Look out – the Web 2.0 Bubble is about to burst!

When Hollywood starts making films about business you know something is about to go horribly wrong.

Out soon (at good cinemas everywhere) is the Facebook story – “you don’t get 500 million friends without making a few enemies” – goes one of the tag lines – no doubt in a very deep voice.

I get nervous when film, TV and media generally start over-reporting or dramatising current business stories. Normally over reporting is accompanied by a false sense of security, or hope, or in some cases anxiety, in the public at large.  It typically happens in financial markets. As we all know (but seem to forget all too readily) market crashes in shares or in property are normally pre-empted with a clamour from the media to explain how best to make a safe, fast, buck. And then it all goes horribly wrong at a pace that ensures you can’t reverse your position until it is too late.

So what of Facebook and this Web 2.0 thing, is it about to fall from a similar precipice to those the over inflated financial markets fell from. I wonder.

The BBC News ran a news story the other night about Starbucks on Facebook and why they are there. News? Starbucks have been on it for ages – they have 14 million new latte drinking best friends for goodness sake. It seems to me we have reached a dangerous point in the Web 2.0 world when the BBC News starts talking about social marketing.

News? Main stream news? Starbucks use Facebook – so should your business – Web 2.0 is brill – oh dear it’s like the nonsense that went before the dot com market crash of 2000 all over again. Just keep that Jonah, Robert Peston away from the story - he broke the banks, remember?

I do, however, sense that things are getting a bit overblown – too much hype and too much coverage. So will the Web 2.0 bubble burst?

Could we really find ourselves trying to unwind our social media positions as we see the follies of documenting every skinny, tall, latte and the geographical location of our mobile devices.

The level of information that we present to an increasingly open internet audience grows by the minute – and surely that must be wrong. Do you really want everyone and anyone to know what you are up to now and what you were up to 5 years prior?

Facebook has shifted privacy rules regularly in its hunger to offer the public what it wants and to squeeze out the new kids on the block. Location information being the latest add in. But are we so addicted that this trend will continue? As a Stirling web design and web development business we have seen a remarkable adoption of the Web 2.0 world in business – it offers some fascinating new ways to engage with the market, to engage with people. Some of the tricks are also pretty useful in intranets for business… nice.

Undoubtedly, though, the release of the Facebook film is an interesting point in the history of the Web 2.0 world and that of Facebook – but are we reaching the high water mark of the Social Media web world? I sense we are.

But in true Web 2.0 style – let’s chat more about this on Twitter, Facebook, Four Square, Tumblr etc etc etc. 

LoL! (Thats laugh out loud – if this is being read by a News hungry BBC Social Media Correspondent.)

Economic recovery struggles as London picks up

As the economic news continues to blow more cold than hot you have to look hard for some good news. Property prices (unless you are in cities like Edinburgh) are falling back as lending continues to be problematic for the banks. Manufacturing has also fallen back – output lowest for a year I think – if I caught the headline on BBC News 24 correctly while it counted down the days to the public spending review. And as the Conservative Party Conference starts I am sure the promise of “cuts”, “difficult choices” and “hard years ahead” will emerge.

Some good news about the economic recovery is that London is already bouncing or bounced back (source recent George Kervan Scotsman article). That should be good news for our London based clients. As a Stirling web design company we work throughout the UK with a variety of folks – Lane Clark Beta 2 is a Forex London firm for instance but we also work with web design and marketing agencies so while Scotland remains stubbornly caught it’s good to see some activity elsewhere to encourage any flagging spirits as the recession fights on.

Web Wise Business Newsletter System – Whose reading your newsletter

If you can’t see if someone is reading your newsletter then how can you determine if the activity is worth repeating? I guess if the phone rings more often that would be one clue – but realistically you want to be able to get the stats in a much more timely and accurate manner. In our newsletter system at website company we can see who opens the email and what article they have opened to reach the website that it is published on. This helps our customers decide on what (if anything) is of interest to their clients and potential clients.

Web Wise Business Newsletter System – a question of content

It’s all about the content. The newsletter system we have pulled together at the software company Objective Associates ensures that you get maximum use from the content you produce. Using one of our website newsletter components on your web site lets you put content on the website and then re-use it easily for newsletter purposes. That means your valuable content can get re-purposed quickly and easily and that makes your business more efficient.

Looking for something – on the move

The Jubilee Line was shut for maintenance on the 7th June so getting to the o2 to see Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel was a wee bit harder than it should have been. In the end we opted for the Thames Clipper service which afforded us the ability to see an economy from the relative quiet of the River Thames. Luckily mobile internet allowed us to find out where they picked up. Had the website been optimised for a mobile phone I am sure the experience would have been better,  but I don’t care. I didn’t have to find someone to ask who could understand my Scottish accent so I was in control in a city I dont visit often.

As mobile platforms move toward a standard platform for browsing things are going to get pretty clever from an online marketing experience (all the time we’re looking for something – S Harley). It made life a lot simpler on the 7th despite the best attempts of the London Underground folks.

Great scope for software development and for appropriate websites – though waiting on a common platform will ensure that it’s down cost effectively.

Website price variations

I was doing the networking thing at a recent evening “do” to celebrate the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce breaking through 2000 members.

Bumping into David Frost the Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce he asked why it was that some of his members could get quotes for their website that ranged from £500 to £50,000. I gave (hopefully) a suitably honest answer – “Because most businesses are not expert buyers they are open to getting ripped off.” In retrospect thats a rather sweeping and overly critical simplification as it implies that the £500 price is the right price.

But the fundamental truth is that most business buyers are not expert and they can end up with wide price variations simply because the specification is non existent. For us in our website busineess arm at webwisebusiness we find that trying to get a customer to define a specification is simply too difficult a task. So instead we show them our example sites like our white label estate agency site using www.yourpropertycentre.co.uk and let them tell us what they really want.

It’s a pragmatic approach to dealing with a difficult problem.

Finance mortgage calculators

We are continually improving our financial websites such as the nowfirsttimebuyer website for first time buyer mortgages in the housing market and our nowselfemployed website for self certification mortgages.

We finally got out our rather clever Mortgage Calculator across all the sites and have been interested to see how sticky our sites become – so we are now ok with Search Engine Optimisation becoming Time Engine Optimisation (see earlier article). Average time on site has shot up and visitor engagement is much higher.

We’ve added it to the Buy To Let mortgage and landlord info website as well though have left it off the commercial loan and business loan site for obvious reasons. We’ll come up with a suitable tool for the Commercial Loan website soon.

Online Marketing Scotland

We put live a wee while back Search Engine Optimisation Scotland for free SEO advice (free not just for the Scots of course – we wouldn’t want to be seen as exclusive). Trouble was as soon as we put our free SEO advice website live we knew we had more work to do.

We realised that we needed to explain about online marketing in a manner similar to SEO Scotland – ie simple and straightforward.  The logic was the same as before, simply provide information to our webwisebusiness website customers to ensure they could decided whether they wanted to do adwords or mass email or whatever. So Online Marketing Scotland is now live and offering simple to understand and free online marketing advice to the Scots and anyone else who is interested.

 

Search Engines and the webmaster

We’ve been looking at the effectiveness of the webmaster tool that you can use to monitor your website from Google. Unlike the brilliant Google Analytics the Google Webmaster tool seems to need a wee bit more work from the geniuses that are Google.

We’re finding Google Webmaster reports that some of the websites we have developed are getting high search position ratings for certain keywords. Good news! Well not really, when you check for the search term it’s clear that webmaster has got its knickers in a twist. But it’s not consistent either – as some of it’s info looks accurate. Our search engine optimisation service is getting increasingly popular as more and more folks in Scotland realise that SEO is important to their website so the free tools from Google are making things a lot easier. Despite the fact that they are free it still comes as big surprise when the Google tools fall short of helping us maximise SEO when we have been busy website developers.

Websites that do stuff for the price of a good runner

A strange realisation came over the business about a year ago…. the web actually works! Bit of an admission that but we had sort of not noticed how different things had become in such a short space of time. No more resetting the 56k modem, no more rebooting the PC, no more slow downloads, no more pop ups popping up with pretty ladies selling you stuff (shame about that last one). At the same time we saw that the creation of sophisticated online software for businesses of all sizes was achievable for the first time at sensible prices. It was both an opportunity and a threat to us – ie you can do stuff but you have to do more of it with more customers more frequently. But guess what? We can and we do and we’re happy to see more and more customers realising that they can ask for the impossible and get it for the price of a second hand car.

To help show the power of some of this new web stuff we have created a new site to help business see what is feasible for their sector – http://www.webwisebusiness.co.uk – it lets the customer cherry pick what they want and of course if they want the impossible then they can always stop dreaming and phone.

Hmmm…. Richard Harris or Alex Harvey? To Dream The Impossible Dream – difficult call – but I’d go with Alex.