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Do you Web 2.0?

Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will surge over the next five years, growing 43% each year to reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

Currently, large businesses are spending more on employee collaboration tools than customer-facing Web 2.0 technologies, but Forrester expects that trend to reverse by next year. By 2013, investment in customer-facing Web 2.0 technology - such as social networking, RSS, blogs, wikis, mashups, podcasting, and widgets - will dwarf spending on internal collaboration software by nearly a billion dollars.

We don't normally point to this kind of broad analysis on Finextra, but I guess if you're reading this post you probably have an interest in where this market is going.

For banks, it's going to be hard to avoid. The next generation of consumers are adept digital natives, who shun traditional marketing techniques. If you want to reach out and engage with them, you're going to have to move in their circles of choice. And that means allocating budget and resources - preferably sooner rather than later.

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Comments: (3)

A Finextra member
A Finextra member 25 April, 2008, 10:22Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Am I the only one to find this Web 2.0 label unhelpful? And when do we get to 2.1 or 3.0?  The web has been steadily evolving since I first started messing with it back in 1994 and presumably will carry on doing so.
Also I'd have thought it was easier and cheaper these days to knock a site together - or do corporates feel they have to get expensive agencies in? 

Paul Penrose
Paul Penrose - Finextra - London 25 April, 2008, 12:15Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

The Internet changes everything. It’s an old mantra, but its as true today as when it was first coined. Who would have thought a protest on Facebook would force one of the world’s biggest banks to backtrack on its interest rate policy for student loans? For banks, it’s a cultural problem as much as anything else. The Web is evolving and so are its uses and users. It’s not just about knocking a decent site together.  Banks will have to adjust their go-to-market strategies, their ethos and their corporate culture if they are to make sense of it. That's the big challenge.

A Finextra member
A Finextra member 09 June, 2008, 01:48Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes Agree with Paul, it's not just about putting together a website - that statement would apply to the old days, when marketing strategies were just having on-line presence and using the Internet as an additional channel to existing off-line products. Yes, Web 2.0 may evolve in the future into something else, but it's well defined today. Web 2.0 is about using social networks and viral marketing to add value, using blogs (opinions democratization), web product mashups, on-line only biz models, sophisticated and attractive user interfaces, and more. The challenge is having innovative, creative and competitive ideas crossing all these with banking and financial services. Not a small challenge.
Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose

Head of Research

Finextra

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This post is from a series of posts in the group:

Finance 2.0

A community for discussing the application of Web 2.0 technologies to financial services.


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