Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

Categories: Community Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web StrategyPosted on May 29th, 2007

Traditional Web Marketing needs to evolve, and this post intends to kick start the next generation.

What’s a corporate web site?
It’s the domain they use after every advertisement where you can learn more about a company, ya know it, anycompany.com

But we’re tired of the corporate website and all its happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

While some of your traffic may be going up on your website, it’s not indicative of how corporate websites are being used. Analytics don’t tell us why people go to your site, and it may not be for the reason you want them to.

[The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations on the internet]

Why is your corporate website irrelevant?

Marketing has shifted, it’s no longer on two domains
Many web marketers are under the impression that the battles are only fought within Google search results and on the corporate domain. In reality, marketing has spread to many other areas where conversations occur: social networks, rating sites, chat rooms, and even blogs. I dedicated a whole post to why marketing is not on two domains only.

Decisions are made before they go to the corporate website
Yesterday, at lunch with a college student, she told me that her peers get ideas about product decisions on consumer rating sites, and from their peers. They use instant messaging, facebook, (and other social networks) and rarely directly type in a domain name to corporate website. If this holds true, then it’s assumed that prospects make decisions on other websites BEFORE they come to the corporate website to get factual information.

Factual information
Legally, corporations need to disclose product details, this is a strong case for the use of the corporate websites. However in my continued conversation with the Generation Y, she continued to tell me that she used corporate websites to get core feature stats and pricing, but that’s after she made a decision based upon her peer feedback to visit the corporate site.

The future, and how to stay relevant:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Your website will be a Community Resource
This means that you’ll put your customers first, No Really, I mean it. This means providing analysis of not just yourself but to competitors as well, this means that you’ll link to competitors. Crazy? I did this myself at my previous role as a community manager, I created a wiki for customers that linked to competitors, and it made me more relevant.

[The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services]

Outcomes
Customers will make your site the first place to go for information, trust will increase, you may be able to build better products and services with real-time customer feedback, and most importantly, you’ll be a community resource that will help you meet your customer needs faster.

Visualize:
We’ll start to see customers help write the corporate newsletter, feeds pulling in industry blogs, media (audio and video) customers rating and ranking and voting for what features they want improved, product teams working directly with customers in real-time, and customers self-supporting each other.

Translations
I’d love if you’d translate this post, I’ll add you to this list.

German, by Jorg Weisner

Hebrew, by Omer Rosen

Greek, by Nikos

Italian, by Marco

French by PR2Peer

Dutch modification by Jacqueline Fackelde

Sweedish version

Spanish Version

Chinese Version

Polish Version

Estonian modification by Dreamgrow

Update: I’ve started to track different opinions from blogs on this post, or you can see all the trackbacks, there’s nearly dozens of links coming to this post.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 8:42 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

brian

Job ad of the future:
Wanted: Senior moderator with experience maintaining multiple social networks for a large corporation. Must have excellent communication and conflict resolution skills. Please send blog URL to....

This seems like a new role not filled by existing skillsets in most marketing organizations. The need to patrol for vandalism and surf for corporate-related flare-ups on third party sites will increase if more companies go this route.

terry chay

Interesting ideas on Corpsite 2.0. :-)

jeremiah_owyang

Brian

This role is called "Community Manager" or "Community Evangelist"

I held this title at Hitachi Data Systems. You can read about what this role is about here:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/26/u...

brian

Jeremiah, I think the community roles you describe are too general. For the new website you describe, companies will want product manager level expertise in these roles. Large companies with hundreds or thousands of products will require fast, knowledgeable and empowered action that a central manager/evangelist role lacks. Social networking experience will be like MS Office proficiency for these employees.

jeremiah_owyang

There's no doubt that there will be multiple people performing this role.

In many cases, it will be in addition to existing and current roles (Product Management to Product Marketing to Product Support to Product Engineering)

Connie Bensen

My pet peeve are FAQ's that aren't easily searchable. Granted I'm a librarin, but I've been on a rampage to link those technical resources with the community forum because I believe that people WANT to serve themselves whether the customer service desk is open or not. And there's nothing worse than resources cleverly buried & no advanced search option! It has to reduce staff time in the end so it's worth the time I believe.

On our personal site, we have our resources linked in 3 different ways so that people will find them while browsing. I wish that companies would be more conscious of the user experience in that sense!

RichardatDELL

Hi jeremiah

Thought you might be interested, we recently added ratings and reviews to dell.com in keeping with what you suggest here.

peter

you wrote, "The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services."

I'm not so sure I agree that this is a good thing. By commingling the voices of corporations and the community at large, we break down the barriers of objectivity that the external community has in theory. I agree that corporations need to be more transparent to build better and stronger trust. At the same time, however, external sources of information need to remain objective in their editorial authority. Think of the stories we've all heard from certain corporations or movie producers hiring people to go out onto external sites to say good things about their products/movies/whatever.

Just because something is more democratic does not make it more authoritative or credible. And just because it includes outside voices does not mean it is more transparent.

Clearly, Gen X became more cynical than our predecessors, and Gen Y is gaining a very strong skill in BS detection. But blurring the lines between official corporate (or government) position and independent editorial opinion is not necessarily a good thing, in my opinion.

To a certain extent, what you're describing is something that will occur whether corporations drive it or consumers drive it. It just will be. But that does not mean it will be unexploitable. It just means misinformation can travel as quickly as information (and often more quickly, particularly if it reeks of scandal). The future you describe is one that includes not only virtuous corporate citizens but also the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

jeremiah_owyang

Peter

Thanks for this insight. My vision is that the websites of the future will in fact contain both objective and subjective content. And it will be transparent in the subjective opinions.

I think there's a way we can all make it work, perhaps the corporations just report the facts, and the community creates the marketing messages. seriously, it's possible.

Joerg Weisner

Jeremiah,
I really agree with your post. Thanks for the great writing.

I just translated this post to German and published it on my blog. I hope you agree with this.

jeremiah_owyang

Joergy

I saw that post in my trackbacks before reading this comment. I'm impressed, and thankful.

I'll be featuring you in an upcoming post.

Philip

Do you think there is a difference between a brand website and a corporate website? The example you give of Dell is unusual, in that the brand and the corporation are one. Take Chivas Whisky for example, it's a brand owned by a largely unknown (to most consumers) corporation - Pernod Ricard Group, the second largest drinks company in the world. How would your thinking apply to this example?

jeremiah_owyang

Philip

It depends on how the content is structured. Some brand websites are purely advertorial experiences created by interactive firms.

If they lack the opinions of prospects and customers they they are indeed corporate.

Perhaps an example of a community site is one that shows how Chivas is used with other brands to make new, unique flavors, but the drink recipes are from the community. That's a communtiy site.

Make sense?

Philip

It does make sense. There is a 'corporate' www.chivas.com site, which is pretty much the the 'advertorial experience' you mention, however, you might be interested to take a look at www.thisisthelife.com which is I think a good example of Chivas running a community website which is engaging and enriching. I would be interested to know what you think.

jeremiah_owyang

Philip, Great example, please continue to bring more

rrxephcwbc

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! elvdpqdoqoqcwg

Nikos

Hey Jeremiah, I've translated this post in the Greek language. We Greeks are not a large user base, but better than nothing. :-)

Is it enough to post it in my blog?

Stefano Sessa

awesome post!

Darren Jones

This is just a straight repeating of the Cluetrain Manifesto, about 7 or 8 years old I believe. See http://www.cluetrain.com/ for a history lesson.

jeremiah_owyang

Darren

The cluetrain is absolutely an influence over me. I read that book quite a while ago, it excited me to no end.

I was schooled by the Naked Conversations authors, which is a 'business extension' of Cluetrain.

My focus is on corporate websites, so I just brought my focus tighter.

If I did a post on 'The irrelevant online newspaper' you could say the same thing.

So, yes you are right, and thank you, I accept that compliment.

Hugo Raaijmakers

Hi Jeremiah,

Very interesting article you wrote. I also believe that the future of corporate sites will look totally different than most people think.

Do you know if there are any companies in the world that have initiatives to create a business/customer controlled portal?

Best regards,
Hugo

Regards,
Hugo

jeremiah_owyang

There's tons, see this list:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/12/l...

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/07/20/l...

jeremiah_owyang

Oh, to be clear, those are TOOLs, there are companies that are using those tools. Companies like Microsoft and Dell are great examples

Check out Microsoft's Channel 9

and Dell's IdeaStorm site (where customers get to decided what products are to be built and sold)

Elwyn Jenkins

Great ideas about involving customers in writing a website. Staying relevant though is more than listening to customers, though. There needs to be an environment of innovation as the engine that delivers on what customers are seeking. So, how to develop an environment of innovation should be a major thrust of the company.

george

I've been enjoying our corporate internet makeover lately at ibm.com. We have moved from pure selling/pitching to more information sharing, and not in an entirely marketing way. The 'Ideas from IBM' series is a good example. Just my two cents, for I agree with this assessment.

Recruiting Animal

Do I get a nod for translating it into Canadian? (Very interesting. Loved it).

Tiemersma

Great article first of all! I noticed that a lot of the points that are described in the 'rules of SMO' (started by R. Bhargava) are coming back here.
I think Dell indeed is a good example of SMO and therefor of the corporate site2.0, with IdeaStorm, the Dell blogs, the active role of Dell on external blogs and so on.

MattCeni

I think another important element that needs to be considered moving forward is the differentiation of a corporate site that looks at transactional and relationship content differently.

Annalie Killian

I am in charge of our intranet and my hunch is that the same deal applies. Do you have any postings you can refer me to in that regard? We are abut to embark on a collaborative process with employees to re-establish purpose, needs and functionality they want. Its strange, the uptake of collaborative tools is low- that may be a function of the internal hierarchial structures.

Jacqueline

Just wanted to let you know that the Dutch translation-link is a dead link. If you still are looking for translators I would be happy to translate your post into Dutch 'again'. In that case let me know by mail or twitter.

Rahul Dewan

Hello Jeremiah,

Interesting post! I wanted to understand more about the highlight you have made - "The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services".

I agree with all the points but do not really understand how a community can be part of authoring a website for a "services" company. My question is relevant because we're an open source consulting services company in India.

We have our ups and downs, great customer references and yet poor-performances as well. We could hardly have rants about us by our customers on our blog or website.

As for good references, customers have given us references on their website, such as on http://www.wizmo.nl/footer/partners.html; yet, what would motivate them to come and write a comment in our blog, about how happy they are with us? Do you see this practice being adopted in the coming years?

Thanks,
Rahul

Ivy Clark

Thanks for the writeup. Makes a whole lot of sense to me. But it's still an uphill task convincing stakeholders that it's ok to let outsiders contribute content to our site.

Yea, in this day and age, anyone with anything negative to say, will say it, regardless of where they do it. At least if they say it first on our sites, we get to know about it first, and are given a chance to decide on steps to manage the issues.

Ian B

Really interesting stuff Jeremiah,

What are your thoughts on how to establish trust and credibility in a non-irrelevant, customer-open corporate website.

Given the attempts to game wikipedia and fake "buzz" on social sites; won't most people just not trust a corporate site - no matter how transparent it claims to be?

And given that customers (or competitors posing as customers) could write anything - wouldn't the temptation to censor just be too great for any corporate?

Ian

kenobi

This should be old news for b2b corporate websites. You should be offering a push / pull experience on their site in some form or another. Even if you're nervous about negative comments, there's always moderation. And no, users won't be annoyed if you prevent spam and abusive emails appearing on the site. Achieving this balance will be the key to the success of the site. Many of the web agencies I know running blogs and opinion pieces on their site would kill for users to leave comments. Having meessages to filter and edit in the first place is a nice problem to have.

Stempniaked

Hi Jeremiah!
Although it's been almost a yeat since you wrote it, it is so great post!
I'm convinced that every corporate (and not only) marketer should read it. For their sake :)

I translated it on my blog into Polish:
http://stempniaked.blogspot.com/2008/03/jaka-je...

Regards,
Pawel Stempniak

Freshleaf

It all makes sense, but my question is with "Decisions are made before they go to the corporate website" If your corporate website is there to address financial analysts, decision makers and investors, how comfortable are those people with information coming from the community rather than the source? But yes, the corporate website needs to evolve with the prevailing trends

Neethu Peter

Hello Jeremiah,

We have come out with our new website on http://www.invendes.com/ . It will go live on 1st of August '08. Please do check it and give me your valuable feedback.

Best Regards,
Neethu Peter

TheLacekCory

Just came across this again. I wonder how you'd revise this now that all the features you wanted built into future corporate sites have more relevance externally. Does the corporate site serve only transactions? Does this become the location to take action once decisions have been made?

Catherine Crofton

While I agree that the relevancy of the corporate web site may have diminished as a ‘marketing’ channel, with the SEC's August 1, 2008 guidance (post-dating your article) governing corporate web sites and blogs, the relevancy of the corporate/IR web site has actually increased as a shareholder relations channel. Public companies can use their corporate web sites/blogs as a recognized channel of disclosure and the corporate/IR web site has become the repository of material information for investors. That said, we see social media playing an ever increasing role in the dissemination of disclosure.

Carlos abler

It appears as though: your corporate site is everywhere.

Utopian Web Strategy

I think everyone will eventually will have to accept that social media is a large part of online marketing. How long that takes is any ones guess. Blogs have been around for a long time now, but are only recently starting to take off in the corporate world

Corporate Web Design

I just came across this article and I think that a lot of the points made still hold true and a lot of companies still don't embrace web 2.0 the way they should.

Social Media Marknadsföring

Nice post!

If you need any Swedish translation made further on, contact me!

Best,
Magnus

Jeremiah Owyang

Feel free to do it, i'll cross link
Jeremiah Owyang
Web Strategist

Blog: www.web-strategist.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/jowyang
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JeremiahOwyang
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jowyang
Email: jeremiah_owyang@yahoo.com

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Nice post here. It does make senses, appreciate for sharing.

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mfarney

Customer feedback is always welcomed even if it's good or bad. Other customers should see what services they actually receive and how their problems are being dealt with. Every services provider should have a forum or a blog where clients can speak their mind.
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Mathew Farney - Web Hosting