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I'm a business to business marketer. All the Web 2 stuff looks like it's for consumers. Any good examples from b2b?

In healthcare we want to use social networking to talk about pharma products but it's a tricky area because of the risk of consumers attacking our company. What are the things we have to do to get it right?

We're thinking about putting communities onto our site (we're a consumer magazine), we have the technology for it but I'm not sure about how much time it will take our guy to edit. Is it a full time role or just an hour or two a week? What do they do and how do they do this? Any advice would be handy!

second life: hype or serious?

SECOND LIFE

Thanks Caroline, yep, this is a taxing one for me. Will virtual reality be huge? Sure. Will there only be one space? Nope. Will we all be earning Lindon dollars in ten years time - I can't see it. Beneath the hype Second Life's managed to show that VR is possible on a grand scale, but there's a sense that some of these technologies are looking for a business solution. I think of it like the 1960s and motor cars in the UK: an era when people like my parents use to 'go for a drive'. Back in the 80s William Gibson gave us Neuromancer, a cracking sci-fi adventure set in what he coined as being 'cyberspace'. Now that these environments are going mainstream you can be sure that the first few will hit the headlines, but it will be those with the real social and business benefits that act as the long term winners. I guess this makes me a brand-agnostic in the battle of the virtual realities.

B2B?

Great question Dave, yep: there are loads more sexy examples right now in B2C because more money went in earlier. But Gamespot, Nature, Doctors.net are all providing some nice examples of business to business case studies. And there's a lot more on the way (we know because we've been training many of the business publishers who are creating them!). Think of it more as an opportunity to leap into ahead of the pack; but do review the consumer examples to see what you could apply in your space.

STAFFING RESOURCES FOR COMMUNITIES?

Susan, you've raised one of the areas that is so often overlooked and really needs a heap of attention early on. Communities sometimes just ignite themselves, but more often than not they'll need some real hard work from you and your team. First up: don't fall into the trap of thinking it's about the technology – getting the technology built or buying it in is the START and not the finish of your work. There's a big need in encouraging involvement, keeping discussions on topic and dealing with the stuff that goes astray. This is about individual people: unpredictable, creative, messy and fantastic – all rolled into one. They might do what you expect, or they might do something so completely different you don't even have a way to reach. I find it handy to think of a community a bit like a successful dinner party: people know why they're coming, the host gets the conversation going and then steps back, providing some good food, dealing with any unruly guests and generally making sure that everything goes well. After a few dinner parties with the same people they'll not need much help because a bunch of social conventions will kick in and they'll start to look after themselves much of the time. The challenge for you as the community's manager is to make sure you have the resource you need to do this properly. It's toughest at the start because you really have to work hard to get that momentum; finding the guests for dinner, persuading you're a great chef, finding times for them to come over… I'm sure you get the idea. While there are a few companies emerging in this space, my hunch is that you'll want to take quite tight managerial control of the first steps your community takes. It's classic product development work and by listening closely to your audience you'll gain some fantastic insights into the business.

I might just be an old sceptic, and I've been teaching marketing for long enough, but do audiences really want to engage?

CUSTOMERS MIGHT NOT WANT TO ENGAGE?

Sadly it's true. For all the wonders of Web 2.0, your customers might not want to comment, post, debate, blog, chat or podcast, and all of the ideas and models that we see in online marketing need to be put through a clear reality check: what's in it for them? Why should someone spend ten minutes of their time taking part? If there isn't an answer then there's isn't going to be much participation, and certainly not much of value.

It's easy to get carried away with the new technologies. Some web developers seem like kids in the candy store, but it's also easy to dismiss the new tools too easily. Give people what they need and they'll readily respond. In the world of user generated content, think about what is motivating the users. Get the value equation right and something amazing can happen: discussion. 'Users' suddenly become 'people' again, and those people begin that wonderfully human, natural and unpredictable process of conversation. And that's where it gets interesting for publishers and web marketers.

If those conversations are on a clear topic and contain material that's perceived as valuable, then you're on to a winner. The format could be raw information, the answers to other people's questions, something thought provoking, or posts that are rich and entertaining – it will vary with the community and the nature of the discussion, but this is where the value is. For every one person who posts, a dozen or more may be reading. As posts build up, over time their value grows rather than weakens. Succeed in capturing your community's imagination and there's an asset that will start to pull audiences back in time and time again. Simultaneously this user generated content is helping drive search engine optimisation (think of the keyword density!), viral marketing (you now have brand advocates passing on news of your site to their friends), and a resource that can become self perpetuating.

I'm a micro-business - a career planner – social networks and blogs sound great, but how could I get this to work for me?

Zoë Streeter, MyPerfectlife.co.uk

SHOULD MICRO-BUSINESSES BLOG?

Yes, yes, and yes again! There's probably more argument for the sole trader to blog than any other type of firm. It's fast, simple, valuable, and introduces you as the face of your company, the person your prospective clients will be working with. Okay, so it may take some practice to get into the swing of it, and you may even need a little extra support from friends or family when it comes to developing your, but it's a phenomenally powerful tool and one every sole trader should explore.

It also gets sole traders over one of their biggest problems: small businesses just don't scale well - let's face it, when the chief executive is also the chief envelope-stuffer, bookkeeper and salesman, there's a lot competing for every hour of your day. Classic marketing is typically campaign driven: a burst of energy to produce marketing messages that are distributed and then lost. This perishability of classic marketing always struck me as a massive waste; yet not so in blogging. Perishability gets replaced with permanence. Your marketing builds over time into layers rather than replacing what went before. And a weblog let's you scale; always being there even when you can't actually be there.

For a sole trader like Zoë Streeter's 'Zoetrope Career Planning' consultancy, a blog could work like a magazine column, packaging up bite-sized chunks of information from recruitment to career development, giving enough information to deliver value, but holding back from publishing everything. This replaces the idea of small corporate websites as being the brochure-ware of the late nineties, with sites as a reference point of real value. Think through the audience needs and you may find your content plan already written for you. If you're struggling then try this little exercise:

1. Quickly list the top ten things your typical customers want to know. Give yourself only 30 seconds so you're forced to take your instinctive response.

2. Look at the list and rank them: which are the most important, which are the least?

3. Now draw a line through the middle and focus on the top five

4. Can any of the really big questions be broken down into two or three parts?

5. Is there an order or sequencing in the topics that makes sense? If there is then juggle the list around

...now you have your editorial plan. Aim for one a fortnight and you have the next three month's topics lined up

In terms of what makes for good copy, enough has been written about column writing to fill a thousand magazine columns, and that's as good a starting point as any. Read other blogs, rough-out your ideas, practice your writing and develop your style. It's time to be bold and passionate; not staid or corporate.

Then think about images that enhance your writing. What would add value, and how? Demonstrating products may seem easy, but getting great photographs takes time and effort so look for strong images that you can use elsewhere in your marketing.

If you need more help in developing your blogs then ask us about our Online Editorial Academies. We designed these originally for magazine teams who found they were having to write for the web, but as soon as you create a site you too become a publisher and the extra training might be just what you need.

You've been showing examples of companies blogging, but how can companies really do this? Blogs are meant to be free and open, but companies all have their own agendas.

CAN CORPORATE REALLY BLOG?

Simple question; tricky topic. Like all good exam answers we need to start by defining our terms and then fleshing out the context. The problem is that 'blogging' has several meanings here. It can describe the technology (the content management systems that power blogs) as well as the process of writing, both of which any company can readily embrace. At one level blogging technology is simply the use of accessible content management systems, and the explosive growth at which new blogs appeared from 2005 onwards reflected the way many smaller firms simply switched their website engines to blogs.

But blogging has a more emotive meaning as well. It's culture grew from the individual rather than the corporate, and in the early days blogs were synonymous with diaries and personal expression. Although that personal publishing has grown – and continues to grow – as the tools have broken into the mainstream the context of blogging has changed.

Some firms have succeeded in combing both of these strands; articulate business leaders writing passionately and personally about their industries and their firms. Leaders like the President and founder of Sun Microsystems have proved it can be done (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ and http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/executives/mcnealy/), but unfortunately they're the exception rather than the rule. Much corporate blogging activity either tries to rework press releases into blog posts, reads like the marketing copy from the company brochure or sticks to the middle ground in a way that's as uninspiring as it is unchallenging and unreadable. Corporate governance and passion don't readily mix.

This is a general question, but what's your favourite part of web marketing?

THE MOST UNDER USED WEB MARKETING TOOL TODAY? ANALYTICS.

At the moment I'm really excited about web analytics. Analytics is giving the deepest of insights into how customers buy and at what point the buying process fails. Whether it's tracking the open rates on emails or the conversion rates within a website, the data is now there. You can tell exactly how many people did, and didn't respond to the most specific call to action. Apply the same thinking screen by screen across your ecommerce store and you can scientifically analyse exactly how people behave.

Harnessed well this means your organisation can become a learning organisation, ever improving the way it works, thinks and behaves. Constant improvements in customer conversion rates at each step in the buying process have a transformative effect on the business.

But right now there's a disconnect. Most firms have web analytics in place. Yet hardly any have the data analysts to make sense of the results. Worse still is that even fewer have empowered these data analysts to drive website design, to feed their knowledge back into the process of building and rebuilding web pages to deliver better conversion rates. It's another massive missed opportunity, and yet look into the leading digital retail businesses like Amazon, Tescos, LastMinute and EBay and you'll find a whole management structure that does this.

Take the guesswork out of marketing, unlock the potential of your customer data, transform your business.

My question is about generic domain names and the possible intrinsic value in terms of search engines relevance and type in traffic.

The subject of using generic terms to leverage low cost entry into markets positive or negative, in your valued opinion?

Access to broadband is almost standard across Europe and these generic domains can now be utilised as portals to direct traffic from the existing Italian insurance brands.

The domains include assicurazione.org / (insurance)assicurazioneauto.com / assicurazionemoto.com / assicurazionemoto.it /
assicurazionecasa.it (House)/ assicurazionevita.it (Life)

Last month 108426 persons searched for (ASSICURAZIONE AUTO)
62897 searched for assicurazione moto, 5821 searched for assicurazione casa (house), 2356 searched for assicurazione vita (life)

The easy-to-remember domain names convey easy access to an area of interest or need of millions of people.

The search engines are important, Yahoo, Google Adsence makes millions of $ from companies buying placement under generic terms,
will ownership of keywords offer low cost entry as gateways to the Italian online insurance markets ?

In addition to the direct keyword registrations I also registered a number of other generic domains in the automotive industry to act as support and related commerce sites :
sportive.it (sports) / autosportiva.it / autosportiva.com / motosportive.com / venditaauto.com (car sale) / venditaauto.it / prezziauto.com / prezzoauto.com / prezzimoto.it /

rivistaauto.com (car magazine) / rivistaauto.it / rivistamoto.com / rivistamoto.it

I would not normally list all these domains as this much information can blind the reader, However, the support sites could a have an important role in the possible development of alliances and I feel sure you will be well versed in this area.

I would be grateful for your thoughts positive or negative in regard generic names and the value in terms of linguistics & SEO alignment

Empedocles

Hi Forwarded two mails to danny@digitalstrategyconsulting.com not sure of your proffered contact route.

Should I be on Second Life?

SHOULD I BE ON SECOND LIFE?

Second Life is awesome: it’s a fantastic window into how community, social space, virtual reality and conversation all collide. It’s one of the first mass market deployments of the type of virtual world William Gibson painted when he coined the phrase ‘cyberspace’ back in the days of Neoromancer. But that doesn't mean your firm has to be there.

I love the model and the concept; but I struggle with the fact most people can’t divorce the notion of 3D environments from Second Life itself. SL is a great brand and it’s riding the crest of a wave right now, but there will be millions of virtual environments and just because they’ve one of the first to get the package cracked doesn’t mean they’ll maintain their unique market position.

What excites me about all this is that we’ll have 3D virtual worlds acting as mirrors to many of our offline spaces, and when the audiences are there and the markets have moved, business logic will sweep firms along in the same way the Google effect has with search. But for the time being most of the SMEs in Nottingham won’t have much to gain from trying to harness SL. It’s a question of priorities and I can’t see it generating real business for them, particularly given that most are struggling to get their search strategies and their email working properly.

Saying ‘no’ is one of the toughest things in digital marketing, because savvy digital marketers will find amazing ways to get value from the new tools, but marketing teams need to really invest in the basics first. In this case it's just a straight forward cost/benefit analysis

Where do people find time for social networking?

Beats me! There's a massive jumbling around of time in the media mix going on, but this spoof article did catch my eye: http://meadows-klue.blogs.com/meadowsklue_on_media/2007/08/facebook-employ.html

How do you manage profiles across several sites?

An end could be in sight for people wrestling with the challenges of maintaining their expanding number of social media profiles. Spacelift is the latest launch among apps offering a way of feeding data into and between personal profiles. This one helps you move MySpace profile data across to Facebook. This has been a massive weakness in social networking since the start: people don’t have enough time to maintain their profiles and if you’re not able to take part in a community then you have to question whether you should be there. Spacelift et al could prove a massive catalyst in preventing established social networks from withering.

Social networks need different types of advertising and smarter filtering, otherwise you have a great brand advertising in a poor content environment. Are the any examples, research in this area?

ADVERTISING IN SOCIAL SPACES

There’s a huge excitement around social networking and social media, but that doesn’t mean the same techniques from traditional advertising placement will work here. For example, many of the social media are private or semi-private spaces, with content that individuals have chosen to share with their friends. Your brand may be able to buy media space that includes thousands of these pages, but there’s a question as to whether you really have their support, or whether you’re invading their space.

Next up, think about the nature of this content a little more. There’s a great deal of content out on the web that you probably wouldn’t want your brand associated with, so if your campaign includes social media then consider how your brand can be protected. Here are a few key questions to ask yourself:

What profanity filters are in place to block your ad appearing next to inappropriate content?
What gives your brand permission to advertise in this space?
Are you considering customising your creative to fit with the needs of social media?
If you have a presence in social media, then could your campaign benefit from integrating your social media advertising with your own social media content?
Can your campaign factor in social media from the very start to ensure the integration really works?

Social media give you a massive range of tools to work with, but even simply advertising in these spaces using simple online graphical formats can create risks unless you think them through.

WHAT IS WEB 3.0?

We've been asked lots about this in training over the last year. Sometimes as a joke and sometimes in all seriousness. Like much digital future-gazing, you can never be sure what the next step is, but when we interviewed Joel De Rosnay about the models for computing and the collision of the virtual and physical worlds, he had some pretty clear ideas - Web 3.0 could arrive sooner than you think. Lock down the digital glasses, plug yourself into the grid, read the interview, and then follow the links... http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2007/07/joel_de_rosnay.html

(And let us know what you think afterwards!)