Can Web 2.0 Support Families?

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding whether or not to use social media to interact with potential website visitors.  In order to make that decision it is important to look at the current social media landscape, your company’s focus and your website.

What is Web 2.0?Web 2.0 means that users are no longer limited by what they can find and download (Web 1.0).  Now users can upload and create their own internet content without needing extensive expertise in programming code.  Users can also refashion what they have found elsewhere and link it to their own work and that of others[i].    It is important to recognize that information posted to the web will be repurposed and repackaged by users.  It is also important to stay connected to a site’s users, to identify user’s informational needs and how they are repackaging information found your site.  One way of doing this is to use other social media sites to both drive users to your site and to interact with them.  

Social Media or Web 2.0?Social Media has become synonymous with Web 2.0, or the ability to quickly and easily create and share user-generated content.  There are hundreds of different ways to share information on the web, including: bookmarks, blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP.  Kaplan and Haenlein[ii] identify six different types of social media:  Collaborative Projects (Wikipedia), Blogs and Microblogs (Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter), Content Communities (YouTube, Vimeo), Social Networking Sites (Facebook, MySpace), Virtual Game Worlds (World of Warcraft) and Virtual Social Worlds (Second Life).   There are also a variety of social networking platforms which aggregate social media—the most popular of which is Facebook.  LinkedIn, Ning, and Google+ are examples of other social media aggregating platforms.  Facebook boasts 500 million active users, with 50% of those users visiting their Facebook newsfeed on a daily basis and 200 million accessing Facebook via a mobile device.   Facebook users are nothing if not prolific in their ability to share information originally posted to News sites, Government, Nonprofit or Business websites, and their own user-generated text, videos or photos.

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[i] Shuen, Amy and Laurent Simon. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. Beijing, etc.: 0’Reilly, 2008. Print.

[ii] Kaplan, Andreas M.; Michael Haenlein (2010). "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media". Business Horizons 53 (1): 59–68. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003. ISSN 0007-6813. Retrieved 2010-09-15.