Friday Marketing Musings, 7 January 2010
Blogging is dead, Email is dead, Pay-per-Click is dead, hell: even TechCrunch recently got reported dead. If you haven’t announced anything dead over the last days, you’re just not much of a marketing guru. Don’t we all like to play Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – God is dead! -, just to show our authority and insight into the inner workings of our industries? So let me add another one: the corporate website, as we know it, is dead.
Let’s be fair: outside of e-commerce focused web property, corporate websites are obsolete. Who needs them? Did you recently browse through one, looking for anything other than contact information? I bet you didn’t, and neither did I. You usually already know all the relevant updates in there just by being on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and reading a couple of blogs, don’t you?
Looking at it from a vendor’s perspective: in owned media, some profiles, a Twitter account and a good mix of corporate blogs is all you need to come up with a solid communications strategy and deep audience reach. The rest is up to the people updating the streams with fresh content.
The best corporate citizen spends time representing the company out there, in social space, referring prospects, customers, partners and investors to content and contacts within the company. Nobody has time to go browsing a complete website anyway. My goodness, it’s like reading War & Peace. On paper!
Corporate websites truly are the dinosaurs of the digital age, the fossils of the future, they’re the thing your grand father is still well able to keep up with, they’re the … the… Well, they’re just dead as a doornail! Bury them, dance on their graves, and make sure to tweet while at it!
Rather than on platforms, brand experiences will be created in interaction. Alas, communications will be social only.
Nice!