Web 2.0: New Challenges for positioning on the Internet

Search engine optimization, usability, permission marketing and viral marketing are tools that have characterized the digital marketing of the first half of this decade. These tools, though still a necessary condition to compete in the Internet have also ceased to be a sufficient condition. The Web 2.0 revolution now required to broaden the perspective and open to new trends where consumers buy a much more active. And although the search engines continue to play a key role in generating qualified traffic, we must learn to manage a wider variety of actors, settings and plots of relationships where social networks are gaining an unusual role.

The traditional digital marketing, if you can qualify as traditional to what happened in the last ten years has been incorporating tactics and tools to meet a single strategy: attracting enough quality traffic to the websites and be able to convert this traffic in some kind of benefit to the company. These tools can be classified according to the specific objective they play within the life cycle of a visit:

1. Attracting visitors:

-Search Engine Optimization

-Pay Per Click Campaigns

-Banners

- E-mail marketing

- Advertising offline

2. Convert visitors into buyers

-Usability

3. Customer loyalty

Permission-marketing or e-mail marketing allowed

-Customization of content / supply

-Loyalty Programs

4. Convert customers prescribers

Viral-Marketing

-Recommendation (send to a friend)

In this simple scheme are included tactics most companies have implemented in recent years to get a return on investment from their Internet presence. To some extent, the planning was simple because the actors and the relations between them were also simple: on the one hand, a company that wants to extend its offer to consumers, on the other, potential customers, and between them, Internet as a means and support that relationship.

It was enough to analyze the behavior expected of potential customers, what language they speak, what search engines use, what words refer to our services or products, to design a good SEO plan that allowed us to reach out to these customers.

A website with good usability and a careful design facilitated the passage of visitors through our website and increased the likelihood of conversion, whether it get a contact, a purchase or a partnership.

Rewarding older clients communicate directly to their email new offers incentives for cross-selling allowed and repeated from previous clients, cultivating loyalty. And these good customers acting, its own accord as the best references to attract new users. All this in a more or less controlled and predictable.

Then came the Web 2.0

Although general search engines are still the main window on the Internet, we can not ignore the growing importance of social networks in generating quality traffic.

This is what has been called Web 2.0 with new patterns of relationships in which consumers buy a new role, either because they share information, forums, chats, or because they become opinion leaders or experts-well-blogs because they add their votes to reward or punish their favorite content, social bookmarking or insulted, or because producing or share your information, wikis, etc.

In any case, Web 2.0 means opening for anonymous Internet users a new opportunity where put forward their opinions, participating in a collaborative environment and where a significant influence on the generation of fashion, trends, product reputation, brand recognition, and so on. Companies can not ignore this trend and must learn to cope in this new ecosystem. Here's how.

From web-site to showcase business-unit

The profile of the target, more diffuse

When planning a new website, not only must take into account the profile of potential customer that, until now, were going the web, but this profile is now much more diffuse as they add new actors who can make an impact future performance of the site.

Thus, we consider that through a web site can come into contact not only with prospective buyers, but with importers, exporters, opinion leaders, bloggers, past clients, specifiers, analysts, references, excolaboradores, former employees ... That is a whole set of different actors with motivations completely unpredictable but with a new and amazing ability to influence the positioning of an online business.

New sources of traffic generation, more unpredictable

Similarly, traffic sources also have become more diffuse. Although search engines are been big traffic generators for both its natural results as paid links, news aggregators, wikis, or sectoral vertical search, social bookmarking, the price comparison and blogs can reach be, as in what cases, large generators of visitors.

From a business standpoint, however, would fail to question the quality of that traffic of the latter, and if a sufficient amount of it could become a client. In this regard, traffic from social sources can be traced, often in controversial encouraged so interested. How to live with this system, manage and influence it without breaking the subtle rules of conduct for the benefit of our company is a very complex task and perfectly assimilated in the online world, what they do PR agencies in the world offline.

Content management, more decentralized

In the maintenance of a conventional web, a single actor, the company produced and maintained centrally wanted to show the content on its website. To improve the dissemination of its contents, could occasionally publish any press release or article to submit a related sector portals. This was a production and distribution of content and centralized way.

Increasingly, however, Internet portals become great puzzles in which, by the ad hoc corporate content produced by the company, mingle and incorporate third-party content and features: Google Maps, information from the environment, comparators prices, booking airline tickets, currency converters ...

And at the same time each portal becomes more permeable to external content integration also increases the spread of their own content collected spontaneously or provoked in blogs, news aggregators, distributors of articles, sources of RSS content syndication ...

Or, what is, an integration that promotes the coexistence of a portal, not in isolation against the cyber environment, but closely related to content and functionality maintained by third parties that often, not even a business relationship. And, simultaneously, diffusion and redistribution of its contents that occurs outside the control of the company through blogs, chats, forums ...

Data traffic, more qualitative

This scenario is so unpredictable and difficult to manage conducive to refine the few tools that can give us clues about what happens on our websites: systems of traffic analysis. But with a twist: where before the emphasis was on purely quantitative data, monthly sessions, unique visitors, page views, now the focus moves to a more qualitative analysis, which look very closely those that involve data conversion online, offline or that are identified by a key performance indicator: download features, complete purchase, book ...

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

We entered a new paradigm in which the search engine optimization is still necessary but not sufficient condition to compete. When search engine optimization should add:

* An excellent management campaigns paid links for those keywords where you can not compete naturally.

* An excellent public relations management portal in the form of integration of third party content, broadcast content on other websites, management of generated views, votes on social bookmarking and incorporation into the portals of the tools and functionalities of Web 2.0

* An excellent content management, where we are able to generate a consistent and continuous new quality content, providing the most original and channel them into social networks by using the voting links, RSS feeds, etc..

All in all, evolved from a specific concept such as search engine optimization, to a much more global positioning as the Internet, taking into account the multiple areas, tools and capabilities that today allows the Network