Six ways to make Web 2.0 work
Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities—for companies that know how to use them. — Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace …
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2009, Web 2.0 had been a consumer story for roughly five years — social networks like Facebook and MySpace spread fast, and the trade press tracked both its promise and its pitfalls: early software roundups and issue lists from 2005, forward-looking trend pieces in 2007, and warnings that openness could be dangerous. What was missing was an answer to the question executives actually asked: how do we make money with this?
This McKinsey Quarterly piece arrives two months after the Wall Street Journal argued that marketing in a Web 2.0 world requires giving up control of the message. Together they mark the moment the conversation shifted from 'what is Web 2.0' to 'how does a company adopt it without wasting the investment' — the same managed-adoption problem every later enterprise technology wave would inherit.
First-order effects
- Companies experimenting with blogs, wikis, social networks and other participatory tools get a concrete playbook: McKinsey frames success as a matter of management practice — matching tools to specific business problems rather than deploying technology for its own sake.
- The article legitimizes Web 2.0 as a boardroom topic, moving it from a consumer phenomenon and marketing experiment (as covered in the WSJ marketing analysis) to a general management discipline.
Second-order effects
- Consultancies and vendors are pushed to productize adoption frameworks, since the bottleneck shifts from access to cheap tools toward organizational know-how — echoing the 2007 critique in why Web 2.0 alone isn't enough.
- Consumer platforms like Facebook gain a second revenue thesis: if enterprises adopt these patterns internally, the same vendors that captured consumers can sell collaboration and engagement into the workplace.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competitive advantage comes less from owning Web 2.0 technology than from the cultural change required to use it — flattening communication, tolerating loss of message control, and rewarding participation over hierarchy.
- The piece foreshadows a recurring industry cycle: each wave of consumer-originated technology (social then, AI later) forces enterprises through the same adoption-gap problem where tool availability is easy but effective deployment is rare.
The trend: This is one data point in the long arc of consumer web technologies being absorbed into enterprise management practice — where the hard part is never the tool but the organizational model around it.