Digital Media Buzz > Businesses Capitalize on Web 3.0 Technology

Businesses Capitalize on Web 3.0 Technology

By Moria Byrne

Despite the recession, many companies are implementing Web 3.0 into a company’s strategic plan. Media companies are looking for ways to organize and produce revenue from their social networking efforts. Businesses are looking for ways to draw more traffic to their websites. All companies want to capitalize on their social media network at a low cost. Several businesses have proven this is achievable. The necessary ingredients are a technologically experienced and hard working staff.

“You can generate sophisticated graphics with a small crew using Adobe and a copy of Flash and execute the same things we are doing here,” says Steve Duenes, graphic director of The New York Times.

The New York Times has integrated photo galleries, interactive graphics and reader-driven content into their community sites. The New York Times launched a pilot run of its community photo gallery on inauguration day, Jan. 20. People were invited to submit mobile photos to nytimes.com. The newspaper received 3,600 submissions and 900 were approved by the graphic design staff of 10 people. There is currently a photo project that involves how the recession is affecting your neighborhood. People are encouraged to send photos showing the difficulties people are facing in their neighborhood. The Times also did a collection of photos when The Grateful Dead went on tour. They received 2.5 million clips.

“Journalism has to become more about the process than the product … that deeply engages with the audience from idea generation and story to the aftermath of the story, and creates a campfire with the community,” says John A. Byrne, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek. “This can create a conversation more meaningful than the article itself.”

BusinessWeek has also implemented a community site called Business Exchange. The community site runs a “what’s your story idea” contest. The reader with the best story idea is highlighted online with a photo and biography. Also, readers who comment frequently and write interesting and articulate content are invited to write an opinion essay for BusinessWeek.

“Once the industrial methods for manufacturing content reach a good-enough quality from the consumer’s perspective, the cost advantages will drive widespread adoption among consumers and producers alike,” says Peter Sweeney, CEO of Primal Fusion.

Other businesses are reaching out to start-up companies that offer low-cost technological expertise. Video curation platforms are a growing trend. Magnify is one video curation business which manages, aggregates and integrates the video into the website.

New York magazine recently consulted with Magnify.net to add video to its entertainment and food sections. Its management also formed a partnership with MenuPages.com. New York readers can find the menus of their favorite restaurants online and free of charge. Michael Silberman, general manager, online advertising and marketing for NYmag.com, saw no reason not to partner with a start-up business if the company can meet your needs in scale and technology. Diversity is necessary to gain revenue online, he says.

“You can tap into a bigger revenue stream (through a partnership) than you would on your own,” says Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net.

Making Money Through Web 3.0
Eager to keep up with the competition, companies engage with their customers and use the opportunity to establish their brand identity. Yet, few companies have the tools to organize their social networking information or know how to analyze the information in order to translate these efforts into actual revenue generation. Google analytics provides free analytics of blogs, ads and website services. BusinessWeek has been using an engagement index for the past 18 months but has yet to release its statistics. “Your metric equals how big is your following,” says Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb.

There are several businesses offering technology assistance in setting up a user interface system. The data management is left as an after-thought for many companies. Database management also requires changing how the company’s database is read. Kloudshare, a graph database platform implemented as a web service that is scheduled to launch this fall, will offer database management and user interface services. Semantic technologies, which read the data from social networking services, will offer opportunities to increase a company’s reach and distribution, improve productivity and deliver new value to their consumers.

“Each company has a huge opportunity with data gathering systems,” BusinessWeek’s editor-in-chief Byrne says. “It’s crucial to companies how they promote that data.”

Advertising online also offers endless revenue sources. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Outliers, sees online marketing as a creative way for companies to engage consumers during tough economic times. The advantage of online advertising is being able to identify the audience by tracking your audience. Another ad opportunity is placing ads with RSS feeds that users can read on their cell phones or computers. Ads will be more targeted and more relevant to the user. Google is placing ads on its mobile news alerts. Google tracks users’ Web searches online and sends users relevant ads. Companies can profit from a well-made website by uploading Google’s application, AdSearch. The application will post relevant ads on the website. The company receives 50 percent of the ad revenue.

Frank Addante, CEO of the Rubicone Project, explains that the weakness of online ads is a lack of emotional pull. Also, advertisers are having trouble controlling pop-up ads. If a rogue display ad pops onto a website at the same time as a competing company, a user might have negative associations with the original advertiser. Bruce Falck, head of Google Content Network, says that display ads are hard to get rid of because there is no content to scan.

BusinessWeek writer, Stephen Baker, sees the problem as three-fold. “The dollars are flowing more slowly than the users,” he says. “There’s a platform piece (lack of understanding about how Web 3.0 works), an institutional piece (lack of staff and new media and technology experts) and a delivery piece (more money is spent on television than new media).”

Companies are left to wonder: how fast can they estimate the monetization of social networking? How easily can they add their company to a social network? Or is it more useful to expand their existing properties? Yet, there isn’t enough participation in analytics to know the true effect of Web 3.0 on businesses.

“We’re measuring these productivity gains across a broad number of areas, including consumer participation rates in content creation, the amount of content created per contribution, customer value in terms of eCPM pricing for content created, and consumer value in terms of page views of content created,” Sweeney says.

Peter Sweeney of Primal Fusion is confident that there are enough advantages to Web 3.0 for companies to slowly become comfortable with changes in the industry and the technology available.

“We’ve seen this pattern before in the emergence of new mass market networks: content networks, search networks, and more recently, Web 2.0 social networks,” Sweeney says. “Each time, a handful of first-movers establish a foothold in the new network. Over time, these initial entrants compel other organizations to get involved and keep pace.”