I recently had the good fortune to be asked by one of my clients to develop a point of view and presentation on the implications of Web 2.0 for their business.  As part of the assignment, I reviewed hundreds of pages of analyst reports, industry presentations, industry pundit commentary and anything else I could get my hands on.  I also spent a fair amount of time on my browser experimenting with so-called social computing technologies like tagging, wikis, communities, blogs, RSS, Second Life and more.  I think the recent post on the B2B marketing blog Social Media Pundits Disconnect from B2B Marketing is right on.  The vast majority of the content and focus is on the consumer aspects of Web 2.0.  Further, marketing perspectives and advice from social media pundits focus on branding, traffic aggregation, and reach.  Ironically, this perspective is very 1.0.  This thinking is going to cause a lot of heartache and pain in the long run, since traffic is disaggregating and media is fragmenting.  Good luck planning mass reach campaigns - campaign overhead is going to balloon and reach is going to wane - a consumer branding nightmare at best.  New thinking and a different approach are needed.   

After winnowing down to the 5% of social media coverage relevant to B2B and exploring the multitude of technologies that have come to describe social computing, I've reached two relatively simple fundamental conclusions. 

1.) Web 2.0 is expectations for what constitutes a web experience.  Now, instead of flat hierarchical, static text pages with fancy graphic images; Internet users expect video hyper-navigation, a wide array of tools and technologies and knitting across and between sites, voices and applications to support exploration and experimentation.  What I call fleamarket or bazaar style interfaces with rich variety and interaction -- including blogs, posts, podcasts, and even videos from employees deep in the trenches of firms they buy products and services from -- all as part of their web experience.  Thus, we see a repeating pattern for the sociologic adoption of technology: consumers lead, businesses follow.  The primary difference between B2B and B2C Internet marketing adoption is the pace.  B2B is adopting more slowly, with the exception of the technology industry, which, as with the early days of the Internet (remember Usenet?) is moving down the fast lane of social computing.  The best example I've found of this is Microsoft Channel Nine, which I will continue to reverse engineer in subsequent posts.

2.) The second implication of Web 2.0 is the application of the technology itself to enable business processes and collaboration.  What's new here is the ability and expectation to extend collaboration and communication beyond the e-mail paradigm; and beyond company walls.  Major corporations have begun the struggle of grappling with permitting and trusting employees of various stripes and ranks to communicate electronically beyond company firewalls into the risky domain of the public Internet.  Again, the technology industry is far down this path.  Well ahead of other industries.  But other industries are following suit.  Companies are using wikis to generate useful tools for end users like customer support knowledge bases and even industry glossaries.  See Reuter's glossary of financial terms for an example.  See also the wikis available on Microsoft channel 9.  There is also a growing constellation of B2B blogs with different characteristics.  Another post, I plan to write in the future is a segmentation of the B2B blog landscape (the backlog keeps growing....).

As usual, some of the Web 2.0 technology is not living up to expectations, at least not yet.  A good example of this is RSS.  Adoption and uptake has been relatively slow.  For instance, press adoption of RSS as a content consumption vehicle for company press releases is very slow - even marginal.  This may be because habits are slow to change; or it may be because RSS readers are difficult to use and do not yet possess the rich functional capabilities to warrant investment in their configuration and use.  See the Tekgroup report on Online Pressroom adoption and interest - according to the survey only 10% of journalists see RSS as very important for receiving company news.  So much for the first B2B killer application of RSS (at least so little, so far).

I'll continue to cover Web 2.0 and its implications for B2B marketers and eBusiness in upcoming posts.  I will also continue to explore Web 2.0 itself for other intelligent and insightful commentary like that found on the B2B marketing blog, which I'm adding to my blog roll.  Thanks for reading - got to go.