Is Your Website Still Useful and Important?

For a couple years now I’ve been feeling the need to not promote building traditional websites anymore, but instead to help clients be part of the conversation around their product and let that lead them to what they need to do online. Back when we started building websites more than 13 years ago, they were a very static thing. Difficult to build, modify and add on to, and yet, the thing everybody wanted and needed to help market themselves. So how’d that work out? Pretty well for a while, until 2001 when people finally realized a sock puppet couldn’t sell dog food very well.

Their motto? “Pets.com, because pets can’t drive.” Well, they can’t buy online either…

Where am I going with this? Well, today I saw a twitter feed from @LenKendall that went to a website  from DigitalBuzz.com with stats for website trends for large brands and then stats for the social media websites.  Company website stats are falling while social media stats are rising… quickly.

The author, Aden Hepburn, suggests two main reasons.  First, that people are spending all their time on social networks and getting the info they need there, and that they’re getting info via RSS feeds and from the very same social networks to which the brands are pushing information.

This doesn’t really mean that the big brands are getting less and less popular, but that they are and need to be pushing more content into Social Media to be successful.  And sure enough, many of them are.

And while the Pets.com sock puppet was funny for a while, it didn’t yet capture the social media in a way that was meaningful and profitable (according to Wikipedia, they were “selling merchandise for approximately one-third the price it paid to obtain the products.”)

So, according to DigitalBuzz.com:

The fact is, agencies and brands will need to work out how to deliver the relevant content, branding and experiences they are currently achieving on their own websites, into highly competitive social networks, feeds, apps and widgets, where every “campaign” or “offer” has to be groundbreaking just to get noticed… and then there was tracking…!

In short, It’s all about the Conversation.  Are you being part of it?