Just got back from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco put on my CMP and O’Reilly Media. Great event, I learned a lot, provoked many more thoughts – in general I highly recommend it.

I do have one major gripe…

Very few presenters really brought their talks back to business fundamentals.

Mr Speaker: How do I use what you just talked about
to further my business goals (make money!)?

Nothing summarized this better then on the last day while attending a talk about how Web 2.0 ideas such as blogging, video and pod casting, user generated content, and other such attributes can be used in the SMB market. How do you, as a small business owner, actually USE this stuff yourself?

About half way through someone finally asked that “So, how do I use this for my business!?”

The loudest applause I had heard yet… FOR THE QUESTION!

And to my great and utter disappointment, it was not answered. Don’t get me wrong, the guys on the panel new their stuff, they were passionate, they GOT IT. But they couldn’t make it concrete. They couldn’t bring it back from esoteric philosophy to physical representation that a business owner could understand, and more importantly, APPLY.

To some extent this was true for almost all the talks.

So now that I’m done bitching, I’m going to do something about it. My next few posts are going to be best-of summaries of the ideas I learned and how to apply them for SMBs and the enterprise.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Corporate, Design, Internet Marketing, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.