Web 2.0

I have been reading some stuff related to blogs, podcasts, twitter, web 2.0 generation and web interactions. This week, The Financial Times reported the top 20 corporate web sites elected according the criterias below:

Construction, Message, Contact, Serving Society, Serving Investors, Serving the media, Serving jobseekers and Serving Customers.

It seems to be simple and easy to have a Global Website, in order to attend all the stakeholders interested in the company. Although, it is not a easy task. More than high level of investments, it is necessary to understand the User's behaviour, and each one of this Stakeholders has a different needs and they are seeking or looking for different kind of interaction with the company.

I have no doubts to affirm that Marketer's tasks are difficult nowadays. We must know much more than marketing theories, marketing tools, macroenvironment relationships, relationship marketing or antropology and customer behaviour. In the modern world, we need to understand the level of interactions people want with the medias. For instance, Newspaper companies, such as Guardian and The Independent have been investing millions of pounds in Webpages in one attempt to interact and delivery to web users contents in different formats: news, comments and analysis delivered as text (SMS), interactive blogs, audio podcasts, video and automated gadgetry.

While here in Europe, companies like these are trying to follow the new wave created by the technology, in Brazil users still have to subscripe online content to have access to complete news and quality information. Then, I ask myself: When companies, such as Folha de Sao Paulo and Estado de Sao Paulo will start the process to interact with Web users ? Maybe, when the Web advertising revenues surpassed the newspaper advertising revenues, such is happening in UK right now.

The fact is, WEB USERS are gainining control over the media through using the available technology to be interconnected between each other, creating communities, exchanging ideas and opinions. The challenges for companies are huge because the technology has broken security barriers and issues like spam, worms, Trojans, viruses, phishing and pharming and denial for service are taken into account, the responsibility and organisation - or rather, its management - bears for the safety and integrity of its information is both obvious and onerous. The question is: What to do, in order to be protected and avoid all of these threats ?

In an attempt to overcome these challenges, we have now ISO 27001 the number one internationally recognised standard for information security. For whom of you that already experienced an ISO process in a company, you know the problems and the hard work necessary to implement such processes and KPIs inside a company. Can you imagine this certification ? A company electing to go for ISO 27001 will probably take 12 months or two years to put all the proper procedures in place at which point... well, if everything gone be alright, of course !

By the way, the top 20 sites mentioned before are:

Siemens, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Nokia, AstraZeneca, Total, IBM, ING, UBS, General Electric, Vodafone, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, ENI, Nestle, Roche, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco System and GlaxoSmithKline.

According to Financial Times, 28 March 2007, Compania Vale do Rio Doce, the Brazilian mining giant, has an expensive site that just does not work well, at all.