Web 2.0 meets Web 1.0
I moderated a fantastic panel last night for the local SIM Chapter I’m a member of. As a Board member in charge of Programming, I’m always very nervous come meeting night. After four years of scheduling presenters, the one lesson I’ve learned is no amount of planning is sufficient to even guess how the program will be received. Having a panel presentation also adds to the degree of difficulty. Given some past bad experiences with moderators, I decided to moderate the panel myself.
I’m happy to say the panel was a tremendous success. The topic was “Using Web 2.0 to Drive Top-line Growth.” I leveraged my personal network for some great recommendations of panelists and ended up with Laura Bennett, President and Co-Founder of Embrace Pet Insurance; Kristy van Auken, SVP of Marketing and Communications for Akron Canton Airport; and David Toth, President and Co-Founder of Worksmart eMarketing, a consulting firm helping their clients understand and leverage social media and Web 2.0 mindsets.
For anyone looking for tips on putting together a successful panel, one of the keys to success last night was balance. Sure, all our presenters were knowledgeable about the subject matter. But what I heard after the event from our members was that there was great balance between the presenters. From strategy to metrics to specific campaigns, there was a minimum of overlap between the speakers. Everyone brought a different perspective which added greatly to the panel.
Leveraging Web 2.0 to drive growth is a hot topic these days. What was interesting about last night was the audience questions as an indicator of where certain industries are and what is holding them up from embracing these new channels to market. With our panel representing Web 2.0, a large portion of the audience was still Web 1.0 focused. Our group has a diverse mix of companies, but generally they reflect our regional economy fairly well: B2B manufacturing and financial primarily, with some education and service companies. While education and services have tended to embrace these new tools, manufacturing and finance still have lots of questions.
The discussions, and questions, were wide-ranging. A few main points rose to the top that I thought you might be interested in.
What’s holding you back?
A main theme from the panelists was there being no reason not to try these new approaches. The tools are for the most part free and with the potential growth gains, there really is no reason not to at least dip your toe in the water.
Laura, from Embrace, talked about how she started a blog roughly a year before she even had product to sell. The blog wasn’t even focused on her product, but by the time she had her company up and running she had a relationship with a community ready, willing and able to buy. In fact, I believe I heard her say due to her blog, she was able to convert blog readers into customers on Day 1 of her product launch.
Our Web 1.0 crowd was interested, but responded with…
Show me the money!
We had a lot of questions around how to tie Web 2.0 efforts to actual conversions or sales. While David of Worksmart did a great job talking through metrics tracking, and Kristy from Akron Canton Airport was able to directly tie their efforts to greatly increased web traffic and blog subscriptions, there still is a sense that it is hard to directly tie social networking campaigns to increased revenue.
Let’s be honest though - many of us say the same about our current marketing dollars. How many of us can directly track our ad expense for example to general sales increases? Sure we can make some general before and after statements, but it can be very hard to make that connection.
So while there is still some hesitancy to dive in the 2.0 pool, in talking with the crowd afterwards, the point that stuck with them was…
Opportunity cost
File this one under the old adage “Lead, Follow or get out of the way.” I think it was David who made the observation that while it may be hard to show direct benefits to management, the investment is also very low. The tools are online and generally free, and your only “cost” is the indirect labor cost for your employees who are participating. David’s point is that if you aren’t willing to start leveraging Web 2.0, you can bet your competitors are, or are at least thinking about it. So maybe the more appropriate way to be thinking about it, at least for industries less prone to be early adopters, is as the opportunity cost of not participating.
From my post-panel discussions, this is the point that really hit home. Can you really afford to not take into consideration 120 million Facebook subscribers, 3 billion images on Flickr or the nearly 79 million users who made over 3 billion video views on YouTube in January 2008 alone. With those kinds of numbers, surely there is a business model that could justify some indirect expense allocation for some exploratory initiatives.
Wrapping Up
So in summary - great panel and great discussions. I think we got some people thinking. At the end of the panel I asked each panelist to throw out one thing everyone in the room should consider doing tomorrow at work with respect to Web 2.0. The general consensus was that even if you still had questions, you need to “dip your toe in the water” and see what the fuss is all about. The opportunity is just too big.
Over to the the readers. Where does your company stand with Web 2.0? Any exciting project or results you can share with us? If you’re not doing anything, what’s holding your back?
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4 Responses to “Web 2.0 meets Web 1.0”
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David,
Awesome recap of the event from yesterday. I wish I could have attended. I couldn’t agree more with the comment about the opportunity cost. You need to leverage Web 2.0 in order to compete, and as our investment on the front end goes lower and lower, the ROI% increases exponentially!
I hope we can be involved with future events as well!
Kind regards,
-Brad
Brad,
Thanks for the comments. The event came off great. I got a little worried about halfway through the panel when I looked out at the audience and saw a few blank stares. What I took for disinterest I think were actually deers in headlights. It was a huge dose of “new” for a lot of folks. Talking to people afterwards, they all greatly appreciated the business focus all three panelists brought to the topic to mellow out what they’ve only heard from their teenage children.
David,
Thanks for the invite to the event. It was a pleasure to attend and speak with both Kristie and Laura. I hope we can so something similar again in the future.
David,
This post was very thought provoking for me. As an accounting firm we are not on the bleeding edge and I think your discussion provided food for thought for me and the firm.
I also forwarded this to a couple of friends that I felt could benefit from the discussion.
Thanks.