It Rubs the Lotion on Its Skin or It Gets the Hose Again – Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0

“It Rubs the Lotion on Its Skin. It does this whenever it is told.”

In the film the Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer Jodie Foster’s characer, Clarice, is trying to catch, taunts his victim with this instruction. Shivering, crying, his victim attempts to get him to see her as human.

That this is the point of his fury is what I have found the most fascinating element of the entire film.

What does this have to do with Web 2.0, or Web 1.0? Or anything?

It has everything to do with it. We’re going to come back to this point momentarily. Let’s get the definitions out of the way, so we’re on the same page.

If you want to understand what has everyone so excited about Web 2.0, you have to look beyond the definition of the person who coined the Web 2.0 phrase, into its real word application. And to do that effectively, you must remember what Web 1.0 was/is.

Imagine the internet as we saw it in the early 90s, before it became the world wide web, when it was many networked computers, no longer a government project, but not quite past the point of university use. You could arguably call this the Internt’s beta period.

We accessed the internet for completely different things, for totally different reasons. Most of the people were having discussions with each other or researching. There were very few actual documents out there, and there was no such thing as a web site yet.

Then came the Mosaic browser. html, cgi-bins and all kinds of programming languages and tools that allowed us to have visual representations of information on the internet, in a way everyone who was connected to the internet could equally access and see pretty much the same way, as long as they had the browser to translate the code of the pages.

At this point, ecommerce was about having a catalog of your products for your potential clients to discover. A large part of that discovery process was ranking well in search engines, and still is today. Here is where this becomes relevant to you, and how the example of the Silence of the Lambs was important.

In Web 1.0, the customer is treated as as invisible entity, a number, a source of cash flow. Smart marketers went beyond just selling to their market, and formed relationships with them. However, these relationships were somewhat limited by the hours in the day, and technology.

If you wanted a relationship with a potential client, you first need to get them to get to your site. Once they got to your site, they’d have to opt in to get messages from you. Once opted in, you had to follow up. You could talk on the phone with people, but again, there’s only so many hours in the day.

Alternatively, you could also have forums, or other forms of community in place for them to have their own discussions, and you’d just poke your head in from time to time.

With Web 1.0, the web site owners, whether commercial or not, are the ones with the power. Yes, you had the people who went the extra step, and tried to bond with the people who were visiting their sites as best they could.

Some people used that power tyranically. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the people who came to their sites, and some of those people who really, at heart, wanted to know they could get personal help for a problem they had.

People who embrace Web 1.0 so fiercely that they refuse to latch on to Web 2.0 amuse me, and in my mind I picture them talking to their clients the same way the serial killer did to the girl he had captured. They seem to be saying “You are in my web site, on my email list, and you will stay there and do what I say! *insert evil laughter*”

And right now, they’re the ones getting the hose.

Yes, you should still build a list, but list building isn’t all it’s about anymore. Email lists are often closed systems. Email is on the decline, so having a big and/or responsive list is more important than ever, because the people who were religiously reading your messages before are now on Facebook. And since Facebook is effectively integrating the tools of the web into their site, with a user base of 33 million people, if you want to reach the people who are in your list and not responding, you have to be on Facebook, too.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Where was I… Oh, the Tyranny of the site owners.

Now, with the birth, and later adoption of Web 2.0, the web began to change. First, there was the inclusion period, and the beginning of a transfer of power. If you owned a site, and you wanted to keep that site relevant, you got yourself a blog. It made you more relevant to the topic being discussed, and made you a more involved part of the conversation whether your blog was active or passive.

When blogs became popular, commenting on issues that matter were no longer taking place in forums and email discussion groups, which were largely closed systems. They began to shift to open systems. And when the place where the conversations were taking place shifted, the power of the web began to shift. Bloggers were relevant to political discussions, and their actions changed the course of elections, which changed the course of policy, which changed the course of history.

People began to see what power blogs had in politics, and they took the personal nature of political blogs and personal blogging, and unleashed them on business. Pretty soon, if you had a business with any element online, if you were smart, you got a blog up as fast as you could.

And here was another interesting shift. RSS subscription put the control back in the hands of the customer again. There’s no way to force a person to stay subscribed to your feed (beyond psychological need to follow you, I mean).

As this shift started, people who stuck to the Platinum rule of traffic, (which is to create Great Content and get it Noticed constantly), were rewarded. People who treated the Web 2.0 world with 1.0 vision began to fail.

More of the people I know online have lost businesses in the past six months than I’ve seen since I started my business online. Almost all of them were due to being underfunded. And the two main reasons for being underfunded were that they either stuck in the old ways that worked online, and used them exclusively, or they were exposed for questionable practices and word spread as fast as Web 2.0 could carry it.

In the world of Web 2.0, everyone knows if you’re just a mean person, or if you were reacting to something mean that was done to you. In this Web 2.0, if you burn your clients, all of their friends and networks known a minute later. And the way they are telling them is in public and exposed on the web.

On the other hand, if you are wonderful, brilliant, giving, and helpful, people will say so right on your site. If they want to tell their friends about you, they can do so in a way that becomes viral.

So, in a nutshell, as it relates to ecommerce, Web 1.0 was a collection of billboards with checkout counters. People came, they bought or they didn’t buy. As clients, their only real way to make a vendor accountable was to compliment/complain to them, to their credit card company, or if really badly burned, the Better Business Bureau or various other scam reporting sites.

On the web company side, you could form a relationship with your visitors, but it wasn’t as easy to communicate with them. If you were a power-hunry tyrant, once they made a purchase you ignored them, killing your true path to wealth, which is in the follow-up sales.

In Web 1.0 communication was one-way, and mostly done in private (even many forums, and email discussion groups were either moderated, or not viewable by those who weren’t members). There was two-way communication, but mostly over email, and again, mostly private

Web 2.0 is the period in which communication isn’t just two-way, it’s in public, and it’s in all directions.

Not only can it happen between you and your clients on your blog, others witness those conversations and draw conclusions from your level of knowledge, or even your conduct by following your part of the conversation on a regular basis.

Your business benefits by being able to identify where that conversation stream is taking place and sometimes just getting into that conversation with solutions brings new clients and breathes new life into a struggling enterprise. Your clients benefit by getting to know more about you and your company before they make a sale, and can post-sale interaction in multiple ways.

Contributions to the global conversation are valued. Interaction is emphasized. In one sentence, Web 1.0 is a network of billboards, and Web 2.0 has added a layer of application to those networks so that the people using those structures can talk about them, or about anything else.

Web 2.0 is the web in which everyone has the tools to fully participate, and the power structure is built upon constructive contribution to the conversation. Web 1.0 is dependent on observation, Web 2.0 is dependent on conversation.

Now, if the whole thing about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is so thrilling, why am I having this week’s discussion mostly on Social Media?

Because that’s where your advantage is as an individual in a large corporation, someone who works at home, an online marketer, or a small business person. A guide to how to get traffic from Web 2.0 alone would be irresponsible of me, in this context – the culture and best practices behind social media as they relate to small business are much more important.

And it’s not just about getting more links, and while it can get more traffic to your site, examining Web 2.0 and social media in terms of that alone is to miss the entire point of why these tools exist.

If you learn the culture of social media first, you’ll have one hundred fold the success than if you just think of Web 2.0 in terms of links and Social Media in terms of optimization: these are among the things they can be used for, not the POINT of the exercise.

Next time we resume (which may be in several hours, or several days), we’re going to identify the types of social media that exist, and how they are important and useful to your business. We’ll also talk about how to approach them responsibly. In future posts, I’ll also be examining what some of them are, and how to embrace them.

Please feel free to add your own expertise by commenting, and don’t forget to fill out the link – I’m a DoFollower.