The long tail describes a wider range of products that are more specific getting sold less often, rather than the ‘head’ being more common/generic products being sold more often. A great image create by leftclick can be seen below:

Effectively the dinosaur represents a curve on the graph, where there more generic or common a product, the increase of the results. On the other end the more specific the term, the less results occur. Following the example by leftclick, how would you leverage the long tail in web 2.0?

If you were in the hotel business and you had a resort you could describe yourself as a ‘hotel’ or perhaps even the location your hotel was. This would be a very generic term, and really ‘the head’. If you were more specific, you could use key works such as ‘accommodation’, ‘Queenstown’, ‘backpacker’, ‘wheelchair access’, ‘pets allowed’ and the results would be fairly narrow. Putting this keywords into Google may give you the results of a few million (the head), to a few hundred or less (the tail).

The more specific your key words, the more specific your audience – leveraging the long tail can yield lower costs in advertising while also increasing your conversion rate.

By doing the following you can target advertisements on the long tail in the example above. This also means you will have lower costs (because there is less competition) and have higher conversion rates (because the target audience is looking for services similar to what you offer).

Another great tip is from leftclick is focused pages, targeted at these specialised search terms. What this basically means is, don’t rely on your advertisements bringing in visitors, create pages or content so the search engines results will list the page (in in turn bring them to your site). In the above example creating an online guest book, or encouraging user reviews (even better if they blog about it and link to your site) are a few good ways to create content.

So what if your a site like Amazon? Similar approach works but there is a few more tips which you can use. If you have a large product range, once the visitor is on your site you might want to direct them towards more generic items you have for sale. The products are more popular and as a first time vistior you might be more interested.

Perhaps you’ve become a member of a site like Amazon and bought a few items. Soon you wont to direct your members towards a little more ‘specific’ material. This will have the opposite effect in that existing members who have seen the common/generic stuff can get pushed towards the more specific terms. By doing this you are encouraging existing users to branch out more.

Twitter, the online social networking site is a great example of an innovative company embracing this technology. Although their premise is simple (allowing its users to post text-based messages of up to 140 characters long), they have adopted APIs, which allow other web services and applications to integrate with their site.

Some examples of applications and other sites that have used API’s twitter have provided are as follows:

Another Tweet On The Wall – Enter in a Hash tag it will start to display random twitter posts in a nice flash page one at a time. If the user has posted a link to a picture (also through an API), then it will load the image and display it as the background.

Twitter Updates – I totally forgot, but on my site you can see that there is a section on the side which show my latest twitter posts. It pulls the data through the use of twitter’s API’s.

Twitterrific - Desktop application for the Mac which lets you use all of twitters features, without ever needing to go to the original site. They also provided an application for the iPhone which does similar things.

In fact, there are far too many examples to write down here so if you are interested check out the following sites which have more examples, and tutorials on Twitter API’s.

• Smashing Magazine – 50 Twitter Tools and Tutorials for Designers and Developers
• Twitter API Wiki – The official Twitter API wiki, including resources, helps, examples and further information.

The use of API’s in Web 2.0 provide unforeseen opportunities to the core website. It allows 3rd party developers to use the data inside the website and extend the features, functionality in creative and innovative ways.

I would like to welcome everyone who is studying Web 2.0 this semester. Due to doing this subject I’ve create a new category (web 2.0) which I shall be using to post my Web 2.0 subject material. As most of the work was done in setting up the blog last semester, I’m hoping to spend a bit more time on tweaking the site and adding in more detailed information in the static pages.

– stay tuned

I can see my blog entry how it would appear on my site, as I’m typing it. I can also go back an edit entries as well. The speed is fairly slow to be honest. It appears as if every character needs to get sent back to the server, so I can type a lot quicker than what the text appears on the screen. It hasn’t picked up on the categories features of wordpress correctly and it also appears as though I can’t add in tags easily.

It also doesn’t allows me to upload photos through iPhoto, and  would need to export the photo from iPhoto first before I could use it. This isn’t any different in how I would have to do it through the web browser, but considering that this is an application installed on my computer I would of expected it to have some advantage.

Well so far, I would rank Adobe Contribute about 1/10 and I would have no reason to use it in the future to write up a blog post on my site. (I’ll have to log in later to fix up the categories and tags)

• http://www.jason-v.com/2009/08/01/have-you-googled-your-name
• http://www.jason-v.com/2009/08/10/web-presence-update

To give a bit of re-cap the site was started and the first post went up on July 30th, 2009. At the stage a search for my name on google didn’t turn out to well, and that is to be expected. So how have things gone in this short period?

In the graph below you can see how I’ve gone on a month by month basis. It might be a little early to tell but you can see a steady trend in the amount of visitors to site each month. If you double the current month (roughly halfway through it) this trend continues.

The amount of bandwidth being used though hasn’t been steady as I’ve seen this go up and down. Recently I started uploading more images and photos which has seen the amount of bandwidth being used jump up a fair bit (realistically though it is such a small amount for a website). It might be worth mentioning that I now have caching working on the site as well as a few other optimisations done with some help from Shane (Hosting Guy).

Monthly websites statistics measuring the amount of hits, visitors each month and bandwidth used each month. - 16th October, 2009

So how searchable is my name? Has it improved? Below is a list of searches on two different variations of my name. Jason Van Dyk & “Jason Van Dyk”. I’ve also compared to the results taken on the 10th August 2009.

• Search on www.google.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 6th & 7th vs. 18th & 19th (Improved by 12 spots)
• Search on www.google.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 3rd & 4th vs. 25th & 26th (Improved by 22 spots)
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 1st, 2nd & 4th vs. 1st, 2nd & 7th (Maintained 1st & 2nd, Improved by 3 spots)
• Search on www.yahoo.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st, 2nd & 5th vs. 1st, 2nd & 6th (Maintained 1st & 2nd, Improved by 1 spot)
• Search on www.bing.com for – Jason Van Dyk = 2nd & 4th vs. 3rd (Improved by 1 spot and added an extra hit)
• Search on www.bing.com for – “Jason Van Dyk” = 1st vs. 1st, 5th & 10th (Maintained 1st, lost 2 hits)

In summary doing a search for my name will either bring up my site, a profile on a social networking site or some other form a hit which is directly related to me. The results have improved dramatically to have top 10 hit amongst all search engines. This is great and has meant that achieving my goal is working.

How have you gone? What are some of the steps you’ve taken to increase your web presence?

I’ve committed to my goal and have reached it within the time frame. You can now google my name, and results appear. So what is going to happen now? Well I will be posting less about Enterprise 2.0 related topics and instead will broaden the topics to cover more of my interests.

Today I’m taking the steps required to claim your blog on Technorati. I’ve mentioned this place before, but I’ll give you a quick summary:

Technorati is the blogsphere platforms as Google is the directory of the web?… or perhaps…. Technorati = Blogs, Google = Sites.

So here is some yummy food for the Technorati spiders/bots – sg4ji9bahx (and also my code to claim my blog). Thanks guys for putting up with this post.

Also in case you were wondering my rank is now – 1,603,173!

Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek (Live at Fearless Music, NYC)

So Imogen Heap has done some amazing stuff as a musician and more importantly she is using Enterprise 2.0 concepts. She is engaging in two way feedback with her fans on a daily basis and has created a sense of anticipation that surrounds her day to day life.  So what has she done? How is she a great example of enterprise 2.0?

She as created a lot of accounts on the web where she allows fans to follow, write comments, give feedback and more importantly she interacts back with everyone (myspace, twitter, youtube, etc) . Imogen Heap is putting a lot of time and effort in communicating what is going on in her life through these technologies which seems to be paying off. Through the use of twitter she keeps fans informed and has even asked them for advice, guidance, ideas in relation to her latest album. Back on myspace you can preview her latest album (which has now been released) and get a feel for the music.

I only knew about Imogen Heaps use of these technologies after reading an article called The New Music Business Model: Imogen Heap at Deep Drive Marketing which is really well written. I recommend you head over to their site and read it as I don’t want steal the light away from the effort put into the post by the author.

So is Imogen Heap takings things to far by letting people know what is going on in her life? I don’t think so, because she is doing so of her own back and enjoys it . I actually prefer the way she is engaging fans compared to Britney Spears. If you don’t know already Britney Spears has a twitter account that has 3,079,749 followers compared to Imogen Heaps 997,892 followers (as of today). So what is the difference between the two? Britney has someone manage the account for her and the tweets are generally broad and informative, Imogen Heap on the other hand are personal. She invites people to help out or give feedback, contribute photos, etc and “talks” to people.

Imogen Heap also has an account on youtube, where she posts video blogs (vlogs) – http://www.youtube.com/imogenheap It is a place where you can see inside of her home as she posts, but also get a look at her latest music as she officially releases it.

So is this method of using Enterprise 2.0 concepts and technology going to change the music industry? Personally I don’t think it will change the industry but it will change relationship between fans and musicians forever. For those of you who are starting a band, this concepts Imogen Heap has used can be applied easily to your group and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of some up coming stars who get popular through the use of Enterprise 2.0 over the next few years.

Well this checkpoint will be a subjective one taken by your personal impression. Before I get you let me know what you think, I would like to tell you how I’m feeling so far.

Practical ability to leverage off web 2.0 to enhance personal branding.

• Bought a domain (jason-v.com) and found hosting within Australia (Sydney)
• Established the site using a leading open source solution (WordPress)
• Created a Twitter account (jasonvandyk) and integrated into my site
• Made available RSS feeds for users to subscribe to
• Established a Facebook account
• Regular two way feedback on both my site and other blogs through various commenting systems

Manner and consistency of participation in weekly workshops activities and your contribution.

• Regular posts on Enterprise 2.0 topics based on workshop activities and self inspired topics
• Regular feedback on workshop activities, through digitalorgs.net and student blogs
• The using of trackbacks to highlight relative posts and relation to workshop activities (only student so far)

Ability to appraise Web2.0 strategies and solutions for organisational and personal success.

• Continuous engagement in self improvement of my personal brand
• Ensured Andrew McAfee’s SLATES has been used and applied to my site
• Used critical thinking to post on the effects of “negative web presence” when most of the focus has been on creating a positive
• Created topics / posts which are relative and trending (above post) which has become a page 1 ranking using basic / common key words

Ability to engage successfully with the wider community (including  people outside of QUT) using Web 2.0 tools and techniques.

• The use of twitter to raise an issue with the font colour of the comment box which received feedback and highlighted additional fields the needed to be modified
• Posting feedback on other blogs, which has been constructive – ie: http://brendanread.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/wiki-at-worki
• Received feedback on most posts on my site (finding various styles/ posts enabled greater engagement than others – ie: long posts/ no images = less engagement)

Leadership via the ability to contribute to the structure and format of the workshop activities, and the smooth running of the online community.

• Provided feedback to surveys posted by the lecture
• Identified problems / hurdles students are having and created posts to aid – Your blog – Getting over the first hurdles
• Suggesting ideas to improve or expand on the current activities – http://www.digitalorgs.net/wp/?p=97#comments
• Comments on student blogs to give additional value on their posts – http://benmccallum.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/to-twitter-or-not-to-twitter/
• Creating posts, that help inspire others. The result in similar topics or mentions – http://enterprise.anotherbyte.net/2009/08/ways-i-promote-my-blogs/
• Posting this checkpoint post early and allowing students to read this. Providing a baseline and example.

There are many posts, which address the criteria and I find it hard to highlight each one. I’ve categories all relevant posts in the “Study” category. A lot which have already received feedback from Jason Watson and students.

Overall I’m making good progress and my site/posts as a whole is an example of this. I’m using existing web 2.0 technologies whilst exploring new ones constantly. I would appreciate any comments or feedback as I’ve taken the steps in making this publicly accessible for everyone. (let me know if you want me to comment on your reflective post!).

This got me thinking about the importance of creating a strong brand name. A brand, an image, something which stands out and makes consumers want it! There are some very good examples of how companies brand themselves well such as: Coca-Cola, MacDonalds, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Apple are another great example, but not only do they manage their company brand well they create a very strong product brand for each of the product lines they sell. One way they do that is by engage an emotional response. They associate a great experience, easy to use and a product that makes your life more enjoyable with it. So how quickly did it take for you to look at the picture of a person’s silhouette, bright background, with white head phones before you realised it was for Apple, and then related to iPod / iTunes? I bet that you would of picked up on it before I asked the question (maybe I should of removed the iPod wording).

So besides creating a company brand or a product brand, how can you create your own personal brand?

• Get yourself a business card (paper, electronic, etc) – People need to establish who you are and how to get back in contact with you
• Network yourself, before you need to network
• Create yourself a resume! Nearly every job requires one, so give this some attention
• Get yourself a domain (www.mydomain.com) and ditch (subdomain.com). If you don’t want to blog, create a static page at least
• Produce your own content, don’t just consume what you read. Add value to yourself by sharing
• Integrate your social profiles / online profiles (eg: Twitter, Facebook, LinkkedIn)
• You don’t always have to agree
• Remember your brand isn’t just your web presence
• Become an assets for your co-workers, business and clients

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you have created your own brand. Any stories in how branding work in your favour when you least expected it?

So lets have a look at what Enterprise 1.0 is and compare it with Enterprise 2.0:

Taken from http://www.e2conf.com/about/what-is-enterprise2.0.php

If you compare the two tables you will see the differences between the two. Business can also transition from a Enterprise 1.0 driven organisation to an Enterprise 2.0 driven organisation over time. There are strong benefits in that Enterprise 2.0 allows the knowledge of many accessible to many. Information is no longer constrained to help files, e-mails, books and traditional methods. Most importantly, Enterprise 2.0 is happening now (with or without you).

Professor Andrew McAfee, formally introduced the concept of Enterprise 2.0 in 2007. One of the easiest ways of describing the technology the enables Enterprise 2.0 (without showing or describing the technology itself) is by SLATES (or S.L.A.T.E.S.).

S – Search
L – Links
A – Authorship
T – Tags
E – Extensions
S – Signals

These concepts were quickly identified as an Enterprise 2.0 checklist. This concept has been developed further in recent times (FLATNESSES) but the 6 key concepts are still there. We can identify Enterprise 2.0 technologies using SLATES or more recently FLATNESSES, so lets move on to Enterprise 2.0 platforms.

Chances are that you are using these or have at least seen them. In fact I can guarantee it (your on my Blog – that you can search, view links, read articles I’ve written and allowed you to provide feedback, views tags I’ve used on content, seen extensions like my twitter updates and one of the ways I’ve signalled this is by using RSS feeds).

Wikis

Blogs

Mashups

Online Communities

Social Bookmarking

Social Networking

Differences between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0 – check
Ability to identify technology that uses Enterprise 2.0 – check
Available platforms which helps oraganisations use Enterprise 2.0 technology? – check

So, do we know what Enterprise 2.0 is?

It seems that a few people are interested in organisations and sites that are actively using it. I’ll try gather a few sites together and share some examples in the near future.