At your consumer products company, "Web 2.0" is officially in danger of becoming this year's "thinking outside of the box": buzzword fodder that's big on elocution, but short on execution.

That's why this six-month project to enliven and build out your consumer Web site will place so much emphasis on defining exactly what your company wants to accomplish with "Web 2.0"—a catchall that means different things to different businesses. For your company, it will mean adding more dimension to a flat consumer Web site and, most important, developing more direct connections to a customer base that gets harder to reach each day.

Part of your motivation here will be pure survival. Old-world media and marketing approaches are increasingly less effective in the face of rapidly fragmenting customer niches. But far from a business problem, those niches represent "an opportunity for customer engagement," says Patricia Seybold, founder and CEO of the Patricia Seybold Group and author of Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future. "Instead of combating fragmentation, companies should be leveraging online tools and online communities to leverage customer fragmentation and to address more customers' needs, not fewer."

Delivering that online promise will mean actively and constructively involving your customers in your business processes through those online tools—blogs, surveys, contests, forums, ratings, and other one-to-one communication exchanges that will do more than just create a multilayered online presence. They'll also use a data analytics backbone to channel that customer interaction into tangible feedback on everything from smarter product development to more effective advertising to "viral" (buzzwords never die) word-of-mouth sales.

To see the details behind this Planner and fill in your own estimates, click on the "Get the Tool" icon above and download the interactive worksheet.

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