We're here on Web 2.0 TV with Giovanni Gallucci of Dexteria Media.
Giovanni, how would you define Web 2.0 as it pertains to your industry?
And how it's changed the marketplace for you and your company the last year or 18 months?
Defining it at Web 2.0, I think the biggest change between Web 1.0 and 2.0,
I don't know if you're going to call it that, is the fact that now the users are heavily invested in participating and creating content.
When it comes to how it affects the industry I'm in, you know, 16, 18 months ago we were just simply doing paid search
and natural search and generalization at Dexterity Media.
And a lot of the practices that we had in place for Natural SEO were very tedious.
We were out begging people for links, we were making changes to content.
And a lot of this stuff was very expensive and very, very low reward on the work.
I mean you would spend an entire month and send out a thousand requests for links and maybe get back three or four successful links back.
The biggest thing that Social Media does for us within that realm is it allows us to get out and populate the web with content for our clients
much easier because we're now in control of the content.
And as it is today at least, the search engines are giving companies credit for the links that we're generating,
the content we're generating in different places on the web.
So as an example, if I'm dealing with a client and it's a brand reputation issue,
say maybe a client's got some stuff on Google that they don't like, they need to push down,
it's really easy for us to go and create profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter accounts, meetup.com.
And because Google looks at those domains as being so much more valuable,
it's really easy for us to push the bad stuff down for the client today.
Don't know how long it's going to last, but as it is today, we can be much more effective for those specific types of things for clients
than we ever could have dreamed of being even 12 months ago.
What is your company currently doing with web 2.0 technologies to facilitate greater customer interaction and online offerings?
With the customer interaction standpoint, we can build communities for folks.
We encourage our clients to go out, and this is almost passé in the world of social media,
but we do encourage clients to go out and create communities or create blogs
so that their own clients can come and communicate directly with them.
And it's one thing to get out and create a website, create a community, create a blog.
The biggest hurdle we have is getting the client to actually participate.
You've got a blog on a regular basis.
People out in the wild could care less if Joanne and marketing had a birthday this week.
You've got to talk about what's important to the customer.
It takes a lot of effort, so we spend a lot of time coaching, consulting with clients
to make sure that they are out there participating like they should be
and actually engaging with their own customers.
How does a company leverage social media products? Is it applicable to products?
It depends on the product and the service that are being offered.
One example is there's a company we're working with that they're launching a new online training website
and so people will go buy subscriptions and they'll participate in classes online.
And we're using, because it makes sense, we're using viral video to help them get the word out.
So we'll take not only bits and pieces of the classes they have, which is essentially their product,
but we create specific pieces called 60-second gurus that are only used for the viral marketing aspect of the campaign.
And then you go out there, you create the 60-second guru or take something out of a class,
you seed it out into 25 or 35 different video sharing sites,
and the video is entertaining, it's got to be very short.
People aren't going to sit there and watch an advertisement for long,
but then you give people a reason to come back to the website.
So there'll be a discount at the end.
Just like if you're couponing, you give them a reason to sit through the entire video,
which in most cases, it's a 60-second guru, it's a minute.
We have some other viral stuff we put out there that can be a couple of minutes long,
but in every case, the very end of the video is go to the website, plug this thing, get 15% off.
So it gives people a reward for sitting through the advertisement,
and that allows us to actually measure the results of the campaign to the client.
It's been said that MySpace has done to the online marketplace what Walmart did to the retail industry.
What do you think of this statement, and how has this new dynamic affected your business?
I would say social media has done that. I'm not going to be too quick to give MySpace all the credit.
And I think it's true in the sense that just like the web democratized journalism and content for humanity,
social media, and it's not only social media, the stuff that we do today in social networking and social media
has always been around, it's just never been sexy.
So we've got this new package that we've put on these technologies,
and we've had bulletin boards and forums forever.
And now marketers are looking at these things saying,
hey, I've got a forum that's based upon people who love scions.
Well, good gravy. My clients, Toyota, they might want to get a part of that clientele.
So forget about going and throwing out the widest net you can and advertising to millions of people.
I want to advertise that these 10,000 people, every single one of those people,
are the exact person we're trying to get to.
So it makes marketing much more efficient, much more targeted, and in almost every case we've been involved in,
the consumer wants to hear the content because they've already expressed the fact that they're an evangelist for the brand.
So you don't have to do a hard sell on it.
And so it further democratizes the web from the marketing standpoint,
but it also allows us to know that we are giving content to people that want to hear the content and want to hear about the product.
So overall, it ends up being much more effective and it's a lot lower cost, too.
Right, right. As the web 2.0 movement continues to empower users to voice their demands of the marketplace,
how do you plan to most effectively listen to and meet those changing demands over the next year?
Over the next year, we don't plan to do that now. We look over and react to what happens.
The marketplace happens so fast and we're in a mode with being on so far on the edge
that we're essentially responding and watching what the market's doing,
and then we're doing what the market asks us to do.
So I guess if you want to say, what do you do over the next year?
We're going to listen and we're going to behave properly based upon each community and what their own rules are.
So you've got to be careful about going into a meetup group and behaving a certain way
and then going over and going into, say, a Facebook group or going into a MySpace group
and behaving differently because each one of those groups have different unspoken rules
about what's acceptable there.
So over the next 12 months, over the next two years, we listen and we're respectful
and we engage in the community and we add value.
Okay, great. Well, thanks a lot, Giovanni, for joining us today on Web 2.0 TV.
This is Giovanni Gallucci from Dexterity Media.
It's a tongue twister. I'm going to go and change the name now.
Don't let it this out. Dexterity Media.
And thanks a lot for stopping by today.
Thank you.
