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Last night I attended “How to Use Web 2.0 to Promote Your Business” and event hosted by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Enterprise Forum of Chicago, an organization I recently became a member of.

Right: Jason Fried , CEO of 37signals, the company that launched Ruby on Rails, an open source web-app framework.

Center: Harper Reed, Threadless CTO, a community centered on-line apparel store

Left: Howard Tullman, CEO of Flashpoint Academy, entrepreneur in education and information technology who was the moderator for this session.

My take away from this event is that web 2.0 companies that leverage 2.0 technologies for their own business become more  innovative and better able to serve their customers. You might be thinking that I am stating the obvious, but there are plenty of technology and consulting companies out there who follow the “do what I say and not what I do” model instead.

Interestingly enough, both 37signals, a SaaS company, and Threadless’ online commerce happen to be profitable enterprises, having been in business for some ten years. They bootstrapped the business early on and have taken late stage investments, Amazon’s Jeff Bezo’s stake in 37signals being an example.

The following is just my summary of the event’s highlights:

• speed has become a critical success factor for these companies to ensure the right kind of quality of experience driving user interaction, both Harper and Howard mentioned: “make sure everything works fast, optimize”
• crowdsourcing delivers innovation, whether user generated product designs for Threadless’ apparel business or new features for 37signal online collaboration services
• the freemium model relies on making basic free services available to a large number of users, while a minority is being charged for premium services such as upgrades and value added features, 37signals being a successful example
• social networking services such as facebook and tweeter enable the to gather immediate direct feedback from customers, having become the online equivalent to a “megaphone” for the company’s executives
• social media sites such as Vimeo (video) and Flickr (pictures) are broadly used to communicate and engage users, being able to mash the up on the company’s own sites
• other tools leveraged are SurveyMonkey’s online surveys and Constant Contact’s email marketing services
• Google’s analytics, gmail and docs have become key the enterprise’s IT tools

Some other discussions addressed the iterative nature of application development for 2.0 services and the need for staying away from over-engineering. This means too many features leading to mission creep and unmanageable levels of complexity which end up defeating the purpose.  Unfortunately, a couple of attempts to initiate a conversation around web 3.0 technologies did not go far last night, but people in the audience expressed interest in the semantic web and intelligent agents making search technologies more efficient.

J. de Francisco. Chicago, March 25.

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