Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

Chapter 6. Businesses Incorporate Strategies

YOU NOW HAVE ALL THE TOOLS YOU NEED TO APPLY WEB 2.0 STRATEGIC THINKING TO YOUR BUSINESS. The next step is to do it yourself. Reading about Web 2.0 in the previous chapters gives you the background you need to make it work, but getting there will require a lot more than reading. How can you get started?

Five Steps to Web 2.0

Here’s a five-step action plan for embedding Web 2.0 business models into your decision-making and convincing others to join you. These actions flow roughly from the earlier chapters, and they are driven by a few key questions about how you can apply the examples to your own situation.

Build on Collective User Value

A key ingredient of many Web 2.0 projects is their ability to collect information from users and then share it in a form that people are willing to pay for. The users themselves, in the course of doing what they want for their own projects, contribute value to the larger system. Creating systems where users want to do this can be difficult, requiring a different kind of analysis then when creating systems that present information to purely consumer users.

Even if you’re in the middle of a project or business that’s been running for years, it may help to start from a blank slate, a tabula rasa, much like zero-based accounting. Take a fresh look at your project, program, or business from the viewpoint of an individual customer. Getting to a user’s perspective and then carefully tracking that single user’s cash ...