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Consumers using blogs and user-generated content

Interesting information regarding online consumer use of blogs, video and podcasts:

Groundswell: From the chart: In the US, of online consumers, 25% read blogs, 14% comment on blogs, 29% watch user generated video, and 11% listen to podcasts. The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English….Podcasts still haven’t caught on the US after years of availability.”

These numbers will be different for the B2B audience, but are very important for the B2C audience.  B2B often follows directly in the footsteps of the consumer market, so they’re interesting from a trend point-of-view. Looks like video is still pretty important.

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Does your business website need buzz?

What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.

Here’s a truism – Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.

In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.

  • Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
  • Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
  • Interactive Media talks back
  • Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
  • You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)

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Web 2.0 Expo – Personal Analytics

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s – the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

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