Marketing, Communications and Technology

What does that even mean, Web 2.0? Watch this video and it may help you understand. Web 2.0 simply refers to the new software, language, and features being built into new websites. They allow for more interaction among users and they make users the actual providers of the content. They are breeding a society of people who are always connected and always “feeding the beast”.

Ok, but how can this help me market my company or institution?

It is important to think of web 2.0 sites as channels or communities where your people are already talking about your brand. You cannot stop them, you cannot control them but you can have a voice in the conversation and you can steer the message that you have access to on your piece of the web 2.0 real estate.

Lets start by identifying a couple of web 2.0 sites and how FIU is using them to expand the content they already produce.

Youtube.com - it has the demographics of regular television yet there is no cost associated other than the cost of creating of the actual content which you post. What exactly is there to lose? Yes you could create your own video hosting system and it could be neatly embedded into your site and work flawlessly BUT who will watch it, will it be searchable by millions instantly? Probably not.

We launched a youtube channel last year as a means of hosting our videos for online articles. All together our channel has received nearly 3,000 video views.

Flickr.com - flickr is a photo hosting and sharing site. Our flickr site currently feeds a slide show of campus shots which is updated regularly. Its easy of use makes it the ideal method for uploading and sharing photos, including the ability to integrate them into almost any website or blog and of course they are searchable on the flickr site.

I will continue this discussion with suggestions for the use of facebook, myspace, blogs, rss, and other web 2.0 sites and features in the next post.

Another important note is that by virtue of being on these sites as an institution you are projecting an image of being ahead or at least in line with the latest technology.