Alexander Craig's blog

I just love “Web2.0”.  It’s all about collaboration, sharing and niche expertise.  It’s a world where everyone sticks to what they’re good at, helps others and just gets along great.  But what, if anything, can we learn from the shiny new world of syndication, mashups and web services that will actually help us run businesses better?

The answer is, I believe, a number of things.  I’ll try and round up the main lessons we can learn here:

1. Think strategically — believe it or not, the best Web2.0 applications, like the best businesses, have a solid strategy behind them, usually encapsulated by a clear and well communicated vision.  Take Freshbooks.com, they do “painless billing” and make sure it is clear that’s what they are all about.  Check out their home page.  Up front and centre you can take a tour or watch a video and they make sure you kow other people are using it.
2. Focus on what you do well — specialisation works well in the Web2.0 world.  Find a niche, stick to it and do an excellent job.  As a business it is sometimes frighteningly easy to lose focus and as any Ansoff matrix will testify diversification and be very dangerous.  Flickr.com do photo sharing (they’d be the perfect example if they weren’t trying to tag video on the side but that’s another story) and do it so well that many other applications (from Moo.com to WordPress) have tied in seamlessly on the basis that users will want to stick with Flickr for pictures.  So good are they in fact that even Getty Images include images from Flickr in their library!
3. Move quickly, be flexible — remember the Microsoft adverts about 5 years ago that introduced the term “agile business” to the common vocabulary?  Well, if you want to do well in Web2.0 you need to be agile because while there are many great opportunities to be had out there and if you don’t move quickly and stay ahead of the game someone will already be there before you arrive.  Business can be very like that too!  Look at Google Street View, they realised that the mapping market was crowding up so they took a pretty quick and quantum leap to stay ahead of the game.
4. Make access easy — I love the fact that I can get up and running with a Web2.0 app in no time.  Our customers rightly demand the same ease of access and use from our businesses so we’d better make sure we’re as accessible as possible.  Take this very blog.  Using WordPress.com the site was up and going in a matter of hours.  Now that’s service.
5. Be happy to share — it makes you a nice person and lets not forget how important that is: people buy from people.  It also makes you a better business, because if you share what you do with others word gets out and before you know it you have a team of advocates working for you just because you’ve made their life easier.  This was the secret of the success behind YouTube, people could share videos and YouTube made it as easy as possible for people to do so by embedding YouTube content within their own site or service.  Word got out, people signed up and next thing you know Google bought them for $1.65 billion.  That’s a nice little earner by anyone’s standards.
6. Partner and peer — and ditto to the above, people should be saying good things about you.  But think carefully about who you work with because, just like WordPress, Twitter and Flickr you want to make sure your business partners are an excellent and complementary fit.  The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts and all that!

I’ve seen this in practice, when thinking about how best to run my own businesses, when advising my clients and when putting together Web2.0 solutions.  The parallels between what happens online and what we do in “the real world” are remarkably well aligned.  The reason is probably because, if you take a moment to stand back and think about it, much of it is common sense.

The best thing about common sense: it never grows old and there is no harm in repeating it because we often forget it!