Archive for the ‘website’ tag
Simple Is The New Black
Clay Shirky in his latest post ‘The Collapse of Complex Business Models’ makes a statement I find very important for businesses seeking to keep their audience engaged on the web.
“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to.” He describes these ecosystems as complex systems where the system’s principals assume that complexity is an automatic advantage. It’s a post that’s got me considering how I go about doing business. Read the rest of this entry »
TweetIs Your Business Conflicted?
A conflicted business is one pulled in two opposite directions by (apparently) valid desires/objectives. They aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. They know they should engage their online audience better but there’s a gap between what they know and what they do. Sometimes, to the extent of starting something and then using another to fight it.
TweetSaving Money With Your Website
Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path makes a profound comment in his book ‘The Elements of User Experience’, “Websites exist to serve one of two purposes; to make the company money or to save the company money.”
I know the kind of website that will lose you some money. It’s easy. Here are five ways to do it effectively.
- Have contact details that don’t work
- Have content that is not relevant Read the rest of this entry »
Nestle’s Facebook-YouTube-Greenpeace Fiasco – The Lesson for Business
‘…and we can get you on Facebook because social media is big right now!’
That’s some scary advise. But many organisations hear it all the time from their agencies when talking about marketing or website design. No strategy, no governance, just multiple channels where the staff can put out great information about the company and its products. Yippee!
Balderdash! I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happened at Nestlé, although I choose to believe they went about it a bit more deliberately (being a multi-national and all). The signs are there to show they have issues with their web governance structures. When their Facebook admin took on some fans in what became a very public and embarrassing spat, a very distressing sign became evident.
TweetIs The Corporate Website Dead?
We see ourselves as an agency that designs, monitors and manages our client’s presence on the Internet. The corporate website, I must admit, is almost always the first place we begin. However, for some brands, it isn’t always a practical approach. The way consumers are encountering brands online is changing fast and the corporate website is not necessarily the first place they look. Or the search engines either.
Many consumers rely on what their peers say about the brand on social media platforms or regular word of mouth before they make the decision to check out the website. This means the corporate website is now a last resort location for data (technical specs, pricing, contact info) that the consumer is unable to easily find on their peer networks.
In his post on the Six Pixels of Separation blog, Mitch Joel raises the point on whether the end of large website builds is here. I agree with his perspective that the days when businesses built large websites where everything was centralized and the brand controlled the conversation are largely over. That is why we should be thinking of a brand’s presence on the Internet beyond the corporate website because ‘beyond’ is where the consumer lives.
Of course this means the traditional ways of measuring ROI for online initiatives has to change. Website analytics are now a very inadequate way of measuring a brand’s impact online. Analytics now have to extend beyond website hits to mentions on Twitter & Facebook, views on YouTube and participation of consumers/prospects on other media such as LinkedIn.
Do you think you may be holding on to a dead website?
