Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief at Mashable.com and the subject of many social media man-crushes, recently posed the question, “Is social media making corporate websites irrelevant?”
In a word, no.
Ostrow makes a good point that a website is becoming less important than it once was.
There was a time when having a dotcom was absolutely key to your brand, and once you had one, it was the URL you pointed everyone to in all of your marketing. But with the emergence of the social web, and opportunities to engage with fans elsewhere, is that really the right strategy – or even a requirement at all?
But now we’re starting to see more business cards with a Twitter handle (I’m at @edeckers), bands promoting thier MySpace pages, nonprofits and their fans pushing people to their Causes page on Facebook.
Does this mean that people are turning away from dotcom websites and blogs to interact with each other on social networking sites?
Not really. They’re still spending their time in the dotcom realm. They’re just spending additional time on the social networking sites.
Ostrow cites Vitamin Water as a good example of a corporation that successfully launched a social networking and ESPN advertising campaign — ads on ESPN pointed people to their Facebook page; this will let them engage with people who continue to use Facebook long after the campaign is over — but it’s not a sign that the dotcom era is dead. Just a sign that it’s evolving.
According to Technorati, 77% of all Internet users read blogs. In fact, they indexed 133 million blogs between 2002 – 2008.
Websites and blogs are still the anchor corporations need to drive their clients to, especially if you’re a B2B company or in such a specialized niche that Facebook advertising just doesn’t make sense.
Let’s say you make specialty framing hammers for the construction industry. Where are you going to advertise? Facebook? Maybe, if you can find a bunch of contractors on the site first. ESPN? Only if you want to reach 99.5% of the people who don’t do construction. Pay-per-click? Possibly, but it can be expensive unless you have a professional who knows how to do it right.
The best place for information about your hammers is going to be your own site. There, you can host your own how-to videos, write blog posts about effective hammering techniques, ecommerce posts about the benefits of your hammer, an ecommerce store to sell your hammer, and a forum for funny hammer stories (if any exist).
To be honest, you’re not going to have many hammer fans who flock to your Facebook page, there won’t be a Hammer Lovers social network, and people will not be Twittering about your hammer several times a day. However, you can still drive search traffic to your website by blogging about hammers, participating in a social network for home building contractors, and reaching your customers where they spend a lot of their time.
Your website needs to be the centralized repository of all your information, the place where people can find anything and everything they want. Reproduce that information around the Internet all you want, but make sure it drives people back to your website. Win the searches, and sell your product that way.
Photo; Kyle May (Flower hammer)
Photo: FoxyPar4 (Hammer throwing)
About Erik Deckers
[...] after hearing that Facebook was going to kill Google, that Twitter was going to kill email, or that social media is going to make corporate websites irrelevant, I’ve decided that people who declare things dead are only doing it to get attention (this [...]