Before embarking on a Web 2.0 strategy for your business, there are some things to be aware of.

• Don’t pick the technology to find an application. Instead, work up a clear idea of how you could benefit in such a set up and find a technology to achieve this. For example, if you are a computer training business, you wouldn’t want to publish a free knowledge store of how to use software – that’s your business. Therefore a Wiki is probably not the answer. Instead, you might want to involve your customers more in how you can deliver a better training environment, so a blog might be more appropriate.
  
  
• Be aware that is possible (probable) that your customers will not be interacting with your content in the context you expect. Establishing brand therefore needs to be done at the lowest level (“content-unit”). You will not be able to assume users are on your website.
  
  
• To encourage your customers to become contributors you must make it easy for them to do so. Technology is the means to the end, not the end in itself.

However, with this in mind, there can be huge benefits. If you can create a ‘community’ around your business or brand, members will stay incredibly loyal.

A recent McKinsey study found that members of an online community:

• visited a site 9 times as often;
• stayed 5 times as long; and
• represented 65% of sales, even though they represented just 35% of visitors .

So use your imagination. There are numerous applications of Web 2.0 concepts, especially if you are prepared to share some of your business’s intellectual property.

For example, a Canadian gold mining company made its highly prized geological survey data available on the internet and offered a cash prize ($500K) for anyone who could analyse and predict gold deposits. 110 targets were returned, with an 80% hit rate, yielding $3bn worth of gold!