17 Websites Explained to Businesses
 See why we asked you to stop calling it “Web 2.0”? Amazon.com isn’t a new, trendy site (it’s been online since 1995), and it’s largely responsible for introducing the masses to online shopping. But the best part about Amazon? Product Reviews. |
How To Use Amazon
Amazon can be your company’s online shopping cart, if you wish. If you’re in the consumer goods business, your products need to be on Amazon. Best yet, the seller reviews and ratings draw many more people to the website than are actually purchasing. Planted seller reviews are lame (and amazingly easy to expose – with grim consequences), so don’t do that, but instead, seller reviews can be mined for info straight from real people about their happiness and experience with all types of products, maybe yours, or maybe your competitors’.
*other great review sites: Epinions, City Search
Blogger is a service of Google allowing easy creation of blogs, some which could even function as a standalone website. Though advanced web users will quickly outgrow Blogger’s constraints, the service probably offers the quickest and most recognized platform to start a web diary (or weB LOG).
How to Use Blogger
Use Blogger to scratch that writing and publishing itch you just haven’t been able to scratch. Test the waters of online publishing; see if running a blog is for you. Most people are surprised to learn just how easy it is to start a blog. They are even more surprised to learn how difficult and time consuming continuing a blog can be. Blogger is a good place to get your feet wet.
Delicious is a weird name for a site that offers social bookmarking of other websites. Delicious lets users organize and browse their own, and each other’s, personal bookmarks. Entering a subject in the search field returns web pages marked by others in that certain category. Additionally, Delicious offers a set of add-on buttons for most browsers that allow users to quickly add a webpage they’re currently reading to the Delicious index.
You need good, unique content to get to the front page of Delicious. Front page Delicious bookmarks feature a lot of tech web pages. For all subject matter, the site is full of “Top Ten” lists.
How to Use Delicious
Use Delicious to monitor what those in your industry are up to. What are the top stories about the products or services you make? Are you creating relevant, fresh content that lets people know about what your company is up to? With enough content, Delicious is a good spot to monitor chatter about your company or industry, and don’t be afraid to use it as a research or entertainment tool of your own.
Digg is also a social bookmarking site much like Delicious, and depending on who you ask, slightly more popular. Users can “digg” stories by submitting them to the site, and also, some websites offer “digg this” buttons (among others) at the end of articles, posts, or other content trying to entice the reader to submit the story to Digg. If enough readers digg the story, it shows up on the Digg front page.
Pretty simple stuff, really.
The main difference between Digg and Delicious is Digg users tend to be more active on the main Digg site (and Digg leans a bit more “general interest”). Where a Delicious reader could find an interesting story and navigate to the source to read (or watch, or listen) and possibly leave a comment, Digg users often view the story, then come back to Digg to talk about it with other Digg’ers.
How to Use Digg
The same rules as Delicious apply; without relevant, fresh, interesting (and possibly wacky content), you’ll never make the Digg front page, unless your company is involved in a scandal. Down to a deeper level, Digg can dig up pertinent content on specific industries or keywords. Here, for a defined audience, Digg can be very useful. Pour around Digg and see what speaks to you; the site is a good spot for neat content to show up that would otherwise be lost around the web.
Digg and Delicious are by no means the only social bookmarking sites. Other honorable mentions are Stumbleupon, Reddit, Technorati, Fark, and Slashdot. Some of the social bookmarking sites tend to feature fleeting stories – “Three Armed Man Wrestles Alligator” kind of affairs, but within your industry, there is much room to make some social bookmarking noise across each of these sites.
Facebook, just like MySpace (and a hundred other social networking sites) is a colossal time suck for bored web surfers, most of whom are goofing off at work, and most of whom are simply trying to find, and hookup with old flames from high school. And yes, because about 36 million Americans want to score with the cheerleader they may now have a shot at because of their “Junior Account Leader” status, the site’s access to active users is estimated to be worth several billion dollars.
How to Use Facebook
Sign up with your real name and try to score with old flames from high school. Oh, you mean advertising? Well, you can buy ads on Facebook, or businesses can keep a profile page but are restricted from making “friends” or contacts.
The best use of Facebook for businesses is if a real company employee is signed up to the network and actually uses the service to make e-connections with real people they really know. If a user is active enough on the site, there is a chance someone could take notice of who they work for, but the return here becomes very vague.
Though people have gotten jobs or bought things referred to from other “friends”, for the average business, the ROI for playing on Facebook is fairly low. Your customers will determine whether or not Facebook and MySpace are worth your time; if they’re not already there searching info and connections on your stuff, you’re not going to attract them simply by pretending your company genuinely wants to make e-friends.
If your company has the programming depth or financial resources to create an application to live on Facebook that helps users, say, find more people to try and hook up with, then perhaps, Facebook is for your company.
Flickr is simply the best photo hosting and photo sharing service on the Internet. The user interface is so slick, any computer novice can get the hang of uploading, naming, and organizing photo collections. Plus, Flickr photo groups are very active; millions of amateur, pro-am, and professional photographers call Flickr home. And even as a simple standalone place to archive and safely store photo memories away from fire or loss, one can’t beat Flickr, though the service limits free accounts to 200 photos or less. Paid accounts with unlimited photo hosting limits run about $25/year (cheap!) Users can select privacy levels of every photo, and in fact, sharing photos through Flickr is not required, but definitely encouraged.
How To Use Flickr
Almost every company could benefit from at least a free Flickr account. Undoubtedly, your company could find a use for the service as an add on to your existing website, a place to outreach users who are already looking for and taking photos of products like yours, or the site simply could function as a spot to store photos for internal use.
Using Flickr is highly addictive, and not in the way YouTube is addictive as a laugh-romp or bored-and-passing-the-time manner. Flickr is home to untold inspiration, wonderful photographs, and wonderful photographers. Photos of family vacations, or even shots of landscaping outside of your company HQ can bring about comments and interaction with the most distant of Flickr members. But as always, the highest users and most frequent posters (uploaders) and commentators receive the highest rewards. On Flickr, the mantra is true; those who give their time and interaction really do receive the same.
Instructables is a really cool site that simply couldn’t have existed before the critical mass of do-it-yourself attitude took over the web (that happened by the way). Instructables is a huge list of homemade projects that normal, interesting, and crafty people have assembled; everything from computer and electronic hacks, better methods to weatherproof your home, and fun uses for old junk (like making a welder out of microwaves).
How To Use Instructables
Whatever it is you make or do, it probably has a shelf life. Even if your company offers a service, how can people bridge the gaps in your service, or get more from your service with homemade, fun, and hands on remedies? What happens when your products break? (people love honest companies, BTW) What interesting, totally new products can be made from an assembled group of your products, or pieces of your broken products?
On Instructables, the goal for an advertiser is not to push people to your website, or embed a link where people can buy your stuff. Instructables is about reuse, adaptation, and inspiration. Simply put, this website doesn’t need glossy messages. If you can use the skills put into your company to find adaptive reuses for everyday products, possibly even yours, Instructables is a wonderful tool for sharing your knowledge with the world. Creating and Instructable is a fun way to provide a new look at whatever it is you do or make.
LinkedIn is a social networking site that actually was built to serve an offline use: corporate ladder networking . Linkedin profiles are based around jobs, resumés, and companies.
Find out a fishing buddy actually used to work inside a vendor you’ve been trying to reach? See if he can get you in the door. Searching for a new job? Maybe a friend of a friend can make an introduction for you.
How To Use LinkedIn
Besides trying to move up the ladder (or switch to a different ladder), LinkedIn can be good for businesses by way of attracting new employees or offering quality retention incentives for those trying to get hired on with you. Companies themselves can also sign up for Linkedin profiles, and if enough company employees are using Linkedin (even your CEO perhaps), through accurate, positive, and real stories shared about your company, LinkedIn offers prospective employees or customers an insight into the processes and culture behind your company walls.
Meetup is another website that actually can create tangible, off-computer interactions with real people. The concept is simple: find, search, or start meetups on any topic you want, in your area. Meetups can be formal, informal, at a bar, in your house, on a particular industry, personal, professional, creative, or political topic. Chances are, whatever your interests, there’s a spot for you to connect with people who’d like to meetup and talk about it.
How To Use Meetup
This is an easy one: start a meetup. Is your company involved in home remodeling? Use Meetup to give a free class or lecture in your area. You work in high-tech and want to meet other geeks? Host a meetup at your company HQ, or see if you can find an existing meetup and do some networking. Is your company involved in healthcare? Start a meetup of people who volunteer at the retirement home. Maybe your company makes consumer products or packaging that routinely make its way into landfills and roadsides. Consider sponsoring a meetup that involves trash pickup alongside a park.
Whatever it is, Meetup can be a great spot to find real people interested with interacting or learning more about whatever it is your company does. No need to hide your affiliation; just don’t be a creepy marketer and make people feel the meetup isn’t worthy unless they’re buying something at the end.
MySpace started off really neat. Originally, the site was heavy into music and began as a website for small bands to post songs and attract audiences. Quickly after this phenomenon spread, MySpace turned into a spot for small bands to talk with underage girls who were bored in chemistry class. From there, MySpace then morphed into a website where anyone liking small bands could try to hit on underage girls, and now, the site acts much like a virtual high school for people up to even 40, where everyone is trying to hookup in chemistry class. MySpace, like Facebook, is a huge time-sink for users, and a place people go when they have absolutely nothing else going on.
Oh yeah, if you write poetry or take pictures and video, you can post that up on MySpace as well.
How To Use MySpace
For a company, anyone can make a free MySpace profile and post up anything they want. Thousands of real companies have MySpace profiles, where they can “make friends”, leave each other messages, and spam inboxes or profile comments with mindless banter (or “hey, we just made a really cool, superneato product, you know, like to buy” messages).
Overall, the reason so many companies have adopted MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking sites into their online practices is because, if anything else, when potential customers are wasting time somewhere, the company may as well have a presence there too. But really, who wants to talk with a guy from marketing while they’re sitting on the couch with a friend?
Ning takes the concept of social networking websites and lets users create a site of their own where anyone can sign up, and behave, just like they do on other social networking sites. Ning-created social networking sites work best for interests or communities that do not already have an e-home. Ning is simply the platform to connect online.
How To Use Ning
Probably, your “network” already needs to be formed in the “real” world. Say, if you make aftermarket parts for an older sports car, and this specific sports car community is not already served by long standing forums or message boards, Ning could offer benefit to a community who thus far has remained e-homeless. If there are enough users begging for it, and they are not happy elsewhere on the web, creating a Ning community centered around your company, or industry, or local area could be an interesting way to connect to potential clients and customers.
95% of all companies can forget about creating a Ning community of their own, but for those with a strong and underserved audience base, Ning offers a fairly elegant set of tools to create a social networking site of your own.
Hey, you know that awesome PowerPoint presentation you just created for the sales team? Now it can live online! For the rest of the world!
Okay, so most people don’t troll the Interwebs searching for PowerPoint entertainment, but for others in the field of presenting (or with presenting as part of their occupation), Slideshare actually does offer an array of slide presentations one normally wouldn’t think would be interesting.
How To Use Slideshare
Unless your presentations contain super-secret data, there is no reason they can’t live at Slideshare. For someone researching data on your company, industry, or field, Slideshare is a reliable source to find data, straight from the source. Slideshare could open the possibility of contacts from others looking to use or quote parts of your presentation for use in their own, and the website can even attract media looking to dig up facts or data on the things you build or sell.
Maybe you don’t want to create a company blog, and maybe a company micro-site is overkill, but there’s just one sideline topic your company excels in and you’d like to share the expertise. Or perhaps there is an opinion no one else shares, but blogging about it everyday or shifting the copy of the company’s website doesn’t make sense. If then, Squidoo is for you.
The website allows users to create “lenses” which are aptly named. Simply, lenses are pages, very easy to lay out pages that is, where one can share anything. The more people read your lens, the higher up on Squidoo your lens ranks, and the more people read your lens. As a bonus, Squiddo shares a portion of advertising profits with highly-ranked lens users, so if you write something really interesting, there could be a small monetary return involved.
How To Use Squidoo
Use Squidoo to share an interesting lens about your industry. Understand how molecular engineering works? Make a laymen terms explanation of the process and what it means for most humans. Company committed to fair trade practices? Create a lens showing consumers how they can make informed fair-trade purchasing decisions. If nothing else, simply use the easy interface of Squidoo to create a how-to, or use the service to write blog entries, articles, or reference other things you might be doing around the web. Whatever it is, spend some time around Squidoo and think of an easy spot for your company to fit it. At the very least, the service is stupid easy to use; just make sure and save page changes frequently.
You knew about websites. You knew about blogging and blog-centric websites. But what about Micro-blogging? Twitter is a micro-blogging service that limits quips to the text messaging length of 144 characters. You can micro-blog, or twitter, from home, from work, from the road, and yes, your phone. Micro-blog entries feed a profile page on twitter.com – from there, your “tweets” can be aggregated to appear elsewhere, like your own website, your blog-blog, or even, your social networking page.
Sure, micro-blogging sounds kind of weird, but Twitter is an insanely popular service. And it can be functional. One could use it like an anecdotal diary, and many do, simply documenting the random array of things happening around one at any given time.
How To Use Twitter
Is there an audience for the banality behind each precious moment of your working day, or the processes of your product or service? Honestly, probably not. You’ll have to judge how the observational minutia of your company or industry stack up against the millions of other entertainment options people have on their plate, but Twitter, at its finest, and for a very small window of reasons (live blogging from an industry conference, for example), can be beneficial for certain advertisers or industries.
Throw out your Encyclopedia Britannica. Everything you need to know, and more, is online, and it’s updated daily. There’s almost no noun, subject, verb, topic, phrase, person, place, or thing still without a user-submitted Wikipedia entry. Though the political side of Wikipedia can get a little dicey, overall, the site’s community-promoted editors are harsh. See something you don’t like? Know more than the author of an entry? You can change it.
How to Use Wikipedia
The best use of Wikipedia involves inspiring others to write about, or reference you. Make something great. Make something notable. Produce some really great research about whatever it is you do, and make it public. Don’t try to be sneaky and write your own company vanity Wikipedia entry (readers can tell, and you will be punished). If you’re really an expert in your field, or employ experts, think about regularly contributing to Wikipedia entries. On Wikipedia, hidden agendas rarely last for too long, so just play it straight, and if anything else, use Wikipedia as a great research tool.
Wordpress is many things to many people. Part an intro-to-blogging service, part advanced blogging platform for power Internet users, and partly highly adaptable content management system for even very large business websites, WordPress is a highly malleable system of tools for owning, managing, and distributing online content. WordPress is free and open source, meaning, a large community of dedicated users continually write and update the code needed to run WordPress’s functions.
How To Use WordPress
Wordpress.com lets users make their own blog, much like Blogger, but better. For starters, free, WordPress hosted blogs are easy to customize and style with a little bit of basic web programming know-how (basic HTML and CSS). Advanced WordPress users can download their own version at WordPress.org and host the files directly, opening up a plethora of options for creating blogs and websites only limited by one’s programming knowledge (advanced CSS, PHP, and MySQL).
WordPress is a great, scaleable tool to learn about web programming and website administration. Some of the most popular websites online are powered by WordPress architecture, and many highly advanced webmasters have been born from humble WordPress beginnings.
Websites built with WordPress are SEO friendly right out of the box, and the administration interface is easy enough to allow even non-web savvy users the options of maintaining and changing the content of their own sites.
If you need a company blog, or if you need a company website with a strong, easy, and free CMS, give WordPress a serious look.
Outside of WordPress, many other web programming and CMS tools are available to create dynamic, easily managed websites. Each with their strengths and weaknesses, WordPress-like tools such as Drupal, Joomla, Moveable Type, Mambo, Expression Engine, and others, all offer elegant solutions for creating websites of today’s functionality.
For the most part, none of the elegant, easy, or free CMS tools are native to Microsoft server platforms. If website administration has been introduced to you in the confines of a Microsoft-laden IT department (Access, Frontpage, Expression, etc.), think about looking beyond the in-house IT guys for your next web project.
Undoubtedly, you’re familiar with YouTube. The now-Google subsidy hosts the world’s videos online, for free. And just like other social networking sites, users can create accounts, log in, mark favorite videos, share videos with other friends, and even communicate and message each other straight from the YouTube interface.
The most generic videos on YouTube get the highest number of views. Homemade shots of furry creatures, things catching on fire, and guys getting hit in the genitals still garner millions of hits, while say, educational videos produced by NOVA remain in relative obscurity. YouTube audiences are fleeting, and they have very short attention spans.
Literally thousands of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every second. Simply posting a video to the site does not guarantee anyone will see it. The YouTube search feature is still very arduous at times, and the site is highly populated with straight up nonsense and millions of 15-second clips featuring kittens doing something cute. Despite all the constant web banter about “going viral,” with all that clutter, it’s very hard for a video to stand out on YouTube.
How To Use YouTube
YouTube can work for businesses by simply acting as a reliable host of all video needs, much like Flickr does for photo hosting. Clips are limited to ten minutes in length, and mostly, that’s a good thing. Anyone just randomly searching for YouTube entertainment better have a good reason to watch your clip, and generally, the best eyeballs for your business videos will need to be pointed to YouTube from outside sources, namely other websites, blogs, or emails.
Real Estate open house tours are very unlikely to “go viral.” To effectively use YouTube, simply treat the service as a fine host of all things video (though picture quality is a long way from HD). Leave the just-passing-by viewers to dogs riding skateboards and people crashing into things. Title every video properly, but don’t expect millions (or even thousands) of views for every video uploaded.
