Quote of the day
Actually two:
Do social networks make your website redundant?
First of all from Martin Kelley on ‘O Reilly’, who muses whether Facebook (and by extension other social networks) will replace the corporate website:
“I’m looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it has intuitive navigation, good e-commerce and a design that projects elegance.
“Yet despite all this, the website itself feels oddly static.
“With the rise of the real-time update streams being popularized by Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, users are becoming accustomed to a constantly-changing flow of pictures, videos and new snippets.”
This harks back to the Skittles experiment, where a standard homepage was replaced by social media feeds. It was noteworthy, not because of the way it was implemented, but because it questioned the purpose of old-school one-way websites.
As we’ve noted before, when we took Cow’s website down for several months, there wasn’t any negative impact. And this blog gets 3x as much traffic as our website does, in itself now a custom wordpress site, shorn of previous bells and whistles (like heavy flash graphics), which we figured provided little value.
The link vs the content economy
Is the title of Arianna Huffington’s post on the debate raging between Google and the Associated Press on whether aggregating news is content theft.
Arianna Huffington quotes ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus:
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
In other words, “what won’t work — what can’t work — is to act like the last 15 years never happened, that we are still operating in the old content economy as opposed to the new link economy, and that the survival of the industry will be found by “protecting” content behind walled gardens.”
The link vs the content economy…a concept that actually applies equally to both the debate around the future of news, and the usefulness of brand websites.
Image – Heraclitus taken by Cote
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Thanks for the comment Martin and I thought your conclusion was spot on, especially since it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot of recently (to the point of doing a report and short slide share when I next have time).
For example, a client has just asked me to rewrite their website. Fair enough, but as I was going through it a fairly fundamental question came up – what is this site actually for?
In other words, it’s much more fundamental than a copy job, you have to question the whole purpose of it.
Advergirl in fact has a good run down of some social sites on her blog as well:
http://bit.ly/BsW1h
Thanks for giving me a quote of the day! I don’t mind sharing the spotlight with Arianna Huffington–poor thing, she needs more attention
I used to work at a small non-profit and analytics indicated that most of our visitors came to find out who we were–beliefs, history, locations. We gave them the things we wanted them to see–committee pages, press releases, etc–but it was clear from the analytics that most visitors would have been better served if we had shut down our site and redirected the traffic to the appropriate Wikipedia page.
I love the Skittles mash-up, which I’ve somehow missed. I think I’d execute it differently but it’s a great way to get talked about. I’d love to dig through the analytics behind it. It would be really fun to run something like that through an A/B test: define goals and have the static old-school site compete against a mashed-up user generated site with links to whatever the goal is–collecting names, online sales. Enlisting fans to provide content and shill for us is just too perfect!