Revenge of the corporate website?

A few weeks back, there was a discussion on one of the LinkedIn groups I’m part of, on whether the corporate website is becoming irrelevant, and whether there was a tendency to make it more social. It was based on a post by Jeremiah Owyang a couple of years back, on how to evolve the corporate website. Coincidentally, I also caught a post by the Jeremiah on the same topic, a couple of weeks back, which talked about brand websites becoming aggregators of conversations happening around the web.

This is a topic I have written about earlier, but with the rapid progression of tools that have been happening in the last few months, this would be a good time to update.  The tools have been evolving – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, and on each of them are built communities, which are finding newer ways and more mechanisms to express themselves on topics, and that includes brands. The aggregation is happening within the networks themselves, and there are ways to take the conversation outside the networks. I’d written last week about Facebook’s Live Stream Box last week, which allows updates to be streamed on external sites. Center Networks has an interesting post that talks about how Friendfeed can take over the forum/ bulletin board world. I also read about one of the pioneers in the user generated content space – MouthShut, planning to tap into the social media marketing to reach out to customers and giving free accounts to brands. On an aside, they are also planning to hire a couple of folks to handle this, so SMEs (Social Media Experts now 😉 ) might want to check it out.

Meanwhile, AdAge has a very interesting post on how, even though Twitter and Facebook have grown as feedback and customer-service channels, the product review has also been growing in importance thanks to its more structured nature. The post also rightly points out that in addition to the listening skill, it is also important for brands to develop a culture that can respond to the feedback that’s now perhaps coming in torrents.

In my earlier post, I had wondered if the reason behind brands’ reluctance to join conversations on networks, and sticking to their own, often static websites, was because of their liking for control. The other reason I had thought of was the ability to ‘measure’. Things have moved on, and we now see many brands making Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. While many of us bemoan the lack of a concrete plan behind such efforts, it is still a step forward. Even the Skittles episode, which many people ridicule, was a significant experiment to me. They tried something, they learned, they moved on. Measurement is still a much debated subject in the social media space. There’s nothing stopping brands from utilising traditional measurable methods of web marketing and also having ‘unmeasurable’ conversations on the side.

If brand websites are guilty of missing the bus on involving existing/ potential consumers on their website when the conversations on social media platforms were still in a nascent stage, this perhaps is the time they can redeem themselves. Indeed, brands have started listening to, and acting on the basis of consumer feedback. As newer and better monitoring tools crop up on a regular basis, this is becoming easier. But for now, all these communities perhaps prefer the conversations to happen on the ‘unofficial networks’, as opposed to the corporate website.

Perhaps brands could try to figure out why that is so, this would help them evolve objectives and a strategy for the website. Going further, it would also give them an understanding of how they could tweak their internal structures to create sustainable processes that can tackle the challenges that an evolving web throws at them.  This is perhaps even an imperative if the mob justice I’d written about last week becomes a trend. But that would be a negative way of looking at it. An interactive website that (without bias) pulls in ‘relevant’ conversations from around the web and gives more perspective to their customers would be definitely appreciated. By treating consumer feedback with the respect it deserves, brands would not only be giving more credibility to their website, and increasing the number of conversations that happen there, but perhaps even creating evangelists who would help the brand by proactively giving it relevant feedback and even taking up for the brand in case of bad PR, or at the very least, considering issues objectively. But then this is as much a culture and process change as it is a web design change.

until next time, homepage with branch offices..