Most of the time you'll hear me talking about Safety and Health related issues but this time I am going to explore my inner geek a bit more. Web 2.0 can be one of the most effective free ways to promote your business and even yourself.
Those that know me well are very well aware of my e-presence and my love of technology. Besides doing Safety Training and some tech troubleshooting, I also help people develop a web presence. Of course, if you're reading this you know about the internet and you are at minimum a proficient user. The internet is easy now, high speed, user friendly graphics, the age of Google. This is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is an interactive electronic playground where you can share your thoughts (like I'm doing now), respond to people and most of all create your own "Presence". Web 2.0 is all about you interacting with the world like you were talking to your next door neighbor.
I've been on the internet since 1993 and it wasn't always that easy. Web Presence used to be all about programming HTML, Geocities and Angelfire, Rocketmail and ICQ. That is how people left a mark, and if you weren't a skilled techie, all you could do was sit back and read what was out there. Internet Users were consumers. Surfing the web was a passive experience, like reading books at a library. Around 2000, a revolution started. In 2004 a conference (the O'Reilly conference) was held, developers, designers and users came together and revolutionized the web. It started with things like Blogs, Livejournal, Flickr and Myspace. It has blossomed into the "Social Web" as we know it, Facebook and Twitter, Digg and Reddit and arguably the most monumental achievement of Web 2.0, Wikipedia. A giant encyclopedia contributed to and edited by users. We started to control the web.
So by now you're probably thinking "Yea, that's a nice history lesson, but what does this have to do with anything?". Well, it has everything to do with effective business. Web 2.0 allows nearly anybody to create their own presence on the internet. Businesses can create Facebook Fanpages without having to hire a web designer or developer (but keep us in mind, we need to pay rent too..). Businesspeople can interact with the world from their living room, in their underwear. Do you have a Web Presence? Have you learned how to leverage Facebook and Twitter to your advantage? More people are "googling" you than looking you up in a phone book. A generation of people rely on the internet to find out about where to buy their products, who to contact for services and look up reviews on you.
Web 2.0 not only allows you to talk to the world, the world can also talk about you. Recently my attention was brought to a Restaurant here in Regina that noticed they had a bad review on a website. They instructed people (via a facebook group) to write positive reviews so it would counterbalance the rating and bury the review. In return for favorable reviews, they would drop the prices of some appetizers on a weeknight. Sounds like a great idea, right? Get in touch with your people, spread the word? It wasn't. In fact, this "mistake" may have cost them far more than they could have ever imagined. People want honesty, and they got a lot of very honest and frank reviews. It wasn't pretty. They may never recover fully from this little"incident".
The moral of this story is... Know your web presence, work with your web presence and understand the way the web works. You're not alone on this one though, I'm able to help. I can work with you to carve out a place in the web, give you the tools to develop your own presence and teach you the "geek secrets" to help you stay competitive. Call me for a free consult, we'll sit down and examine your presence and I can help you decide where to go from there. Best of all, I can teach you how to promote yourself on the web using free tools, no need to have a designer on staff and no need for a monumental advertising budget. Call or e-mail me to find out how the Tach Advantage can work for you.