Communication Needs in Cyberspace of Industrial Companies' Consumers

Introduction

A leap of development of information and communication technologies in recent decades resulted in changes of new communication, marketing, business relations and other fields both in terms of technological measures and the needs of target groups. Thus, the digital content such as social media and e-commerce solutions are pervasive in daily life, its influence on consumers’ lives is powerful (Powers et al. 2012). Many scientists (Hassanzadeh and Keyvanpour 2011; Aghaei, Nematbakhsh, and Farsani 2012; Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2012; Sun and Wang 2012; Choudhury 2014; Davidavičienė and Davidavičius 2014) describe development of cyberspace through stages of the web development characterized by different characteristics, objectives and technologies applied. The first stage of cyberspace is described as the website 1.0 – the cognitive web. It is the first-generation web designed for information provision for consumer cognition which is seen as the main feature of this web. It is mainly designed to provide organization with information about itself for familiarization by consumers. This stage of development is characterized by limited consumer interactions and content. Activities are restricted and consumers are only permitted to execute search and read information obtained. The second stage of the web (“the web 2.0”) is defined through the communication network. This stage is defined as a business revolution tool provided by the sector of Information Technologies that creates preconditions for emergence of platforms and that forced business organizations to understand new rules for effective work in this dimension. A possibility to read-write is seen as the main feature of this stage of development. Technologies of this stage create preconditions for assembly and management of huge global societies that have common interests in regard of re-social interactions. Functions of communication medium and such measures as social networks, wikis, blogs, etc. become relevant in this stage. The cooperative network (“the web 3.0) is the third stage of cyberspace. Semanticity that enables automation of human tasks by providing digitized comments for technologies which can be well understood by them is seen as the main feature of this stage. Two platforms, i.e. semantic technologies and the environment of social computerization are identified as the main elements of this stage. Semantic technologies are characterized by open standards that can be applied in the network. The environment of social computerization enables human-computer cooperation and emergence of communities of a new generation social network. The fourth stage of cyberspace (“the web 4.0”) is analysed as network integration. Reading – writing – execution – parallelism along with advanced interaction are the main features of this stage. However, this stage has been poorly studied by scientists.

In summary it should be noted that the following aspects have changed: opportunities of information transmission, acceptance and processing (from a static information display in stage 1.0 to reading – writing – execution - a parallel processing in stage 4.0), an axis of technologies (from a company to human-computer symbiosis), models of interaction (from stage 1.0 client-server to server-server in stage 4.0), use of information (from development of taxonomies in stage 1.0 to insightful decisions made in stage 4.0 on the basis of information) and technologies used (from static information portals used in stage 1.0 to opportunities of the Internet of things in stage 4.0).