Web 2.0: new challenges for Internet positioning

Written by Fernando Maciá

Natural search engine positioning, usability, permission marketing or viral marketing are tools that have characterized digital marketing in the first half of this decade. These tools, although still a necessary condition for competing on the Internet, are no longer a sufficient condition. Today’s Web 2.0 revolution requires broadening the perspective and opening up to new trends in which consumers take on a much more active role. And although search engines continue to play a fundamental role in the generation of qualified traffic, it is necessary to learn to manage a greater variety of actors, scenarios and relationships, in which social networks are acquiring an unusual prominence.

Traditional digital marketing, if what has happened in the last ten years can be described as traditional, has been incorporating tactics and tools to fulfill a single strategy: to attract enough quality traffic to web portals and to be able to convert this traffic into some kind of benefit for the company. We could classify these tools according to the specific objective they fulfill within the life cycle of a visit:

1. Attract visitors:
   1. Natural positioning in search engines
   2. Pay-per-click campaigns
   3. Banners
   4. E-mail marketing
   5. Offline advertising
2. Convert visitors into customers
   1. Usability
3. Customer loyalty
   1. Permission marketing or e-mail marketing allowed
   2. Content/offer customization
   3. Loyalty programs
4. Converting customers into prescribers
   1. Viral marketing
   2. Recommendation (send to a friend)

This simple scheme includes most of the tactics that companies have implemented in recent years to obtain a return on investment from their Internet presence. To a certain extent, the planning was simple because the actors and the relationships between them were also simple: on the one hand, a company that wants to get its offer to consumers; on the other, potential customers; and, between the two, the Internet as the medium and support for this relationship.

It was enough to analyze the predictable behavior of potential customers – what language they speak, what search engines they use, what words they use to refer to our services or products – to design a good search engine positioning plan that would allow us to meet these customers.

A website with a good usability and a careful design facilitated the transit of visitors through our website and increased the chances of conversion, whether it was to get a contact, a purchase or a collaboration.

Rewarding previous customers or communicating new offers directly to their e-mails allowed to incentivize cross-buying and repeat purchases from previous customers, cultivating their loyalty. And these good customers acted, motu proprio, as the best referrals to attract new users. All this in a more or less controlled and predictable scenario.

And then came Web 2.0

Although general search engines continue to be the main showcase on the Internet, we cannot ignore the growing importance of social networks in generating quality traffic.

This is what has come to be known as Web 2.0 with new relationship schemes in which consumers acquire a new protagonism, either because they share information -forums, chats- or because they become opinion leaders or recognized experts -blogs- or because they add their votes to reward or punish their preferred or rejected contents -social bookmarks- or because they produce or share their information -wikis-, etc.

In any case, Web 2.0 means the opening of new opportunities for anonymous Internet users to make their opinions heard, to participate in a collaborative environment and to have an important influence on the generation of fashions, trends, product prestige, brand recognition, etc. Companies cannot ignore this evolution and must learn to navigate in this new ecosystem. Let’s see how.

From the web-showcase to the web-business unit

Target audience profile, more diffuse

When planning a new website, we must not only take into account the profile of the potential customer to whom, until now, we were directing the website, but this profile is now much more diffuse as new actors are added that can have an impact on the future performance of the site.

Thus, we have to consider that through a website we can get in contact not only with future buyers but also with importers, exporters, opinion leaders, bloggers, previous clients, prescribers, analysts, referents, former collaborators, ex-employees… In other words, a whole set of different actors with absolutely unpredictable motivations but with a new and amazing capacity to influence the positioning of a company on the Internet.

New, more unpredictable sources of traffic generation

Similarly, traffic sources have also become more diffuse. Although search engines continue to be the major traffic generators, both through natural results and paid links, news aggregators, wikis, vertical or sectorial search engines, social bookmarks, price comparators and blogs can become, depending on the case, major generators of visitors.

From a business point of view, however, the question remains as to the quality of the latter’s traffic, and whether a sufficient proportion of it could be converted into customers. In this sense, traffic from social sources can often originate from self-serving controversies. Knowing how to coexist with this system, manage it and influence it without transgressing its subtle rules of conduct for the benefit of our company is a very complex task that can be perfectly assimilated, in the online world, to what Public Relations agencies do in the offline world.

Content management, more decentralized

In conventional web maintenance, a single actor, the company, produced and maintained centrally the content it wanted to display on its website. To improve the dissemination of its contents, it could occasionally publish a press release or send an article to related industry portals. It was a unidirectional and centralized production and dissemination of content.

Increasingly, however, Internet portals are turning into huge puzzles in which, along with the corporate content produced ad hoc by the company itself, intermingle and incorporate third-party content and functionalities: Google Maps, environmental information, price comparators, airline ticket booking, currency converters…

And, at the same time that each portal becomes more permeable to the integration of external content, the dissemination of its own content collected spontaneously or triggered by blogs, news aggregators, article distributors, RSS content syndication sources, etc., is also increasing.

Or, in other words, an integration that favors the coexistence of a portal, no longer in isolation from its cyber environment, but intimately related to contents and functionalities maintained by third parties with whom, many times, there is not even a commercial relationship. And, simultaneously, a dissemination and redistribution of its contents that takes place outside the company’s own sphere of control through blogs, chats, forums…

Traffic data, more qualitative

This unpredictable and difficult-to-manage scenario leads to the fine-tuning of the few tools that can give us clues about what is happening on our websites: traffic analysis systems. Although with a nuance: where before the emphasis was placed on purely quantitative data – monthly sessions, unique visitors, page views – now the focus shifts to a more qualitative analysis, where data that implies an online or offline conversion, or that is identified with a key performance indicator: downloading features, completing a purchase, making a reservation, etc., are looked at under the magnifying glass.

How do we prepare our website to compete in this more complex, more unpredictable, more diffuse and more difficult to control environment?

We are entering a new paradigm in which natural positioning in search engines is still a necessary but not sufficient condition to compete. To natural search engine optimization we should add:

• Excellent management of paid link campaigns, for those keywords where it is not possible to compete naturally.
• Excellent management of the portal’s public relations, in the form of integration of third-party content, dissemination of content on other portals, management of the opinions generated, votes on social bookmarks and incorporation of Web 2.0 tools and functionalities in the portals.
• Excellent content management, where we are able to consistently and continuously generate new, original, quality content and facilitate its channeling to the social networks through the use of voting links, RSS feeds, etc.

With all this, we evolved from a specific concept such as natural positioning in search engines, to a much more global concept such as positioning on the Internet, taking into account the multiple areas, tools and capabilities that the Web allows today.