope you found it of interest.