What’s fueled this groundswell shift from traditional media is new technology that has made the World Wide Web more collaborative and participatory. This new tech includes social networking websites, wikis, blogs, forums, and tools that let users publish, review, rate, rank, tag, and share content, all without web programming skills or HTML knowledge.

According to comScore, a majority of U.S. American adults who were online in 2007 participated in the Web 2.0 conversation by:

Participating in social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Biznik, hi5, and Plaxo. (FriendFeed and Twhirl aggregate social net activities into a "lifestream.")

Blogging (setting up a blog is easy using free services such as Blogger and WordPress; or cheap services with premium features, like TypePad)

Micro-blogging (even easier with Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, and fidj.it). See Twitter sidebar in right margin.

Commenting on other people's blogs, which can generate extended dialog, relationships, and even communities (caution: habit-forming)

Contributing information to Wikipedia; reviewing books on Amazon.com

Interacting in affinity-group forums and networks (you can create your own with Google Groups, Meetup, and Ning)

Using wikis to collaborate with colleagues, clients, or any membership group, thanks to simple, free wiki-building tools like Wikispaces, WetPaint, PBwiki, and Google Sites

Publishing original, rich content such as articles, white papers, photos, and videos, either on their own websites or blogs; or on community media sites such as Newsvine, EyeMobile, iReport, Flickr, Photobucket, and YouTube.

Enterprise-generated content
As traditional news media audiences shrink and online audiences grow, a curious thing is happening. For-profit corporations are hiring many of the reporters and editors who are being laid off by newspapers (and to a lesser extent by magazines, radio, and TV news organizations). These corporations are publishing informative, “rich” content (as opposed to self-serving, promotional content) on their corporate websites, thus becoming a fast-growing source of news, information, and sometimes entertainment too. Larry Weber, social media marketing pioneer, calls it "enterprise-generated content" (not to be confused with "branded content"). Audiences reward such corporate websites by linking to them, sharing their content via e-mail and social networking sites, blogging about it, forming communities around it, and disseminating it virally. In that way, rich content published by corporations becomes “hyper-syndicated,” embedded in the conversation.

Perspective: we still live offline
Web 2.0 evangelists and buzz-meisters might lead you to believe that traditional media are doomed and you should focus your PR strategy on social media. That may be true someday in some industries, but not yet. Before you invest in a social media campaign, integrate it into your strategic marketing plan.

Engage
You can begin participating in the Web 2.0 conversation by publishing informative content on your website or blog. Don't neglect to use plug-in tools like "digg this" and "share this" so that visitors can hyper-syndicate your content for you.

But you don’t need your own website or a blog to participate and have your ideas hyper-syndicated. You can post thoughtful comments on other people’s blogs, forums, online communities, and professional networking sites like LinkedIn. In some cases your comments will be commented on, shared, referred to, discussed, and virally disseminated. Providing your e-mail address with your comments offers opportunities for audience members to contact you. Providing your website URL (which some blogs allow) invites people to visit your website and may improve your site’s search-engine ranking.

You don’t have to plunge in head-first to join the Web 2.0 conversation. Start by listening to the conversation, and discover what your clients and customer are talking passionately about. Read a few industry- or profession-related blogs each week (search for blogs on Technorati, Icerocket, or BlogPulse), and look for opportunities to contribute comments. Join a professional networking site like LinkedIn, and participate (don’t just wait for something to happen). Don’t be surprised if you have fun with it and find it necessary to impose limits on the time you spend networking online. Post a "widget" like one of these on the bio page of your website:

Diplomacy
Monitor what is being said about you and your firm on blogs and the Wikipedia especially (use monitoring tools like Google Alerts and Factiva). If you find inaccurate information or defamatory claims, be careful how you respond. Work quickly and diplomatically to correct factual errors, but approach the process as a collaboration, in which you are a participant rather than an enforcer. If you threaten, or try to take control of the conversation, you will be overwhelmed by indignant, irreverent, intentionally disruptive hordes, and your efforts will backfire. Remember, opinions are usually protected by the First Amendment.

Above all, your contributions to the Web 2.0 conversation should be authentic. Don't pretend to be someone you're not, and don't use a surrogate to convey your message for you in an attempt to appear unbiased. Wal-Mart and Whole Foods were pilloried in the blogosphere and business press for publishing disingenuous content (see sidebar at right).

On the horizon: Web 3.0
Web 3.0 technology is already being developed. See "The Web 3.0 Pipeline, Part 1: the Semantic Web."