Is web2.0 useful to businesses?

Before attending thishappened last night I was invited by Garrick Jones to attend an informal discussion on web2.0 hosted at the Hospital, a very chichi private club in Soho.

Nothing could have been more further away from how I thought businessmen perceive the value of the now 3 year old term. I should have known better, of course and quickly recalled a client who asked me last year to produce a document on the business value of growing a community online. le sigh.

Here are some answers to parts of that conversation that stood out for me, since the conversation was pretty much taken over by 4 quite aggressive, serious types in a room of 20 sheepish looking observers (i’d kill to know who on earth these people were!).

1. The future of the web is NOT in paying people for their time.

That’s called work. People interact online because it’s fun, they learn stuff, they laugh, they read and educate themselves about the world, and they can meet new people in ways noone would have thought possible. Oh, and Second Life is not a good example of monetisation on the web (WoW is much better at it).
Paying contributors for their time and effort has proven to be an unsuccessful model (check out some thought about this on theWealth of Networks Chapter 4, an article in the O’Reilly radar, and the founder of wikitravel). A vivid example is why, Yahoo answers won against Google answers.

2. Facebook, mySpace, Second Life and Boingboing aren’t the only things online.

These 4 were the most used examples during the entire conversation ( a gentleman from Nokia mentioned Get Satisfaction which was the only new example) and I do not think they represent the spectrum of web2.0 interactions.

3. Stop thinking the Internet is just a dump.

Not unlike a huge library where people don’t put the books back where they left them, the web is full of information which isn’t relevant to EVERYONE but to SOME. Live with that and leave it alone. Not everything is meant to be organised and controlled. Again think word “fun”.

4. Web2.0 can be stronger than corporations, even the online corporations and if you don’t take control of your company’s voice online, you can be sure someone else will.

I have 2 words for you as worthy examples:HD-DVD and Crapwest. If you don’t want something like this to happen to your company every time you piss people off, take part in the conversation online, the worst thing that can happen is that people will challenge you to offer better services.

So in short web2.0 is immensely useful to businesses if they’re wiling to dig a little deeper than the Facebook “you have a new message” emails. (yes someone did refer to that as an example of web2.0 interactions!)

I won’t even try to address some of the silli comparisons to traditional warlord models that were brought up and I wish I had stayed longer talk through some of these points with people, but I had to dash off to a much lovelier crowd in Shoreditch.