Enterprise 2.0: 6 Things You Really Need To Know

• Tweet

• Tweet

The online world has been revolving around what most people often call, “web 2.0”. I would say this term is aging fast with overuse, but its fundamentals are still fresh up till today.

These are the fundamentals that businesses should embrace to succeed online.

But what are they?

According to Andrew P. McAfee, enterprise 2.0 (web 2.0 technologies used by business) has 6 components: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals. In short, SLATES.

1. Search

To gain presence online, you can’t be invisible. Don’t expect consumers to spend time looking for you. You have to be searchable every time and everywhere. User friendly navigation on your website is no longer enough when consumers want relevant information presented within seconds. Make sure you have an efficient search bar integrated in your site and work hard on your organic search engine rankings.

2. Links

Links organize our content in a more reader friendly way. It made transition between web pages possible and helps bring traffic to your website.

Link your website to your social media tools so that consumers can find out more about you no matter where they land on.

Great web pages also have many pages linked to them.

3. Authoring

How can we ever miss this out? User generated content is all the rage now. We are no longer spectators but creators of our own content. The best content no longer comes from newspapers and TV stations; they are being generated everyday by individuals via YouTube, Blogs and Podcasts. The best thing is, they can be equally professional and credible. Encourage supporters to create positive content about your brand and products or create meaningful ones yourself.

Wikis are also growing rapidly, notably as an internal tool within companies. It encourages collaboration and real time information sharing.

4. Tags

Since search is so important, there must be something there to organize and categorize information – tags! By assigning tags to a particular piece of information, such as a blog post, users can easily find it by either typing in or clicking on them. They help to make you more visible.

Just be sure to tag your content with relevant and common keywords. Long, irrelevant and uncommon tags are as good as no tags at all.

5. Extensions

Extensions help consumers to sort information according to their preferences. For example, if you have a corporate blog covering content about different topics, your readers would most probably not be homogenous. They have different preferences and reading habits. With an extension, “related posts”, you can suggest similar posts to readers who are interested in that topic, prolonging the time they spend on your blog.

6. Signals

With Twitter feeds rolling out faster than we blink, it gets really hard to grab consumers’ attention. Even if consumers want to hear updates from you, they might find it hard to keep up, especially with limited time and so many sites to visit.

You will need something to catch their attention, a signal maybe.

We can always use the good old email system as a signal to subscribers but with email overload, consumers might soon associate you as a spammer.

RSS seems to be a pretty good solution as it brings content to your consumers without them having to go search for it. It centralizes content from different sites into one place. Twitter and Facebook can also be used to inform followers and fans of new content and news.

SLATES: Not a Guarantee to Success

These 6 components will help businesses go in the right direction towards higher visibility and user-friendly content. However, doing well in these 6 things is not enough. They need to be accompanied by genuine and sincere communication with consumers. Businesses need to talk and at the same time, listen to their consumers. You wouldn’t want to be as unresponsive as Qatar Airways: