Mastering Web 2.0: Transform Your Business Using Key Web Site and Social Media Tools

Citation

Jones, R.P. (2011), "Mastering Web 2.0: Transform Your Business Using Key Web Site and Social Media Tools", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 160-161. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761111116015

Mastering Web 2.0 might be better titled Introduction to Web 2.0. The author begins with a preface, an introduction, and with the following four chapters: “Social media”, “Communicating the best and the worst”, “Piggies in the middle”, and “The making of the corporation/person”. These opening pages examine the basics of the internet and are rife with trite sayings and generic surface‐level discussions of social media. In an attempt to tie salience to her web discussion, the author offers readers four Wikipedia citations in the first four pages of Chapter 1 that add little to no weight to her discussion. The Wikipedia references are followed with an interesting juxtaposition in Chapter 4 where the author, feigning disdain for websites that are “me, me, me”, then uses nearly a full page to reflect on her past successes. All in all the first 47 pages make for some very slow going and very little insight. But with Chapter 5 things begin to improve.

Chapter 5, “The grand old lady of the internet”, discusses the corporate website. The author discusses in good detail what the website should be in the Web 2.0 world. Good solid strategies are discussed that are designed to help reinvigorate a stodgy website. It is particularly noteworthy that the author advocates maintaining a website and improving it. Many discussions regarding the internet today focus solely on social media and alternate means of communicating with consumers and forget that the corporate website can and should be the nerve center of the corporate web presence. The corporate website can tie all the various communication tools together as well as direct traffic among them. Finally, it is made very clear that the website should serve as the primary sales vehicle. In addition to the website strategy, the author gives welcome advice on design: “Forget about the bells and whistles. Keep everything simple, clean, intuitive and professional” (p. 53). The chapter concludes with a list of simple and direct do's and don'ts.

Chapter 6, “Googling it”, discusses search engine optimization (SEO). While this topic has been reviewed extensively in a variety of media, this chapter is straightforward with clear direction and ideas. “Avoid Flash“, a sub‐topic in Chapter 6 on web design, is particularly good at describing the pitfalls many companies fall victim to when designing for style not function. “The forgotten magic of article marketing”, Chapter 7, takes a step back to Web 1.0 to review articles as a tool for generating web traffic and authority which, has been largely abandoned in Web 2.0 literature. This has been seen as an “it's all about me” one‐way communication strategy. However, articles as a tool are reinvigorated with some helpful tips and good direction to make this tool relevant to today's internet. Chapter 8, “Citizen Kane to citizen journalists”, begins the thorny discussion of blogging. So many individuals, myself included, as well as companies, begin blogs with the best intentions and then let them fall into irrelevance or disrepair, rendering them meaningless at best or harmful at worst. Interesting approaches and purposes for blogs are discussed, including an investigation of blog ROI (p. 115).

Chapters 9, 10 and 11, “Podcasting”, “Social media will be like air”, and “Viral velocity”, the mastery promised slides into the mundane. Little insight is given for the employ of these methods or how these areas can advance your cause. Podcasting is discussed as an up and comer, while the social media chapter is a rehash of the opening chapters, and the viral velocity chapter is more of an introductory discussion than a guide to mastery. The most helpful part of the latter chapter is the “what‐not‐to‐do” cautionary tale examples. Starbucks is singled out as a particularly good example of what not to do (p. 162). Starbucks responded to an offer to employees and family members that had gone “viral” by declaring the offer void, opening the door to Caribou Coffee to notify Starbucks customers that they would honor the Starbucks offer. As a note, the Starbucks example is in a grey box on the page. The book uses these grey boxes to highlight supposedly salient messages throughout the book. However, as a reader I found them distracting and generally less impactful than the balance of the page.

Chapter 12, “Video opens the floodgate”, is basic and relatively uninspiring. Chapter 13, “Putting the pieces together”, is the author's graphic attempt to show how to employ the various Web 2.0 tools and their functions for users. The pairs of tool and corresponding function are listed as:

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  viral marketing/fast exposure;

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  article marketing/thought leader;

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  website/online personality;

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  SEO/traffic;

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  blogs/conversation;

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  social networking sites/interaction;

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  podcasting/communities of passion; and

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  video/high emotion & entertainment.

These are graphically depicted with the tools as slices of a wheel inside of the larger functional box divided into the matching tool slices. The chapter also includes several cases with a marketing goal described and the appropriate tools to employ to achieve the goal. The final chapter, “A peek at the future”, is short both literally as well as figuratively. No major insights or “A‐ha!” moments await the reader.

Throughout the book the author does do a good job of describing the nuts and bolts of linking and referral tools such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which alerts users to new content from you; and social bookmarking tools such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, which help users find your content and make the dissemination of information between users simpler. There are also references to using old‐fashioned discussions between fellow web citizens designed to generate support between groups which should drive traffic to and between sites.

Overall, Mastering Web 2.0 is a good primer on using the interactive nature of the Web 2.0 environment. If the reader expects to come away from this book as an expert she will be disappointed. But more casual web denizens will find the information helpful and the book will give them a good foundation from which to explore in more detail the workings of these tools. The executive interacting with his web marketing team may feel a little bit more secure in her knowledge and will likely understand more of the conversation after reading this book. The casual reader will gain some insight into the how and why behind the use of these tools on the web and why marketers utilize them. Mastering Web 2.0 may be a misleading title, but it turns out to be a solid, if basic, Web 2.0 application book.