The Dirty Dozen: Are You Experiencing Symptoms of Web 2.0 Misalignment?

As “the Internet” changed the rules of information access during Web 1.0, pervasive peer-to-peer communication is changing the rules of people access during Web 2.0.  Web 1.0 made information accessible by anyone at a very low cost through the standardized Web browser, transport and network, but it was still one to many communication.  Web 2.0 applies this same logic, but it’s many to many this time, and it’s social because people are connecting with other people.

Consequently, most organizations are experiencing the slow boil*.  I have compiled this list from my client work and hundreds of hallway conversations.  How many do you know? 

1. A competitor has made headlines with a campaign in MySpace/blogs/Facebook.  How did they do it?
2. Some of our employees barely use our email system.  What do we do about it?
3. One of our employees flamed an irate customer on a message board, and it caused a bit of a stir.  What do we do about that? 
4. We’ve been experimenting with blogs for a while, but should we think about making them work with our other communications?  If we do, will that detract from blogs’ credibility?  How do we manage that?
5. Everybody in our company (or a client’s company) wants a private Facebook, and employees are doing all kinds of things.  Actually, we don’t even know exactly what they’re doing.
6. Our marketing people keep telling us that we need to be in virtual worlds, gaming and social campaigns to engage Millennials.  But how do these fit with what we’re already doing?
7. We’re getting some negative blog posts about our company/product/policy, and we don’t know exactly what to do about it.
8. How do we get our arms around blogs, MySpace, YouTube and other things we haven’t heard of?  Should we be concerned about them?
9. We have heard and read about blogs, MySpace, YouTube affecting business of companies.  How do we figure out how these things are relevant to us?  Or when they might become relevant?
10. Our CTO admitted that he is often more productive working from home since our company policy prevents accessing entertainment and social network sites, and he uses them for recruiting.
11. We are increasingly cropping up on YouTube, and that makes us uneasy.  How to we prevent people from showing our product (company, policy) in a questionable light?
12. An incredible amount of our new (website) readers are from Asia.  They’ve come out of nowhere.  How can we capitalize on this?

The Social Network Roadmap helps you to answer these questions and myriad similar ones, and the beta program is an opportunity to apply it in short-cycle engagements that deliver Web 2.0 adoption insights, so you know how to approach it.

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* “The slow boil” refers to cooking frogs.  If you toss a frog into boiling water, he’ll hop out.  However, if you place him in warm water and turn up the flame gradually, well, you get the idea.  Incidentally, I’ve never done this!