MAKING a name for your business in a national market is never easy. It's even harder when you're a small start-up company based at Ballarat in regional Victoria.
Sometimes a lateral approach to the market can help - such as providing a free service to get your name out there and get potential paying customers hooked.
That small start-up, Imaging Associates, decided that a web 2.0 tool could help give them that edge. Imaging Associates provides a specialist service and software to help professional digital photographers calibrate their computer systems.
The company chose to use a swicki - a combination of search and wiki software - to build a community of interest (and potential customers) around its company website. The swicki software, developed by the New Zealand company Eurekster, enables web searching that produces only the targeted search results wanted by that specialist community.
The swicki search engine learns from the popularity of the links clicked by the software developers, multimedia designers, digital photographers and graphic artists who use them.
The swicki went live in September last year, and immediately doubled IA's site traffic. Since February, traffic to the IA site has increased by 10 per cent each month.
"It was a very good way that we could gain publicity for our site," says Imaging Associates' webmaster, Simon Reid. "We can provide a service by putting in some of our time to moderate the search engines that we've created, and in return it's gaining publicity for our site.
"We've definitely found a very positive response, in terms of learning about what people are looking for, and people discovering Imaging Associates."
The company has since built swickis for even more specific topics. Each requires maintenance of about one hour a week. The swickis are free for Imaging Associates to create, with Eurekster deriving revenue from ads on the swicki sites.
Swickis are among a clutch of technologies described under the collective tag of web 2.0. The term has many definitions, but is generally applied to web pages or applications that can be easily altered by users, rather than just being passively read.
The technology has also come to represent a spirit of free and open communication between or among companies and the users of their products and services. Hence, some web 2.0 technologies are also called social media technologies.
Blogs and wikis are the most common examples of web 2.0 technologies, but the label has been applied to many others, such as mash-ups, tagging, and virtual worlds.
The main focus of web 2.0 developers has been applications for consumers, such as the online task management service called Remember the Milk, or the parenting information service Minti. Some have been adopted by small businesses such as Imaging Associates, but to date few larger Australian businesses have plunged into the social media pool.
One exception is the not-for-profit World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Its former manager of online communications, Grant Young, says the WWF is becoming a convert to web 2.0 technologies, having recently created its first organisational blog focused on what people can do to reduce their environmental footprint, using software from US company WordPress.
The WWF has also set up a travel diary blog for a staff member travelling to Macquarie Island, using software from another US supplier, Blogger, which is owned by Google. The WWF communications team is using an internal wiki for sharing information within its marketing team, and is looking to expand that across the organisation.
Mr Young, who is now working at digital media consultancy Digital Eskimo, says there is much interest in the use of these social media technologies throughout the WWF globally. "We definitely see it as an opportunity to meet people where they are at, rather than constantly trying to drag people to where we are," Mr Young says. "Our website is for anybody to find, but quite often they may not think of WWF as an organisation that is working in a particular area. So we go to where they would be looking. And everything from search engine optimisation to web 2.0 tools are methods of doing that."
WWF is also a heavy user of email and manages this using the Campaign Monitor online service from Australian developer FreshView. As a small software developer, FreshView is a heavy user of web 2.0 technology, with an active corporate blog.
Mr Young says he has appreciated having close access to the product's developers through the blog, as they have been highly responsive to support requests. Several of Mr Young's suggestions have since been incorporated into FreshView products.
"Their blog has been fantastic - particularly for us when we were redeveloping our newsletter," Mr Young says. "The blog has a gallery that promotes their customers' emails, and it was a really rich way for us to get an idea about what other people were doing and how they were doing it."
Adopting the web 2.0 ethos has paid benefits for FreshView, a company that employs only five people and spends next to nothing on marketing. Co-founder David Greiner says the company has created a very active community, allowing it to sign up 25,000 registered customers including Apple and eBay.
"We relied on word of mouth and blogs and message boards and online communities to get the word out," Mr Greiner says.
Whether companies such as Imaging Associates and WWF will prove to be early adopters of a mainstream trend is still unknown.
According to social technologies researcher Ross Dawson, some information-intensive organisations, including law firms and banks, are the most active in investigating the benefits of web 2.0 technology, as an extension of ongoing knowledge management developments.
"Web 2.0 in the enterprise is about enabling people to better find information and work with it," Mr Dawson says. "There are some sweet spots, which are very natural applications for blogs and wikis where it makes a lot of sense. And these are projects, competitive intelligence, and many other things where you are trying to get broad information and input on a specific topic."
In the case of competitive intelligence, for instance, a wiki can be set up to allow employees to input information they may have learnt about their organisation's competitors, and rely on their colleagues to collaborate or correct their entries. The same can be true of corporate blogs.
"There's a lot of cynicism around whether it is worth doing or not, but done well, in the right sort of organisation, it is a way to get greater visibility and awareness of capabilities across the organisation."
Mr Dawson also believes that blogs and wikis can become an alternative to email.
"Email as a communication platform is experiencing breakdown because people have too many emails. If you can start to shift activity outside of email, that's enormously valuable and more effective and more productive."
According to Martin Wells, the chief executive officer of the Australian web 2.0 software developer Tangler, many large corporations are limiting their use of web 2.0 tools to just another tool for marketing, as they are struggling with losing control of their communications.
"They don't see this as really opening a channel of conversation for users, or tapping in to the creativity and passions of users and how loyal they are," Mr Wells says. "They just see this as another medium. Some 2.0 technologies will get into enterprises this year, but I don't think the actual 2.0 spirit that's behind it. It will take a number of years before that is taken advantage of by the enterprise."
Tangler's product, which is still in testing, is a web-based service for enabling website visitors to to communicate with each other. Hence, a company can quickly create a community from its users and learn from their discussions.
However, according to Tangler's marketing director Mick Liubinskas, these benefits can be swamped by concerns over the increasing level of regulation under which companies find themselves working, and the risk-averse legal perspective this engenders. Hence, they stick with traditional methods of reaching consumers, even though consumer audiences are fragmenting, thanks in part to blogs and podcasts.
"So they keep chasing the users wherever they go, and the users are running away because they are sick of the corporates yelling at them," Mr Liubinskas says. "So from a marketing perspective there is going to be a continued mess for a while."
Consumer goods manufacturer Kimberly-Clark is another to test some of the concepts around web 2.0. The company has made extensive use of its website to solicit feedback relating to its Huggies disposable nappies. The company has used online forums since 2002, which now include 19,000 members in Australia and New Zealand.
According to Lisa Liaros, senior brand manager for Huggies, , the forum was established to give parents a form of communication and support with each other that was available at any time.
"It is a safe space where any question can be asked and answered by other parents and carers," Ms Liaros says. "We often ask mums their thoughts on new products and ideas and have recruited mums to test and trial products as needed.
Ms Liaros says that the parenting forums have become an integral part of Huggies' marketing mix, with more than 600,000 posts since it was launched, and the company's experts are now receiving more than 100 questions a month.
"Through the forum, Huggies is able to build a strong relationship with parents that hopefully builds loyalty to Huggies products. "The options for communication and interaction that web 2.0 technologies present are widening rapidly. The concept of virtual worlds, in particular, shot to prominence in the past six months. Australian companies such as Telstra, the ABC and web technology company Hyro have opened sites within the Second Life virtual environment, providing a new avenue for interacting with users, business partners or even potential recruits, although most of these efforts are experimental, rather than commercial.
Sydney-based Yoick is currently testing its virtual world technology, dubbed Outback Online, which allows an organisation to create its own virtual environment, or outback. These outbacks utilise peer-to-peer technology developed by the IT research organisation NICTA to overcome problems experienced in Second Life in terms of the number of users it can support in one place at one time.
According to Yoick's chief executive officer, Randal Leeb-du Toit, there is strong demand from companies to showcase or test goods or services in a virtual environment.
"(Outback Online) came out of extensive discussions with industry, so we knew what they didn't want, and as a result could work out what they would want," Mr Leeb-du Toit says.
Similarly, Australian start-up VastPark is developing a three-dimensional content portal and toolset. The company is aiming to become an online portal for members of the 3-D industry to promote its work, but in the longer term will offer a platform for creating 3-D showrooms or classrooms. A multi-user version of VastPark will be released soon.
VastPark's chief executive officer Bruce Joy says the goal is to create an environment where someone can undertake a very small development and build it into a larger community.
NEXT SPEAK
� Blog - an easy-to-use web publishing tool - e.g. TypePad, Blogger.com
� Mash-up - where different technologies are blended to manipulate and display information - e.g. Google Maps
� Social network - tools for managing communications between people of related interests - e.g. LinkedIn
� Swicki - a search engine tailored to a community of interest -e.g. Eurekster
� Tagging - where users help to organise sets of information -e.g. Del.icio.us
� Wiki - a site that can be edited by visitors - e.g. Wikipedia
� Virtual world - an online three-dimensional virtual environment - e.g. Second Life.
MyCyberTwin
ONE OF the problems with social media technologies is that companies need new systems to handle and benefit from the increased level of communication.
Local start-up MyCyberTwin is developing a web-based technology platform that can respond on behalf of a person or an organisation even if they are not actually online at the time. Known as a CyberTwin, the user trains the software with basic question-and-answer routines.
MyCyberTwin's chief executive officer, Liesl Capper, says many websites are very one-dimensional "brochure-ware", and force users to navigate large amounts of information.
As a consumer product, CyberTwin gives users a personality online at any hour of the day. But the CyberTwin can also be trained to respond on behalf of a company, handling routine queries and forming a new channel for communication with customers.
"You can't do this with staff - there are just not enough. From a brick-and-mortar perspective it can serve as a representative of your company that chats and finds out about people," Ms Capper says.
Ms Capper says normally a company will train representatives to ask or answer questions such as how the consumer found out about the company, or what products they are interested in. This function can easily be taken over by the trained software agent.
Ms Capper says she consulted extensively with businesses, including major media companies, while developing MyCyberTwin, and is already working with the owner of a popular web dating site to give its members more options for handling inquiries.
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