Here is a great introduction to Web 2.0. Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter group has produced, Web 2.0 for Business Advantage: A Personal Guide to Profiting from the New Web, a forty-page guide that “explores what is driving the dramatic adoption of Web 2.0 and how you can profit from it. The guide covers key advantages that can be had from smartly deploying Web 2.0: building an online presence; personal information management and the new desktop; and the new collaboration.”
The book includes three cases where business problems were solved with Web 2.0: podcasting for learning, innovation in financial services;, and learning networks at the American Library Association. Kathleen writes this in the first person and coveys a personal journey as the central case. This makes it much more readable and useful for other small businesses like her, including myself.
In true web 2.0 manner, she has set up del.icio.us tags for further reading, opened a discussion forum, published a set of video podcasts as tutorials. You can find all this in the report and the document is also full of useful links. A good small business blog example is Nitewinds Kennels who stared a blog and has spent $300 on Google Ads directing people to the blog. It has resulted is $10,000 is sales, some new ongoing customers, and daily enquiries about her services, a nice ROI.
There is a good review of the main blogging tools, including MySpace. I knew that business had started to infiltrate MySpace but it was useful to learn more. I followed a number of Kathleen’s suggestions throughout the report, including checking out myspace restaurants on Google and found the Nu-way Restaurant in Spartanburg, SC with some good rock coming out of their web site. I may go their the next time I visit my cousins in nearby Greer. It was number one in Google for the search, one more example of the power of blogs for search results.
I could go on with examples but you should get the report yourself. At $9.95 it is a much less expense way than the O’Reilly report to learn more about the opportunities within the new web. I learned a lot myself. I frequently get asked about the difference between blogs for such tasks as project mamagement and groupware. I have a few ideas on this, primarily the transparency vs. silos issue. Kathleen offers a nice articulation of these differences but then provides the best answer - simply Google the name of a groupware tool and add the word "sucks" to see what the wisdom of crowds is currently saying.
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