[Web 2.0: It's All About Me is part three in a series of blogs that will summarize a presentation I delivered at the Northwest Arkansas Marketing Summit on September 20th concerning using technology to grow your business.  Part one can be read here, and part two here.]

If Web 1.0 was characterized by the two words “content” and “commerce,” then Web 2.0 could be similarly defined by “personalization” and “relevancy.”

A couple of examples:

Google launches in an already crowded search engine market led by the well financed and rapidly growing Yahoo.  A look at the two search engines home pages quickly demonstrates that content is not what has propelled Google’s growth.  Rather than crowd ads all over their website and charge based upon impressions, Google delivers ads that are relevant and only charges when I click on them.  Companies that want to capture click-throughs for a particular searched term bid on what they will pay for that click and the ranking they want on the page.  Instead of watching their advertising revenue decrease as the value of an impression diminishes, Google saw their advertising revenue increase dramatically as companies were willing to pay more and more for a personal and relevant ad delivered at the right time to the right customer.  An added benefit, by delivering accurate and relevant results people began to talk about Google – a lot!  The search engine grew like a virus without the need of a large advertising budget.  Today, Google has created the ultimate brand, transitioning their name into a verb.  How often do you tell someone to “Google it”?

The second example is an ecommerce site that made it through the .com bust in spite of the dire predictions of their impending doom at the turn of the century:  Amazon.com.  Despite the fact that I have a growing list of online retailers from which I frequent, I continue to find myself purchasing online at Amazon.com – especially their staple, books.  Why?  First, because they know me and offer me books that I want and need to read even before I knew that I wanted them.  Second, because they trust their community to sell on their behalf.  I’ve often skipped books with low ratings that I thought I wanted and purchased books with high ratings that I didn’t even know I wanted.  Third, they use their data better than any other online retailer from which I shop.  Their recommendations are spot-on, their related items are also appropriate, and when I check out they make it quick and easy, without the need to type in information I’ve already given them before.

If you take a minute and think about some of the more popular sites on the Internet today, you’ll quickly see why personalization and relevancy are key components of Web 2.0 (MySpace, Blogs, Flickr, LinkedIn, You Tube, etc.).
 
The Internet continues to grow at a rapid pace with more than 1 billion users spending an average of 14 hours per week online (the same as television).  In spite of all that Web 2.0 has done to improve the relevancy and usefulness of the Internet, the web is still badly broken.  Behind closed doors companies are working on new technologies to revolutionize how the web integrates into our everyday life.  Might these new enhancements become known as Web 3.0?  I’ll discuss that in a posting soon.