FreshNetworks Blog

You’ll remember a post last month showing a great picture of the Groundswell theory in picture format (see here). I was reading another interesting post today on the Groundswell blog.

Josh Bernoff looks at the ways that people can build buiness models for Web 2.0 and suggests that the most likely future successful models will be ones which make use of the technologies to help businesses with their objectives. Making reference to the Groundswell objectives, these include models that help organisations to:

• Listen - private communites that help organisations listen to their customers, or brand monitoring organisations (such as BuzzMetrics) organisations that monitor the buzz around a brand
• Talk - campaigns that use social media to talk to customers. This is the route that many PR firms are taking as they attempt to digitise their offering
• Energise - ratings and reviews increase exposure to and likelihood to purchase items from ecommerce sites - just look at the success of Amazon’s rating or the contribution TripAdvisor makes to Expedia’s sales
• Support - support forums and communities make it easier for customers to find the solution to their problem, are less costly than call centres and other ways of supporting customers
• Embrace - customers have great ideas and some great companies harness them, either through their own online research communities or through sites such as Innocentive that match those with problems to those with solutions

I think this is an interesting way to start to analyse and segment the activities that organisations are doing in the Web 2.0 space. I think, however, the picture might be more complex - with some solutions and services actually taking from a selection of these objectives. In fact, I think the greatest opportunity for Web 2.0 is to help brands have ongoing conversations with their customers - not just listening, but talking. With elements of supporting and embracing. And energising from time to time. Understanding how these objectives combine to support businesses will be where the real business models come from.