50 Essential Strategies for Creating a Successful Web 2.0 Product

Author: Dion Hinchcliffe, 1/26/2009. Reposted from Social Computing Magazine.

As we begin 2009, not only is it difficult for companies to attract new business, it’s tough to keep your existing customers. Budgets are sliced and orders from the top down are ‘do more with less’  - which is actually the theme of Web 2.0 Expo this year. Even if your customers are happy, budget restrictions may prevent them from repeat business.

Regardless of your vertical, getting to know your customers - especially in a down economy - is vital for success. If done correctly, there is opportunity to grow market share and strengthen your brand and its positioning.

Utilizing enterprise 2.0 tools to capture customers’ data and feedback enables an organization to take a transactional relationship and give it more dimension. Overtone Inc has take this concept of listening and developed a brand-monitoring solution called the Open Mic Integrated Listening System which delivers contextualized insights based upon what your customers are saying. Open Mic works in 4 steps: collection, categorizing, analyzing and acting.
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Like many of you, I was glad to see 2008 come to a close.  We ended the year deep into of one of the worst recessions in our history with financial market meltdowns, auto industry bailouts and unemployment on the rise.  Let’s hope we’re near the bottom.

But what does this mean for Enterprise 2.0? The recession is certainly very bad news for the less-capitalized companies out there trying to get their Enterprise 2.0 offerings off the ground.  Good companies, good technologies and good people will fall victim to this recession not for lack of a good product, but because they can’t get their balance sheets into the black quickly enough or find the additional funding to stay afloat.  We all know people who have been directly affected by this and it’s truly a shame. But I’m an optimist and also anxious to see if these times will offer a silver lining for our burgeoning Enterprise 2.0 market.  Will the economic crisis be good for Enterprise 2.0 adoption as companies seek out technology solutions to drive greater workforce efficiency?

GetSatisfaction is an interesting new approach to leveraging the power of the Web for fun (and maybe profit)? The idea is to create an open market place for customer support. Got a question about a particular company or product? Go to http://getsatisfaction.com/, enter your question, and hopefully within a few minutes you get a response via e-mail from someone in that company. There’s a pretty compelling business model there if you can leverage this sort of service to reduce calls to your contact centers. There’s also some interesting opportunities to meld this service with microblogging services such as Twitter.

Wordle is new web site that lets you create a cloud showing the most popular words used on your web site. Similar to a search engine, Wordle indexes web site pages, but allows you to mine that index to reveal information about the most often used words (I’m assuming it filters out words such as “a”, “and”, “the”, etc.

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Just a quick heads up that we recently turned off the ability to post comments to the blog. It’s a temporary measure, which was necessitated by the fact that our site was hacked (via SQL injection) through the commenting system. Our web team is in the process of addressing the problem, and we’ll have comments turned back on shortly.

And while I have the podium, I’d like to congratulate our blogger-in-chief, Steve Wylie, who welcomed a new son into his family last night! Steve and his family are doing great, and he’ll be back on the blogging circuit soon. Way to go, Steve!