Open Yourself Up to Web 2.0 | BTalk Australia

By Phil Dobbie | July 30, 2008

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Web 2.0 allows consumers to say what they think about your company. On today’s BTalk Australia Simon Van Wyck, a founding partner of Hothouse Interactive, tells Phil Dobbie that marketers should see this as an opportunity and not something to be afraid of.

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Today’s Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie. Today on BTalk Australia, Web 2.0. It’s been a buzz term for a while now, but do we really know what it is? Actually I think BNET’s probably a pretty good example of a Web 2.0 site, but that’s me just sucking up to the boss. For a more independent view, here’s Simon Van Wyck, who’s the founding partner of online marketing and solutions company Hothouse Interactive. Simon, if I was looking for that elevator pitch, that 30-second explanation of what Web 2.0 is all about, what would you say?

Simon Van Wyck: Well, I’m going to take it a little bit longer to explain, only because I think the history of the term is quite interesting.

Dobbie: Right. I’ll put the lift on the hold button in that case.

Van Wyck: The history of the term came from a guy called Tim O’Reilly who was running a conference in the US and he wanted to differentiate that conference from previous conferences and he called it a Web 2.0 conference. And what Tim meant by Web 2.0 was the internet as a platform and what he meant further to that was the fact that you can now and you will increasingly, be able to access the internet and internet services from anywhere, using any device.

Dobbie: Right.

Van Wyck: And that’s really what he meant. And we’re seeing that now as people start to buy iPhones and people who previously had BlackBerry were using the web to get their email, but once you’ve got an iPhone you can use the internet to look at websites and get your email, and it’s about the internet becoming ubiquitous, it’s about the internet being available from anywhere and the other thing, it’s becomes synonymous with the ability to engage directly with the internet. So user generated content and things like that are a feature of Web 2.0.

Dobbie: And that’s because we have this ability to access it and involve it more in our lives I guess?

Van Wyck: That’s right yes, the platforms are more cleverer than they’ve been and we are able to you know, sit at a computer at night and go well I’ve got an opinion on that article and I’m going to give you that opinion and well it’s also the web is a platform because, if you’ve got a digital camera, you may well want to post your images up on a website so you can share them with your friends and relatives. So then those things are part of the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Dobbie: So how does this effect business? I mean, it lends itself to media and entertainment sites because you know, they’re always providing new content and stuff for people to talk about. Does it lend itself as well to corporations who, most of whom, have what you’d call brochure ware sites because you know, they don’t generate content on a daily basis?

Van Wyck: Look, I think the challenges for organisations are now that they are going to have to generate content on an ongoing basis. And an easy way to do it is to create a company blog and there are a number of big companies now experimenting with the challenges of blogging and creating a blog that’s ongoing, interesting and engaging. Because, the issue we’ve got now, I saw somewhere recently that 90 pecent of business research starts on the internet. And so it really doesn’t matter what business you’re looking for or what kind of service you’re looking for, you start on the internet and most often Google is your homepage. You go to Google or Yahoo, to a lesser extent, and you type in you know, find me something and basically your opinion of an industry or your understanding of an industry or a category is entirely shaped what comes up on those first two screens.

Dobbie: But looking at blogs, that’s fine if you’re in a dynamic and exciting industry where something is always new. If you sell planks of wood for example.

Van Wyck: Yes.

Dobbie: If you’re timber merchant, can you find enough to talk about to produce something on a regular basis, to produce a blog? I mean, it probably isn’t applicable for every industry is it?

Van Wyck: No. Look I agree. It’s definitely not applicable to every industry and there’s some people that just don’t warrant the attention. But look, blogs can be used in a whole lot of ways. Blogs can be used to communicate internally to staff members, they can be used to communicate to your stakeholders, they can be used to communicate to distributors. The use of wikis now is quite well established in many organisations rather than publish a lengthy operations manual. People will put their operations manual in the wiki and because we all know that, I mean, when last did you see a paper-based operations manual that was up-to-date? They are difficult to update and they’re expensive. If you put it in a wiki and there are changes to the processes and people go in and modify the wiki, you’ve got some chance of keeping your operations manual up-to-date. Now that could be classed as a Web 2 application and most people would say that’s Web 2. So there are applications like that that are pertinent to almost any organisation. I mean, we are a small to medium-sized organisation. We run all of our internal manuals on a wiki.

Dobbie: So when you’re exposing yourself to the greater, wider world and you’re encouraging customer feedback, that strikes me as a dangerous thing. I mean it’s a bit akin to turning a call centre into a radio talkback show, where you hear everyone else’s complaints and complaints can seem to steamroll. You as a business are going to lose control if you open yourself up in that way aren’t you?

Van Wyck: Yes but look, I mean, companies are nervous of this and big companies are particularly nervous, but if someone doesn’t like your product or you’ve doubted someone, well they’re telling their friends about it anyway and the internet’s just made it easier. I would have thought that any large organisation would want to know that something they were doing was really annoying their customers. And aren’t they better off knowing it than not knowing it? Because if you think about it, the marketing people in very big organisations eventually get so distanced from their customers that it’s quite difficult to know what’s really going on. And if you’ve got that direct feedback, well you’ve actually got some chance of addressing it. So I’m not so sure. Look, I think that the answer is on dodgy companies with dodgy practices and certainly there are plenty of opportunity for people to promote those things on the internet and that certainly does get out of control, but for good companies it’s a fabulous thing.

Dobbie: So you think an element of it is organisations just feeling uncomfortable. I can imagine it’s often the marketing person who’s going to be saying hey look, we don’t want to lose that control of our brand. But I think what you’re saying is, look hey, it’s the reality, get used to it. This is what people are saying about your products.

Van Wyck: Yeah look and there’s an example that goes back way before Web 2 even became a buzz word which was Subaru in the US that thought that people bought Subaru’s as manuals, but actually it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The company thought people wanted manual’s because they were a driver’s car, so they made more manuals and then people came into dealers and said I want an automatic and they said well we have to order one, but we can give you a manual now. And so people took a manual and it became self-fulfilling and they had a configurator on their website that showed them that people were actually more likely to configure an automatic than a manual and that actually changed the way they thought about their marketing. And surely that’s a good thing.

Dobbie: So many larger corporations or mid-sized businesses in Australia are really embracing Web 2.0 or are a lot of people still shy of it because of this fear of losing control?

Van Wyck: Look, I think internally there are lots of companies using it because they’re using wikis and things like that to run the internet. I think in terms of engagement with customers, it’s still relatively new for lots of organisations because they’re still struggling with Web 1 and making that work properly for themselves and changing their processes around, and there are risks and concerns about Web 2. So I don’t think it’s widespread, but certainly I know some of the banks are starting to publish blogs and there’s a lot more user-generated content around corporate websites these days.

Dobbie: Can it be done badly? I guess if you’re going to do it you’ve got to go all the way haven’t you? You can police it too heavily and then everyone just sees it as being a bias, one-sided presentation.

Van Wyck: Yeah look and the danger is when that happens, the famous example is General Motors that had this idea for one of their SUV’s that they’d run the ad online and you could take components of the ad and resplice them and then present them as your own ad and post them up on their website. And what happened was people created ads around this SUV, but they created ads around the fact that it was a gas guzzling monster that really had no place in the world anymore. And it was very embarrassing to the organisation and they pulled it down very quickly. So it can, but look the other side of that was that could so easily have been managed and they could so easily have got around all of those issues. They just try to maintain control over something that they had no control over.

Dobbie: Yeah well they were probably asking for it.

Van Wyck: They were asking for it. No question.

Dobbie: Now is it costly? I mean, you’re saying a lot of businesses are having difficulty, even just coming to terms with the web generally, to then move onto Web 2.0. Is it costly to implement a good Web 2.0 site for your corporation?

Van Wyck: No. Look, I think if anything has happened it’s actually brought the costs down. Because there are a lot of frameworks out there that already exist and it’s just a matter of re-deploying those frameworks for your own company and your own brand. I mean, you can put a corporate licence for blogging software is around $200,000 for an incredibly sophisticated platform. If you’re a smaller company you can use that same software for way less than that. But if you’re a big organisation who wants to do a big blog and have the richest functionalities, you can buy the licence for around $250,000 and build that blog for around about $20,000.

Dobbie: But I imagine the biggest cost is actually people isn’t it? You’re going to have to have more people working day to day on your website to generate that content and keep it fresh and interesting.

Van Wyck: Yeah, I think that’s true. But look it’s been very successful. I mean, the Telstra Organization that run a very big and successful blog and their blog now gets more traffic than the financial reviews. So Telstra have used their blog as a way to talk to their customers and tell them what’s coming up and they publish all their press releases on their blog before they’ll send them out to the newspapers. So corporate companies are using these things in quite innovative ways.

Dobbie: That’s Now We’re Talking, the Telstra site yeah? Which they’ve taken away from their main site, which is probably a good idea isn’t it? That they’ve got a blog which is separate. So they’ve kept the corporate site where you can still find product information but their discussion site is the Now We’re Talking site.

Van Wyck: Yes, that’s right.

Dobbie: Which is probably a good idea to move as a step process, to develop something separately to your main site. Would you agree?

Van Wyck: Look, I think it depends on the product and there are a lot of products where I mean, I haven’t seen it yet so I’m making up the example but, if you were selling digital cameras, I think there’d be a lot of reason to say, here’s our digital camera and here is the opportunity for people using that digital camera to post their photos and their reviews and talk about it and get help from other people with the camera. I think the category where the discussion and the use of their technology is so connected to the actual product, that you’d want those things to live together. But others like you’re right, in Telstra, they want those discussions to happen somewhere else because they actually don’t add to the value for someone you know, trying to find a product.

Dobbie: I think a lot of it’s all about humanising your business isn’t it? I think it’s an opportunity for cold, remote brand all of a sudden to become a brand that’s associated with human beings.

Van Wyck: Well I bet with Microsoft strategy when they let loose people like Robert Scoble and the Australian guy, Franco Rigo, they wanted to put a more human face on that organisation and they turned those guys into bloggers and it was an incredibly successful strategy for them and they created two people who’ve become sort of Web 2 celebrities as a result because they’ve got a big following.

Dobbie: Right, absolutely. A Web 2 celebrity. I’ll tell you what, it’ll happen to me one day as well. Thanks very much for your time today Simon.

Van Wyck: OK, thanks Phil.