Most of the conversations blazing up the blogosphere are about how businesses can use the latest and greatest social networking sites to further their reach and develop relationships. Chris Brogan had a nice post on the building blocks of social networking for business. These building blocks are critical to the future success of your company. However, with all the talk about social media where does that leave your companies website? What does the future of a business’s websites look like?
The answer is integration. All of these social networking services (blogs, flickr, facebook, linkedin, twitter, posterous, youtube, etc) need to be integrated into your main website. When I say integrated I don’t mean just a tab at the top of your site or a nice feed on one of the pages. I mean real integration. Some examples:
- On your product offering page you should allow users to leave comments
- Allow your users to join your website with facebook connect or google friends
- On your homepage have the latest blog posts (headlines and excerpts), twitter feeds, flickr photos, and youtube videos
- Allow multiple employees to aggregate their twitter feeds to the main website
- On your product offering page, show flickr and youtube feeds of customers using that product
- Have a list of your employees along with their linkedin, twitter, facebook and posterous accounts
- On your products offering page, show “Related Links” to that product that link back to blog posts you’ve done that pertain to it
- Allow the ability to “like” or add comments everywhere throughout the site. On your about us section, history, products, customer support, etc
- Pull in product reviews from around the web that are posted right next to the product on you website
When you look at the blogs that are currently on the web you see many of these techniques being used. It’s these techniques that create a community, a two way conversation. However go to any companies website and at best they may have a tab that links to their blog, or maybe they have forums where you can comment. The experience is stale, static and one way.
The future of business websites will be a melding of all the social networking tools into one location where a customer can go to get an entire view and establish a relationship with that company.
Do you know of any company websites that are doing this now?