ON MARKETING AND PROMOTING WEB 2.0 SERVICES

RISING WITH THE TIDE

Yahoo! seems to be promoting it's Web 2.0 social tagging service, which recently won the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award for tagging services (see my earlier post here).  From the Yahoo! Search Blog (via John Battelle)

"Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. ...
For bloggers and publishers, it's a great way to distribute content to a larger community of connected users and make your pages instantly searchable on Yahoo! Just copy and paste this code into your blog templates anywhere and everywhere you want the button to appear on your pages."

John Battelle in his post says he's not going to use the feature, because

"Well, it's too...focused on one place. I dunno, but I want something else. Something non-denominational."

This sentiment is echoed by commentator Mike to his post, who wisely adds:

"...we are living in a Yahoogle world anyway."

I don't have a problem whether the feature is from Yahoogle or a start up.  I just want it to be easy to implement, and most importantly, be truly useful.

I do like the "save my web" button idea, and have implemented it on this web site (see the side bar).

But Yahoo! needs to implement it with more instructions on how to effectively use it and implement it on one's site.  The script they provide today merely puts the button in your side bar (I'm a Typepad user), but NOT at the end of every post, which is where it needs to be for user convenience.  Yet, there is no indication on how to do that.

Furthermore, when you click on the "Save to My Web" button the user is taken to a log-in page.  No explanation as to what "MyWeb" is or how it may be useful for people who are not early adopters and haven't already signed onto the service.  At the very least, they should incorporate this page into the presentation.

All Web 2.0 companies, large and small, need to realize that the battle going forward is for the mainstream user (see my earlier post titled "On mainstream users coping with Web 2.0).  It means don't assume your users know what all this stuff is, or know how to use it, or are inclined in the slightest to take the time to learn it.

Make it as easy as possible to implement, even if it means doing the extra engineering work, and/or doing business deals with other companies or competitors.

And then, after you've worked non-stop for days to perfect your technology marvel, WRITE a good instruction manual/page/wizard or whatever, to help mainstream users figure out why this is the coolest next thing they need to figure out and use.

You've got to market it, promote it, sell it.  And as you innovate on the product/service, re-market it again.  Show users the multiple ways it can be used.  And put processes in place that allow you to keep doing it for as long as you offer the product/service.

Remember Procter and Gamble, founded in the nineteenth century, and one of the most experienced companies in global consumer marketing, still spends millions of dollars showing customers how to best use Tide detergent to do your laundry, even though they launched the product in 1946.

One of the company's earliest and most successful products, Ivory soap, was introduced in the 1880s and marketed in thirty different versions by the 1890s.

The Googles and Yahoo!s of the world continue to enjoy plenty of free media attention given the novelty of Web 1.0 in the last decade and Web 2.0 today.  Each in their early years enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity and close scrutiny by the media and early adopters on every new product or service, real or imagined.

While there's no reason to expect the media interest to wane over the novelty and coolness of web services, at some point consumer internet companies are going to have to do a lot more of the heavy lifting of marketing and promotion.

This is especially true when a Yahoo! of today offers literally hundreds of various services, and a Google is ramping fast its roster of services from dozens to match.

We're entering a world where the consumer is going to be barraged by Web x.0 services, by hundreds of companies, with thousands of new web services EVERY SINGLE YEAR for decades to come.

Most will fail, but some will stick...and become as indispensable as detergent.  But it's going to take a heck of a lot more than just technical innovation, brilliant as it may be.

The arguments of whether Yahoo!, Google and its ilk are media or technology companies are way beyond the point in this second decade of internet commercialization. 

They're technology driven consumer services companies, much as P&G is still a formidable consumer products company. And the smartest ones will figure out how to leverage the networking powers of technology to market themselves to the top for decades to come.

Oh, and if you want an example of a technology company that totally gets this already?  Look no further than Steve Job's Apple, whose Macs and iPods are the Ivory and Tide of our era, in global mind share and/or market share.

Comments

[Alex Moskalyuk]

"The script they provide today merely puts the button in your side bar (I'm a Typepad user), but NOT at the end of every post, which is where it needs to be for user convenience."

I am not a regular user of Typepad, but is there such thing as Comments template or Single Post template? By default the MyWeb JavaScript pulls a URL currently in the browser window, so for user to bookmark a single post, they have to be reading it in single post view. Yahoo! cannot control where and how you insert their code, so my guess is - the location of the button has something to do with Typepad templates.

[Jeffrey McManus]

Let me get this straight. Web 2.0 means that users should pick up new products without having to learn them? That makes no sense to me.