Winning Online

With gas prices going thru the roof, people across the country have been forced to car pool or drive less altogether.  Grocery bills are climbing at an alarming rate so people are now being forced to find creative ways to feed their families, and themselves.  On top of this, I just read an article on CNN about how new home purchases are the lowest in 16 years.  Seems to be the craze over the last couple months, how poorly our economy is performing and the emerging stories of survival from an alarming percentage of the countries population.  However, it appears that the penny pinching philosophy hasn’t hit all industries, just yet.

At the Web2.0 Expo conference this week in San Francisco, the buzz was all about spending. Survey results were shared with the audience at the beginning of the week, showing that businesses are preparing to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools.  Forrester, the research company which carried out the Web 2.0 survey, believes the technologies being developed and unveiled over the coming days (at the Expo) represent “a fundamentally new way” for businesses to communicate with employees and customers. It seems as if the masses are starting to get it… time to connect and collaborate.

The days of static page websites is long gone, and businesses across the globe are now scrambling to find ways to integrate user-generated content into their web marketing strategy. Wikis, blogs, virtual worlds and dynamic content – businesses are finding that this is where it’s at.

So as you peddle your bike to work and eat your ramen noodles for lunch, maybe it’s time to think about how you can work a Web2.0 strategy into your marketing endeavors.  After all, wouldn’t you agree that it is time to consider new ways to get the word out about your products and services?

Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, is a conference and tradeshow for the rapidly growing ranks of designers and developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, and business strategists who are embracing the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies. For more information about this weeks Expo, please click here.