Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational speaker who can speak about web 2.0 and social media (and where the trends are pointing) at your next business event. Contact us to check availability. The full transcript of the above video is included below.
Full Video Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to define some of these jargon terms that people throw around like Web 2.0 or social media. What do those things actually mean? We’re going to break it down into three steps.
Let’s look at the first one. This is back in the early nineties, early to mid-1990s. At that time, websites spoke to the website visitors. That was it. They had information, they provided information to the visitors. That’s all that happened – one-way communication. That was like the first Web 1.0. No one ever called it that, but that’s effectively what it was.
Then in the second half of the nineties and into the 2000s, we started having Web 2.0. What’s that? Well, Web 2.0 is when the website speaks to the website visitors and allows the visitors to speak back to the website. It’s called user-generated content, so people could upload. They could write things. They could contribute content. They could upload pictures or videos or whatever. User-generated content. That’s two-way communication. That’s what Web 2.0 is referring to.
So what’s social media? Social media is the next step. So website speaks to website visitors, allows the visitors to speak back to the website—user-generated content—and facilitates the conversation between members, between visitors. Three-way communication. So the visitors could do user-generated content and they could also communicate with each other. That’s social media. So you have things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and everything. You can communicate with other users of the website. That’s social media.
So the big question is, what comes next? What’s the next step in the process? Well, the next step in the process are websites and platforms that bridge the gap between the online world and the offline world. There are a lot of things that are taking place in this area. One of the big ones is referred to as “augmented reality.” So you have platforms—of course, a lot of these things are happening on cell phones. They have mobile apps where you can actually—
For example, there is this website called Zillow.com, which is a real estate website, and they have an app where you can literally be in a neighborhood and see a house right here, and you can hold your phone up and it will know where you are, and because of the GPS in the phone it’ll know where the phone is pointing, so it’ll know what that house is and it’ll know what that house is worth. So you can literally just hold up your phone and be like, “Oh, that house is worth 300,000,” or 400,000 or whatever it is, and you can go around to all the different houses in the area and see what they’re worth through the phone. So what’s happening is it’s putting a filter of information in between you and reality, and a lot of this of course is happening in the mobile space because that’s what people carry around with them.
So the first step was websites speak to visitors, that was it; one-way communication. The next was two-way, allowing people to contribute content back. Social media was allowing people to communicate with each other. And the next step is to bridge the gap between the online world and the offline world, often referred to as “augmented reality.” There are barcode scanners where you can go to a grocery store and just scan the barcode and immediately see if the price down the road is a dollar cheaper than where you’re at. That’s augmented reality.
So I hope that gives you a better idea of some of these terms, some of the things that people are talking about out there. It’s an exciting time. It’s going to be even more exciting in five or 10 years.
Thanks so much for watching this video. This is Patrick once again reminding you to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a keynote speaker who has spoken at business conferences in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
