Inspired Epiphany

Websites like MySpace, YouTube, del.ici.ous and many others have literally changed the way people use the Internet. These interactive, social online communities have given birth to the term "Web 2.0". This term is used to describe any application that allows users to interact - either with the application or with each other.

Web 2.0's most common elements are social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, video and audio, and surveys and polls. A couple of these types have been discussed in detail below. You can easily integrate the power of Web 2.0 into your marketing plan to increase your website traffic, to brand your name or your business, to increase your credibility, and to increase sales.

Online communities like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Orkut are all social networking websites. Essentially, they provide a place for like minded people to gather and socialize. MySpace is by the most well-known and most powerful vessel of its kind. Most people these days have a MySpace page and the site gets an obscene amount of traffic.

Many marketers today have incorporated the use of MySpace into their marketing plan. However, like forum marketing, there is a right way and wrong way to promote your business. Once you've created your profile, you start adding friends, and then join some targeted groups. You can send out messages to all of "your friends" through the broadcast feature, however, you cannot blatantly advertise. You want to used the broadcast to bring "your friends" back to your profile page, where you can advertise as much as you want to.

Social bookmarking is not as much a social community as it is a way to share your bookmarked or "favorite" websites with others. When you want to find something on a social bookmarking site you just type in the keywords and look at the results. Members of the site have "tagged" their bookmarked sites using keywords and then the site appears in the search results for those tags. The more times your pages have been tagged, the higher it goes in those search results.

It's a good idea to make it possible for others to tag your site, by putting social bookmarking buttons on your pages and simply inviting visitors to bookmark the page. Many feel social bookmarking will eventually replace the search engines as the way Internet uses search for information. Onlywire.com is a website that allows you to submit sites to multiple social bookmarking sites all in one place.