Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Britain

A new report into customer engage­ment produced by e-​​consultancy reveals that UK firms are likely to sig­ni­fic­antly deepen their com­mit­ment to Web 2.0 tech­no­lo­gies over coming months. The authors, who polled 800 internet and customer exper­i­ence pro­fes­sionals to obtain the results, found that:

42% are planning to apply user-​​generated content (UGC) to their websites in the next 12 months; 23% are using it already.

35% are planning to use cor­porate blogs in the next 12 months; 17% are using them already.

33% are planning to use pod­casting in the next 12 months; 18% using it already.

35% planning to use videocasting in the next 12 month; 17% using it already.

In brief, there will be twice as many com­panies involved in this stuff next year. (Unless they get dis­tracted. The report also mentions that 66% regard lack of time and resources as a “great barrier” to deliv­ering better customer service.)

While I am an evan­gelist for all this stuff to some extent, it’s hard not to feel that there’s a band­wagon element to this group of respond­ents. While the positive impact of blogging is pretty well-​​established, con­sid­er­able question marks remain over the impact of some other Web 2.0 elements.

Yesterday, news emerged that very few people (1%) reg­u­larly download podcasts though aware­ness of the format has risen con­sid­er­ably. I’d want rather better assur­ance of positive results before I advised a company to go down that route. Even more are planning to videocast. I wonder whether the very large support for this idea might be related to the news that the format is now con­sidered the best vehicle for advert­ising online?

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