How many points of interaction can you give your site visitors? Plenty. That’s why ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ get so much attention. Potential online tactics for engaging your audience include blogging, polling, forums, rating a product, Facebook, Twitter, desktop widgets… it’s a long list, and getting longer. And implementation is getting easier, which is fortunate, because your visitors, as they catch on to the social media trend, tend to expect more.
Just the other day, YouTube became the second-largest search engine behind Google – bigger than Yahoo, MSN, or Ask. Yet even in Internet terms, YouTube is a young company. Its success results from providing an interaction point that, in hindsight, everybody wanted and therefore enthusiastically adopted. And let’s be clear: it’s also blurring the traditional distinction between content ‘publisher’ and content ‘consumer.’ Basically, it’s increasingly easy to be both.
To take one more example of social media, and how it connects consumers and business: Tehcnorati, originally a blog search engine, now connects blogs and social media sites with advertisers and indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time every day. Technorati likes to describe itself as 'placing brands at the center of a global conversation.'
Thanks to Web 2.0 innovations, online communities now arise with surprising speed. And while we can’t all be as successful as YouTube and Technorati, we can learn some lessons from this measurable phenomenon.
Click here to learn how Quicksilver integrated social media into a new consumer site for the Academy of General Dentistry.
