Today’s internet applications are not like ones from five years ago. Just a short time ago, corporate website communication was primarily one-way conversation. Landing pages were often nothing more than a one-hit wonder. A company built a simple website and fed information to users who had little or no chance to interface with them.
Nowadays, web applications have become more rewarding not only for organizations but also for their visitors. Today’s web applications and sites are building technologies that leverage human behavior and desires, which consequently create a higher value to all parties involved.
Two-Way Communications
With the advent of social networks and community sites, users now embrace and reward companies who openly collaborate with them on the web. Just as friends are meeting up on the Internet, so are companies and its customers/users. People all over the world can now share experiences through these websites in a way never seen before. This wholesale change has led customers to expect more out of their company brands and how they want to communicate with them in a more interactive way.
We call it the “Living Web,” while Tim O’Reilly calls it bionic software. Whatever you want to call it, this interaction has created an incredible value to these applications; as each person adds his or her opinion, knowledge, or content to a given website, it becomes more credible and valuable to the next user AND the company hosting the “discussion.” Everyone benefits from this new digital age.
Some examples of the “Living Web” are sites like Yelp.com, Trip Advisor, Wikipedia and other Wikis, the personalization on Amazon.com, Google search engine, and more. The fact is that all of these applications would be one-dimensional without continual participation from its users whether good, bad or indifferent. The more people who engaged the content and each other, tag it, or link with it, the more intelligent the algorithms become as they learn how people search, learn, buy, behave, and so on.
Creating a Strong Community
It is imperative that companies today utilize this technology and realize that an application isn’t an “island” of code. It needs care and feeding (interaction and communication) to make it better and stronger. No one can simply ignore the “living, breathing” aspect of these sites. A company must build sites with this in mind, creating spaces where customers and users can interact, feel heard, and be responded to in kind.
Some of the ways to do this is to know the audience and anyone else who would be interested in coming to be a part of its community. Once it is understand who will be the “living” in the community, it’s mandatory to create an open, facilitated discussion area that is not focused on marketing or promoting products and services. The key to creating a strong community is to take the high road and not be self-serving. The audience will leave a community that is too sales-oriented and be gone for good.
The last thing to remember is that once the community is built and has an audience, the care and feeding doesn’t stop. Much like a pet, you can’t bring it home, give it one dish of food and leave it alone. A community needs the same daily attention in order to keep the audience properly directed and to be responsive to their needs.
It’s Alive!
How we interact with companies and brands on the web has made a huge shift. It’s a method no company can afford to ignore. The Living Web opens up an opportunity to serve the needs of a customer base and prospective users in a deeper and more responsive way. The companies that acknowledge this shift on technology consumption and do it right will reap the benefits of a strong audience base and better product feedback. Picture your site as a living being, maybe even the face of your customer, and you will surely treat it with the respect and care it deserves.
