[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/x66lV7GOcNU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]Lee LeFever at CommonCraft has posted a series of great videos that help explain some common Web 2.0 concepts in plain English. These are great primers for individuals interested in adopting these tools into their marketing mix. the one above is Social Bookmarking in Plain English, others in this series include:

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English

Thanks to Charlene Li for introducing these to me.

No game of buzzword bingo would be complete without the term “Web 2.0.” However, as much of a cliche as it may be, it is one of the most important terms that a corporate marketer should understand. So while the web is chock-full of definitions for this term, the following article illustrates an interpretation designed specifically for the corporate marketer.

So, lets get to it. Web 2.0 means one thing, “accessibility.” Accessibility in this regards comes in 3 varieties:

1. Making yourself accessible to others.

2. Making your audience accessible to you.

3. Making your audience accessible to each other.

Simple enough right? It is basically what the web was designed to do in the first place. The recent movement and buzz around the term has just been a refocus on the web’s original intent. So lets dive into each a little deeper and see how each of these concepts manifest themselves as marketing tactics and strategies.

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In our business we thrive on bringing people to our site. Whether it’s a microsite to educate visitors about a product, or a more traditional site designed to show knowledge in a market segment - our projects would fail without self promotion, traditional advertising, and word of mouth.

With all of these there is a certain level of trust that your visitors place in your site. An example, most of our sites have a ‘Send to a Friend’ link. This small form makes it easy for a visitor to send a note to someone else with a link to make it that much easier for word of mouth advertising. When a visitor uses this function they place a certain amount of trust in us that we won’t be storing these addresses for later campaigns. And, just in case there is any question out there - we don’t.

This trust is difficult to establish and even harder to keep in an online world where each of us receives a few hundred spams a day. There was a time that people felt free to share they’re email address with anyone that asked. Today, all it takes is that fourth email from your great aunt telling you that Bill Gates will come and wash you car until you begin to realize that your email address should be a protected piece of information.

This brings us to todays lesson in how not to spread word of your site. And if you’re the kind of person that clicks on links and doesn’t finish blog posts, don’t sign up for this site. The folks over at Quechup are a bit late to the social networking sites, so they have a unique method of generating new members. On sign up they ask you if you want to scan your address book for other Quechup users. If you say yes, then they email everyone in your contact database with an invite to join.

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As a recent Economics graduate, and now as a Marketing professional, I was excited to learn that Web 2.0 information accessibility concepts are creeping into the delivery of scholarly literature online via Google Scholar.

Back in college, if I needed some supporting research for my paper on, say, the effects of World Bank efforts in Venezuela, I’d find myself hitting JSTOR, JEL, APJS…just a few of the myriad of socio-economic literature databases that may or may not have contained that valuable nugget of information I needed. And I should mention that I had access to those engines only because my university paid a hefty annual subscription fee.

Google Scholar is not replacing existing literature databases, but 1) simplifying the research process by aggregating these resources into one search engine and 2) making content available to previously-excluded audiences. Now I can go to the Google Scholar search engine and, in just one search query, see results from a multitude of trusted sources…even sources that previously required a paid subscription. Now I can opt to pay a nominal fee of around $10 for each article I wish to obtain from one of these sources.

I suspect that, in time, this will become a standard tool used by researchers to gather information and by publishers to propagate content to new audiences. As use increases, I hope to see Google incorporate an RSS feature that would allow even more efficient access to current scholarly literature.

Check it out for yourself at scholar.google.com.