Web 2.0

It’s no news that major corporations are pushing hard to develop a positive image using social networking channels — see the McDonald’s Quality Correspondence Campaign or the backfired Wal-Mart blogging foray — and neither is it news that companies aren’t afraid to use legal recourse to protect their interests… Napster, anyone? But an interesting article about a VW Subpoena to YouTube that appeared in Wired this morning shows a different mix of the two forces: a company taking legal action to protect its copyrighted material, which just so happens to be a piece of negative PR.

Basically, the video in contention is a spoof of a recent VW Golf commercial with some rather unflattering Nazi-themed overtones. Volkswagen filed a subpoena and is now looking to get the user’s identity from YouTube, who complies with the law but alerts users of the filing to give them a chance to respond. While this sort of thing is almost a daily occurrence with file-sharing networks, legal action with social media sites is a relatively new beast, and Wired wonders how dedicated social media sites will be to protecting the identities of their users as more cases like this appear.

As I touched on a couple of weeks ago, the web has a funny way of making temporal comments permanent, and biting those who post things against their better judgment. With major companies taking assertive (and certainly not unreasonable) motions to protect their copyright (and brand), users should really be aware that they’re playing in the real world when they post anything online. At the same time, social media sharing sites should do their best to protect their users — within limits — from themselves.

Already unique in the way it aggregates news stories from multiple sources and offers them in customizable RSS and Atom feeds, Google News took another bold step in the way it presents the news with the announcement that story participants will be able to comment on stories about them in the near future.

As the Natural Search Blog points out, the most interesting people to hear from in stories — publicly-owned, major companies — will likely not take up the opportunity to use this new feature. Caution is the better part of PR for most major companies, and the hurdles to drafting an accepted public statement may well make the story well over and done with before any comment is ever posted.

While as of today (almost a week after the announcement) a visit to the Google News homepage doesn’t show any stories tagged with the new feature, I think the move is very forward-thinking on Google’s part and should disintegrate the producer/consumer, story/subject lines that as a whole are under attack by Web 2.0. Now it’s just a matter of seeing exactly who’ll comment using the new system.

Throughout the blogosphere, people are commenting on last night’s unconventional political debate hosted by CNN (with a particularly great wrap-up by CNET News.com). In case you missed it, what makes this debate noteworthy — even on an internet marketing blog — is that all the questions were those posed by ordinary Americans posted on YouTube.

While the answers elicited in the debate weren’t that radical, filled with the usual political jargon and runarounds, the questions themselves were personal and direct in a way that those asked by an “expert” host generally are not. The questions covered a spectrum of issues on voter’s minds — from war, to healthcare, to cultural stigmas and some probing questions about candidate’s living habits and families. The faces of ordinary people speaking in plain language about issues passionate to them added a tremendous human element often missing in these kinds of debates, and the astonishing response by users (over 3900 questions were submitted) shows just how important grasping the internet will be to capturing the minds of a growing voting population.

The particularly Web 2.0 element of this whole event, is that long after it happens, it will be blogged about, responded to with more YouTube videos, talked about in chat rooms, forums, and over countless conversations in IM. And, pointing to the curious role that Google has in all of this, try a search for “Youtube CNN Debate” and you’ll see a great example of universal search.

It’s fascinating to watch the web and traditional media continue to butt heads, converge, and ultimately experiment in what media is inevitably becoming. This latest political forum was a great product of this work-in-progress, acknowledging how key the internet is to the lives and opinions of millions.

While the article I shared last Friday was all about the nitty gritty of growing links, this SEOmoz Article is all about targeting content that is meant to be linked to — or targeting the “linkerati,” as they are dubbed.

Using some hiliariously illustrated examples of the Googlebot and HotBot monster, Rand discusses the difference between your qualified customers, random web surfers and a group of people who are often ignored by the less-savvy developers — the bloggers, web site owners, and generally tech-friendly who do the vast majority of linking on the Internet. They’re not looking to buy your product, but they might find a story about a facet of your industry interesting, or some of your cutting commentary worth sharing with their friends. With Web 2.0 rolling very strongly, it is vital to the long-term success of a website that it be comprised of content worthy of being shared with the Internet-savvy audience.

It may seem an ironic situation, having to target people other than your actual sales prospects, but the importance of being popular in the web’s social circle is only bound to increase, especially as Google and MSN look towards personalized search as the next landscape for relevancy.