Over the last few months, as I talk to our cli­ents and pro­spects, all of whom are gen­er­ally within the SME and micro-business sec­tors; I’ve noticed that there is an increas­ing desire to become Web 2.0 enabled with their own websites.

Now I’m not say­ing that your aver­age small to medium sized busi­ness owner knows what Web 2.0 is and as a res­ult is spe­cific­ally ask­ing that we “Web 2.0 enable” their own web­site (if that’s the cor­rect phrasing).

Far from it, and why should they after all we’re into ‘geek ter­rit­ory’ here are we not?

How­ever such people are often enthu­si­astic Users of Web 2.0 tech­no­logy them­selves whether they real­ise it or not; and hav­ing seen the bene­fits of it, are thinking,“Wow I can see how that [fea­ture] would work really work with our own company’s web­site.” Which is where I, with my busi­ness, start to get get involved.

Okay I Give in! What Are You On About?

Well without get­ting into the tech­nic­al­it­ies of what Web 2.0 tech­no­logy actu­ally is (I sug­gest googling “Web 2.0″ to find some defin­i­tions includ­ing this good one from the O’Reilly site); what is Web 2.0 and how does it affect my needs on my company’s website?

The easi­est way is to define what Web 2.0 tech­no­logy is for we nor­mal folk, is to think of the User gen­er­ated con­tent avail­able through the likes of You­Tube, Zim­bio, NowPub­lic, and Blogs; think of the online inter­activ­ity and com­munit­ies that exists through sites such as Face­book and MySpace; think of social con­nectiv­ity through ser­vices such as Twit­ter and finally, think of how Users organ­ise and share their web pages through sites like StumbleUpon, Digg or Deli­cious.

If you think of these web ser­vices and par­ti­cip­ate in one or more of them, then you’re using Web 2.0 technology.

So What?

So how does such tech­no­logy start to creep into the requests that we get from busi­ness owners?

Well it’s quite simply the fact that people are using the social media sites such as Face­book and You­Tube more and more, and are see­ing the prac­tic­al­it­ies of Web 2.0 tech­no­lo­gies and as such are ask­ing us to mir­ror a par­tic­u­lar fea­ture from on one of these sites.on their own.

Such a request can be along the lines of “I really like how it’s pos­sible set-up an event and then invite people to it by email who can then respond with an R.S.V.P.” (as can be done on Face­book) or “We’d love the abil­ity to upload video files to our web­site from our cam­era, whereupon they are view­able on our web­site” (as can be done on YouTube).

Prior to Web 2.0, your aver­age web User wasn’t privy to such fea­tures and unless they were par­tic­u­larly focused on what they needed, were obli­vi­ous to the feas­ib­il­ity and ease of deploy­ing such fea­tures to their website.

Just goes to show you how a hand­ful of ‘big’ web­sites are start­ing to influ­ence the aver­age busi­ness web­site owner.

Static Web­sites are Dead

Dead as a Dodo

In my opin­ion it’s because of this trend, which shows no sign of slow­ing by the way; the typ­ical Users’ expect­a­tions of what the web is all about and what it can do for them is chan­ging rap­idly. People are expect­ing a level of inter­activ­ity, change­ab­il­ity and cross plat­form com­pat­ib­il­ity (browser, phone, smart phone) from the web­sites they visit, that has not been seen in the last 10 years of the web.

In a nut­shell, this means that com­pet­i­tion for traffic amongst all web­sites will become even fiercer and it’s only sites that can sat­isfy the expect­a­tions of their Users in the way that Web 2.0 cur­rently does, who will survive.

In terms of busi­ness web­sites this means that the typ­ical com­pany web­site which is typ­ic­ally noth­ing more than an online bro­chure, will need to change in order to sur­vive and to remain a for­mid­able con­trib­utor to a company’s mar­ket­ing mix.

So with this in mind, if you’re a busi­ness look­ing to develop its web pres­ence as a ser­i­ous mar­ket­ing or ser­vice deliv­ery chan­nel, appoint a com­pany who knows what the future land­scape will look like.

It’s an invest­ment worth making.

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