Blogger: Larry Cannell
Robin Hamman makes some really good points in his post “Your corporate website is irrelevant.”
Twentieth century corporate structures, which, to borrow sentiment, if not words from Lee Bryant, put the World's window upon your organisation in the hands of the IT guys in the basement and the marketing department are crumbling under the weight of peer-to-peer recommendations and reviews, consumers tweeting about their experiences, audiences creating their own groups on facebook, and outraged citizens discussing the expense claims of MPs on blogs.
This is similar to what we said in our Burton Group Report “Web Content Management Systems: Managing Web Presence in a 2.0 World.” Thinking your website is the only place a customer can get information about your company may be a very naive position to take.
However, while I agree with Robin that a standalone website is likely to be less important today and enterprises need to consider their entire web presence, I wouldn’t go so far and say all companies need to have a presence on social networking sites. For many companies a presence on Facebook, for example, makes a great deal of sense. But for many others it may not. For example, a supplier whose primary customers are automotive companies might be better off to focus on localization of their web content (in particular provide English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese versions of their content) than to start a Facebook fan page.
I think the advice Chuck Hollis gave in a blog post entitled “Does It Make Sense To Have A Corporate Presence On (insert name of popular social platform here)?” applies well here:
You know, if someone asked me "does it make sense to go to Cleveland?", I'd have to ask the obvious question -- why do you think you need to go to Cleveland?
There's an implied context here of goals and objectives that serve as a framework for any decision we might make about anything. I'd encourage people to think in these broader terms of what we might want to get done, rather than the pros or cons of any particular social platform.
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