Connected Consumers are Collectively Shaping Your Brand
Put Web 2.0 to work to harness this phenomenon

Join the Conversation
Fostering a "strategy of participation" to embrace consumer contributions to your website typically begins with a series of questions. What conversations are already taking place in the marketplace without your participation? Which form of consumer contributions make most sense for your business? How do you manage these contributions? How do you manage negative content? Do you have enough traffic or the type of consumers who will participate?

To lay the foundation, you might want to first consider a few of the following ideas:

• Track the conversations that are already taking place about your brand through a tracking service, such as Google News alerts, Buzz Metrics from Nielsen or Twitter;
• Identify relevant blogs and tagging sites for your industry on blog search sites like Icerocket.com and Technorati.com and assess the prevailing themes;
• Decide which forms of user-generated content and other next-generation Web features make sense for your website and your business;
• Foster customer comments and product reviews within your own branded environment. Encourage the kind of objective, grass-roots discussion already taking place elsewhere—and respond in kind to show you’re listening; and
• Leverage RSS to extend your content into places where your target market spends time researching or discussing your brand.

Once you’ve re-engineered your online business for Web 2.0, don’t keep it a secret. Make your user-generated content program a major component of your marketing activities: highlight relevant URLs in all your marketing materials, leverage key words to increase search results, create dedicated campaigns around key components, and use comments and links on other sites to build interest and draw traffic.

Transform Consumers into Content Authors
Simple, inexpensive digital media tools give consumers the ability to create professional-quality online content. Contests and online galleries of user submissions encourage participants to spend more time thinking about your brand. They can also reveal unexpected and valuable insights into the way your brand is perceived. Content like this is also highly viral and buzz-worthy, showing both current customers and new visitors that your company "gets it."

As with any other form of user-generated content, you need to be willing to accept in good faith a few sour notes along the way. However, online communities tend to be self-correcting, with the positive voices outweighing the malcontents.

Chevy demonstrated one way to transform consumers into authors by inviting members of the public to create their own TV ads for the new Tahoe. As they demonstrated, attracting consumer input can drive traffic to your website. The Chevy Tahoe contest website drew over 600,000 visitors of whom nearly two-thirds went on to visit Chevy.com. And it drove sales as well. The new Tahoe accounted for more than a quarter of all full-sized SUVs sold, outpacing its nearest competitor two to one.

Of course, managing the online experience and all of the new content created by your community can be complicated. After all, you can’t do business in a Web 2.0 world with Web 1.0 technologies. Next-generation web content management (WCM) solutions provide the tools to effectively manage user-generated content. You need to quickly analyze user behavior and preferences and make changes to online content in real time to provide more targeted experiences for your customers.

The best-of-breed solutions allow for tight integration with other applications that help you associate user ratings and reviews, comments and blog postings with content that is created in-house. And integration with best-of-breed Web analytics technologies is a must—quick reaction to activities of site visitors will help you improve over time.

Next Steps
Your customers are talking about your brand, and they are using the social technologies we’ve discussed in this article to do it. It’s time for you to join the conversation. However, this is not about implementing the coolest Web application, using Flash or AJAX or just starting a blog. To be effective, you need to think through the big issues: how to meet customer needs and how to initiate an open conversation with them. Process and technology are equally important.

Web 2.0 gives you a starting point to do both. By listening to customers through blogs, reviews and other open conversation forums, you begin to understand your customers and how they interact with the new technologies. Only then can you begin the process of selecting and implementing the Web 2.0 application that will work best for your unique customer base. Quick tip: start small, stay focused on the customer and keep in mind that experimentation is necessary.

This challenging new frontier in the world of marketing is not without risk. However, those who do not embark on this journey can count on one guarantee: they will be left behind. Marketers who opt to join in the dialogue have a unique opportunity to work in unison with their customers to evangelize their brand.