Resurgence in Online Community due to Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is here and there are more and more organizations moving forward with launching online communities to build interactions with their site visitors. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that many of these communities are being launched with a suite of features, but without proper outreach and advertising. This makes them virtually invisible except to the most loyal fans. We’ve seen several communities launch recently which have no traffic and no action other than easily recognized employee seed posts. When searching for information on these organizations’ and their product and services, there are no listing of their communities (from either organic search or PPC). Worse, many of these new communities are feature rich but seemly without a true purpose. Too many offerings dilute your traffic and reduce the organizational effectiveness of your community.

Several of our roundtable members are embarking on upgrading their sites to the illusive Web 2.0 standards. What is encouraging to see with these companies is that they are building upon what they’ve learned from their work with communities and interactive features. Sites such as Cisco.com, SAP.com, and others understand that best practices for interacting with your visitors must be baked into the process. The idea of Web 2.0 is to meet your visitors needs through interactions and collaboration, not just to offer the latest and greatest features. It’s not just about adding blogs or podcasts, but finding out what your visitors really want through careful analysis of metrics, visit patterns, multi-variate A/B testing of pages, and TALKING TO YOUR VISITORS to find out what they really use your site for and what they want!

You’ll only get to Web 2.0 if you truly meet your visitor needs. Forget cool, go for what your visitors need and with what will provide your organization with the best results. Want to discuss how to do this? Contact us for a free consultation about using interactive features to build significant results for your organization.

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