Company websites… who cares?

Yesterday, Jeff Bullas posted a blog entitled ‘Is Facebook killing off the company website?‘ It’s based on a study by Webtrends that looks at the effect that Facebook has had on the website traffic of a selection of well-known brands. It’s a good post, and one that raises a key point, but unfortunately like some businesses it is 80% concerned with Facebook and 20% everything else. The issue here is not Facebook – internet behemoth that it is – but about the value of the company website and its place in the wider online strategy of all companies, large or small. In fact, Facebook won’t be the most relevant social network for a lot of companies, especially those without a B2C focus. The real gem inside the post is simple – make the most out of aligning all your digital assets. But how do we go about that? And what is the value of my company website in this scenario?

Taking a step back

It isn’t the 90’s anymore, but let’s pretend that it is. As businesses start to realise the value of a burgeoning internet, they are all lining to up to create their own little piece of web real estate. Things start off simple: just a name, an address, some contact details, a little blurb to say what you do. Really it’s nothing more than a glorified entry in the Yellow Pages.

Over the next decade, that online directory entry will grow and grow, getting ever more complex as businesses try to cram more information into it, desperate to be relevant to any visitor. It’s understandable though, because it’s pretty much the only place you have:it has to try to be relevant to everyone.

We’ve now reached a point where the question of relevance has changed in emphasis. Relevance isn’t just content, it’s also channel.  And as a result, the company website has to change.

What is the value of a company website?

The value of a company website lies in its authenticity. It’s the one place where the company has control, from the carefully selected domain name to the honed and polished content. At the very lowest level, if you want to find out how a company positions itself, you visit the company website.

But that’s it.

Your company website is no longer the best place to engage with prospective employees, to advertise your services, to create thought-leadership positions, or to generate leads. The explosion of social networks and other web services has meant that there are a host of specialist services available that can be utilised to increase a company’s web presence. It’s a similar scenario to digital TV; channels have become more fractured and more focused, and for each channel there is a target demographic that they are designed to exploit in a way that more generic channels cannot do.

Twitter's Fail Whale has become an iconic symbol, despite its negative connotations

Hold on, you want me to trust everybody else with my stuff!

At this point I’m sure there are a few people who are asking this; it’s a completely valid question. The answer is yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, but you don’t need to worry about it for a number of reasons. I’m going to put my IT hat on for a moment, so bear with me.

1. The people behind a lot of the services are quite likely as well prepared for downtime as you are. Online services are always susceptible to downtime, whether from DDOS attacks , weight of traffic, hardware issues or simple human error:  the Twitter ‘Fail Whale’ has become an iconic symbol over the last 5 years. But they are businesses too, ones that rely on being able to provide high-quality outage-free services, and as such they will have structures in place to deal with these issues.
2. A distributed network of services delivering your online presence is more resistant to failure than a single site. If you have one site and its down, it’s down 100%. Having a number of independent services providing content minimizes the risk of 100% downtime. We do the same on a hardware level at our data centre; spreading elements physically across locations and logically across multiple nodes.
3. You’re not alone. Many companies have started using third-party services for online communications. The internet is the great equalizer, small or large you can use these tools to your advantage.
4. Having a third party service go down doesn’t reflect poorly on your brand, it reflects poorly on theirs.

So there’s no reason why you shouldn’t create a more distributed web presence, but how do you go about doing it?

Mapping your online real estate

The first step to working out how you create your online presence is to work out what sort of content you have. From the content you can then work out the most relevant way to present it.

Here’s a theoretical example for Acme Corp.

Acme Corp - online presence map

I’ve identified four types of content that are pertinent to my users: Social content, Positioning content, Communications content and Functional content.

Social content is about building personality around the company. Its purpose is to entice the best new employees by showing what it’s like to work here. The content is upbeat and slightly frivolous, so I’ve selected two matching online services. Facebook will be the main area for photos and stories about social events, and for sharing information that we find interesting outside of work. The main contributors will be the staff themselves. We’re also using Last.fm; music is really important to the team in the office, so we’re going to share our musical playlist with the world. Later on we might also include Spotify and Flickr.

Positioning content create a clear set of focus areas around the business. I want to create a thought leadership position around the key personnel within the business and make sure that their thoughts and opinions are heard. Personal brands are a big topic right now, so I’m going to leverage those personal brands, exposing people’s strengths and experience. For this I’m going to use LinkedIn and maybe Flavors.me (if they have a profile). To provide these people with the platform to talk I’ll use a WordPress blog, and maybe Lanyrd to spread the word if they’re speaking anywhere.

Communications content is all about publicity and PR. Whatever happens in the business, it will get published as communications content, from official press releases to office parties. Twitter is the obvious platform of choice for this.

Finally, functional content is the real nuts and bolts information. Where are we, who are we, what are our products and services. All this will go on our company website, which will form the hub of all the other services we use, pulling them altogether.

Of course, there will be an element of crossover, where we push content to other channels once in a while – using individual Twitter accounts for positioning work for instance.

As we can see from this example, there are numerous ways to blend services together to create the right online presence for your business.  And within this blend there is still room for the corporate website; we just need to be aware of what its purpose is and why people will want to visit it.

Maybe it is the 90’s again?

Well, it might be for the company website at least. It’s time to go back to the basics. Your company website still has a part to play, but it’s a limited one.  Give it the attention it deserves, but let’s not forget that there are many other ways to connect to the audience we crave – and it’s not just Facebook.

Making sense of it all – Part 2: the marketer

You can find part 1 of this blog entry here.

Wasn’t it nice in the days before social media, when communications could be put into little campaigns, all neat and tidy? Sure, we had customer care and sales that had a kind of ongoing conversation with the client, but, on the whole, we controlled when and how we communicated with our customers and leads. It was much easier then, with our plans and our schedules.

Image from Flickr - credit to Kexino (http://www.flickr.com/people/kexino/)

Okay, I’m still being facetious, but this lack of control over the communication of our brand, and the sheer volume of activity that social media networks generate, can catch marketing departments unaware. Unlike traditional marketing activity, this is a real-time conversation, a non-stop campaign that’s already started.

The good news is that it is manageable and there are some easy steps we can take.

1. Treat Social Media with the same attention to detail as all other channels
It all starts here – don’t treat social media as an afterthought. It’s been done before and the results are usually bad. Not convinced? Check out ‘Social Media screw ups – a history’ then come back. Social media should be considered as a core part of the marketing strategy and should tie in to business objectives – it’s just the day to day mechanics of communication that are different to more traditional marketing techniques.

2. Understand your Social Media landscape
Tracking your social media exposure is extremely difficult without the right toolset. 2010 saw an explosion in the number and quality of the tools available, from Hootsuite to Radian6, both of which monitor multiple social media sites and networks. Here at Volume we use our own internal tool (SociView), but whichever you choose, the important thing is to use one. Good tools will provide you with the means to monitor, respond and analyse your brand online; giving you the data you need to create effective strategies

3. Understand the limitations of what you can do
Once you see the amount of information online, you’ll quickly realise that controlling every word is an impossible task. Relax, this is the way it should be, and there’s no point worrying about it. The days of total control are gone, and with it the old marketing mindset. Use your tools to map and separate the official (your blogs and feeds), the unofficial (partners, affiliates, fans and brand-enemies) and the temporary (bad and good experiences looking for an outlet). Start listening and filtering the noise, then you’ll know when you can…

4. …be a part of the conversation
And it is a conversation, we can’t rely on the same set of skills we use for one-way communication. The people we choose to represent us should be selected carefully. When you have the chance to get involved, acting the right way is paramount and can stop bad situations escalating unnecessarily. If someone’s happy with you, by all means retweet them, but make sure you stay humble and polite – acknowledge that you’re getting a helping hand. If someone’s unhappy, make sure that you deal with it with the same level of attention – admit your mistakes and learn from them.

We can see this approach already being adopted by Dell – ready converts to the social media space, who have had their fair share of “learning experiences” along the way – when they announced the setup of a dedicated ‘social media listening centre’ to manage the 22,000 Dell-related posts every day.

Although a lot of us won’t be dealing with quite that much, putting the right people and tools in place will help you to stay in control and, hopefully, make sense of it all.

Agree or disagree with my point of view? – I’m happy to discuss, so please post your comments.