Five Web 2.0 Trends Worth Watching
B2B Online put together an interesting list of five web/tech trends worth watching right now and what they mean for b-to-b marketing. The five trends they identified are:
Widgets
Definition: Widgets are small programs that can be embedded on desktops, Web pages and mobile phones.
Background: Widgets aren’t new—buy social networks have helped them explode. These mini-applications are most often downloaded and installed on social network (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn) pages and blog sidebars..
B-to-b impact: The ability to deliver fully functioning applications (versus static ads) with seamless branding is a marketer’s dream, enabling full user engagement. Consumer companies such as Coca-Cola Co., Toyota Motor Sales USA and Harley-Davidson USA have launched marketing-oriented widgets. As b-to-b-oriented social networks (beyond just LinkedIn) emerge—and if OpenSocial takes off on the wider Web—widgets could be an important tool for b-to-b marketers.
Social Feeds
Definition: Social feeds are aggregated, shared streams of information about individuals and communities.
Background: RSS took content and distributed it. Social feeds take the Web activity of a user or group of users and spread it just as far and wide. The power of social feeds is in aggregating all a user’s friend activity in a single location.
B-to-b impact: There’s a real chance that social feeds could become the de facto way people keep up with one another—replacing e-mail and even real-time communications such as phone calls and texting. It’s that powerful. But Facebook’s Beacon, which injected both brand ads and word-of-mouth-style messages into the personal news feed, demonstrated both the power and danger of introducing marketing into these very personal feeds.
Data Portability
Definition: Data portability enables users to control how they share (or don’t share) information about themselves.
Background: If social feeds let users more easily share information about their activities, data portability lets them have more control over their personal data. Data portability has become a hot topic as more people experience “social network fatigue”, the need to re-enter data again and again for new social networks, has set in.
B-to-b impact: Data portability should sound familiar to marketers; it is really the other side of the coin of opt-in/opt-out. If users are able to create and move rich personal profiles around, that’s a great thing for marketers. The key will be to offer a compelling reason for users to give their profile data to you; but then, that’s always been the job of marketers. Data portability could help regulate and automate that exchange, making it a crucial trend to follow.
Mashups
Definition: Mashups are the pulling together of multiple Web services, via open interfaces, to create something new.
Background: The key to mashups are open APIs on today’s Web services. Those open interfaces let developers create new applications that pull together, or mash up, pieces of other applications. The classic example is a map application that combines Google Maps with some other source of data, such as traffic feeds or coffee shop locations.
B-to-b impact: Marketers can create mashups, imagine adding sales locations to a live map, or they can create APIs into customer data streams that others can use in mashups of their own. The big idea here is most important: On the Web, applications aren’t standalone things but combinations of multiple open services.
Open Mobile
Definition: Wireless becomes like the Web as individuals, not carriers, freely mix and match networks, devices and content.
Background: Mobile operators such as Verizon have announced plans to open up their networks to all devices and apps. Google is trying to buy wireless spectrum. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission are pushing “net neutrality.” And mobile browsers, led by Apple’s iPhone, have made it possible for users to really surf the whole Web, ending the walled garden approach.
B-to-b impact: Mobile is the future. But walled-garden mobile is one thing; open mobile, quite another. For starters, content providers, marketers and advertisers will no longer be forced to work through carriers or device makers to make a mobile push (though those types of companies may still be key partners). More likely, the open mobile Web will evolve like the Web itself—the best content and marketing messages will win.
What do you think of these five trends? Did we miss any?
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Mar 18th, 2008
March 18th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Five Web 2.0 Trends Worth Watching…
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