Beta Program: The Web 2.0 Ecosystem Audit

An increasingly tangible Web 2.0 ecosystem is growing up around all organizations, but they don’t know what it looks like, much less how to engage it. This is a looming problem that most businesses don’t know they have: their executives spend little time in Web 2.0 venues like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc., and they have no idea of how word of mouth is starting to change their businesses.

As a friend said poetically last week, “Quit pretending that people aren’t talking about you.”

It’s a slow boil: in 1996 when we asked executives how the Internet was affecting their businesses, and they had no idea, but, come 1999, they had to find out in a hurry, and it was very expensive. 2008’s Web 2.0 is going mainstream in pockets, but leaders don’t understand social media adoption.  Management needs to understand how the firm’s stakeholders are contributing to and learning from the conversations in these venues.

The Social Network Roadmap(SM) Web 2.0 Ecosystem Audit measures stakeholder adoption trends by defining stakeholder characteristics and digital identifiers before identifying Web 2.0 venues that are relevant to stakeholders. During SNR Pilot, this is a fast process; for a large company wanting to do a thorough analysis with SNR Enterprise, it could get quite involved. Here’s how it works:

• Make explicit external stakeholders’ impact on the business: who matters the most to your business?
• Make explicit internal stakeholders’ impact on the business: what internal stakeholders are affecting your business the most and how?
• Defining stakeholder characteristics: what characteristics define your best clients?  Partners?  Suppliers or vendors?
• Conduct keyword analysis and test: we translate the characteristics into digital identifiers.
• Web 2.0 venue analysis: using identifiers, we discover who is doing what where in Web 2.0 venues, paying close attention to adoption, even if numbers are small
• Web 2.0 influencer analysis: here’s a similar process for analyzing competitors and substitutes as well as analysts, media and lawmakers.

This rolls up to a solid understanding of what your organization’s Web 2.0 ecosystem looks like.  This will also give you a firm grasp of adoption trends: many businesses will not have large numbers of stakeholders engaged in social media, but we look at the adoption rates of small numbers because the market is nearing an inflection point in many industries.

As a freestanding project, the audit will help to vet preexisting Web 2.0 projects that most progressive firms have floating around their organizations. Also see the Web 2.0 Readiness Assessment.

Web 2.0 means that the ecosystem of market participants around your business is far more addressable and actionable than ever before.. and transparent.  It’s also easier for your company to engage.. when you know how.  You need to get in touch with this as soon as possible.

More Detailed Information

• The Social Network Roadmap Pilot: how the Ecosystem Audit helps you to focus on the right people at the right place at the right time to increase returns on social business (social media, social networking) initiatives
• Short videos:
  • How SNR enables 21st century brand management
  • Preview of SNR executive seminars to get teams current fast
• The Social Network Roadmap: brief presentation
• The Social Network Roadmap: expanded overview