Slideshare - the future is social media

This presentation has some fantastic graphical representations of the philosophy behind Web 2.0 and some amazing statistics as well. 14% trust advertisments compared to 78% who will trust a friend's recommendation. And only 18% of TV advertising campaigns generate positive ROI.

Here's the killer stat: 36% think more positively about brands that have blogs.

Web 2.0 and Social Media

From: shantanu.adhicary,
4 months ago

Web 2.0 and Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: shantanu media)

Social Media and Web 2.0 presentation designed with the help of Marta Kagan

SlideShare Link

Groundswell

I've just started reading Groundswell, a book addressing Web 2.0 and the larger movement it represents. It has a fantastic definition of the "groundswell" which represents the growth of the culture around Web 2.0 and social media:

The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies.

This neatly rolls together both the threat and opportunity that Web 2.0 represents to any corporation, and especially those involved in the production and distribution of information (including the publisher I work for).

The threat is clear: the production-distribution-consumption model, with companies as the producers/distributors and individuals as the consumer, has been radically altered. The premium prices that individuals paid companies to maintain their resources and processes are no longer required. Due to the internet and Web 2.0, anybody can create and distribute information to an enormous audience, and all it costs them is their time and effort. If they are providing this for free, why would individuals pay for it?

So what is the opportunity for the former manufacturer-distributors? It is to support these burgeoning communities, to create innovative tools that facilitate their sharing activities. To support the free information with premium quality information that is directly relevant to the question at hand.

In my next couple of posts I'll come back to these concepts. I'll take another look at Ravelry (my favourite Web 2.0 site) and also review Sara Lloyd's fantastic article, "A book publisher's manifesto for the 21st century".

RSS in Plain English

We are starting to get a buzz at my workplace around Web 2.0 due to a whitepaper my team just wrote on how professionals (read: our customers) use Web 2.0 in their work. The paper is due to be launched in January and in the meantime I have been asked to create a short presentation on what Web 2.0 is. My first thought was to use a Common Craft video but sadly they don't have one just for Web 2.0 yet! Oh well, looks like I do my own presentation after all. I do love their RSS in plain english video but don't think I'll have time to show the whole thing - I may adapt some of their visualisation techniques (the arrows!) to my presentation.