Web 2.0 is dead – at least it’s on its way out. That was brought home to me this week when I attended the 2008 Supernova conference in San Francisco. This executive conference had a great mix of corporate executives, the usual Web 2.0 valley crowd, and a very strong mix of academics. The experience reminded me of the experiences I had back in the dot com days in about 2000 when I attended the Brand Value Strategy Conference. I’ll never forget watching the 'expert' panelists that included Cyndi Crawford and Whoopie Goldberg, advising the audience on how many millions it took to build a brand. I knew right then and there that the dot com days were going to be over…and they were.

You get a very similar sense with the current Web 2.0 discussion. I encourage you to listen to the podcast to learn more…but here’s a summary:  

 

Web 2.o has served its purpose - it has created an expectation of interaction on the part of consumers, partners, employees, and citizens. But the Web 2.0 paradigm is changing - and fast, as engagement is now becoming a part of business and organizational processes.

 

In “the bowling alley” described by Paul Weiffels in the Chasm Companion, business and public sector organizations are requiring clear measurement and well defined purpose. They are finding that purpose and apparent value by leveraging their own pre-existing networks - networks that it took them many years to build.

 

Existing organizations are starting to understand that Web 2.o is simply about connecting people in a variety of ways, something that they have done for years. So what are commonly referred to as Web 2.0 tools are actually enabling technologies and methods to energize existing networks and to build new ones.

 

One of the fundamental premises of pure Web 2.0 companies and some of the analysts who are following them is that existing organizations can only capitalize on engagement from the outside looking in - that they will not be able to earn trust as network participants. This logic is silly. Organizations in business and the public sector are slowly learning how to be “in network” participants. I would argue that they are necessary participants to the sustainability of key industry networks.

 

There is an emerging class of thought leaders who are ready to lead the next wave of innovation in the engagement industry. People like Verna Allee and John Mahoney of Value Networks who specialize in mapping networks and identifying the tangible and intangible value of networks; Shawndra Hill (UPenn) and Raisa D’Souza (UCDavis) who are actively modeling business networks and network behavior; J.P Ragasami, who is a thought leader in Network Competition; Bernardo Humberman, who heads HP’s social media research and who leads a new discipline of studying “social attention”, habituation, recommendation, and novelty; Susan Crawford (UMich Law) who sponsors One Web Day and is actively involved in establishing governance theories, and Catharine Hays, who is the project leader for the University of Wharton program that studies the Future of Advertising.

 

There is a sea change in industry dialogue. The polite (and trite) arguments between Google and Facebook about their ability or inability to play nice together are not the drivers behind the next evolution of Web enabled engagement.

 

As the industry evolves we have to get it right. Capital from the financial industry needs to be allocated to minimize failures. We don’t need and can avoid a repeat of the .com era with intelligent and thoughtful industry leadership. This is also true at an organizational level where we need to ensure the opportunity for successful engagement by business and public sector organizations.

 

There are surely challenges as the manner of network communication transitions from a top down to flat bottom up communication structure - from a world of experts to a world that includes non-experts in participative dialogue. Roles change, people change, skills change, measurement changes. But the bottom line is that it is time to move beyond the venture capital fueled hyperactive social network dialogue to a more reasoned (yet still disruptive) discussion on how to best create and measure value through engagement.

And yes I do get it. We all get it. Web 2.0 is going...going...gone! Listen to the full podcast.