Mike Arauz is a strategist at Your Competition is Everything On the Internet
Yes, this includes pornography. It also includes every picture of a cute kitty cat and every video of an adorable baby. Most importantly, though, your competition includes every personal relationship your audience members have with each virtual and real life friend. This means every email in their inbox. Every wall post on their Facebook profile. Every IM chat. Friends' Twitter messages, quotes, links, and videos posted to Tumblr, and original blog posts.
In case you haven't noticed, our internet usage is now primarily guided by our personal interests and social behaviors. This means that generally speaking, we only go where we want to go, or we go where our friends lead us.
According to a 2007 MTV Global study, digital youth in the US only visit 7 websites regularly.
As of February 2008, these were the top 10 websites among US college students:
Notice what makes it on to this list: social network sites (Facebook and MySpace), YouTube, search engines (Google and Yahoo), and content-specific blogs and publishers (ESPN and Perez Hilton).
Notice what isn't on this list: any brand websites, micro- or otherwise.
If you're hoping for a share of their time and attention, then you have to begin by acknowledging that attempting to create a stand-alone experience outside of these most popular domains is probably a lost cause.
Brands need to focus on creating experiences that live within the domains where their audience already spends the most time.
Those experiences need to be native to the domains. Users need to be able to discover the brand organically. They need to be able to interact with the brand in a way that is natural within each online environment.
And those experiences need to be so compelling that your audience seeks them out (that they are either something that they want to find, or something that their friend wants to tell them about).
In case you haven't noticed, our internet usage is now primarily guided by our personal interests and social behaviors. This means that generally speaking, we only go where we want to go, or we go where our friends lead us.
According to a 2007 MTV Global study, digital youth in the US only visit 7 websites regularly.
As of February 2008, these were the top 10 websites among US college students:
Notice what makes it on to this list: social network sites (Facebook and MySpace), YouTube, search engines (Google and Yahoo), and content-specific blogs and publishers (ESPN and Perez Hilton).
Notice what isn't on this list: any brand websites, micro- or otherwise.
If you're hoping for a share of their time and attention, then you have to begin by acknowledging that attempting to create a stand-alone experience outside of these most popular domains is probably a lost cause.
Brands need to focus on creating experiences that live within the domains where their audience already spends the most time.
Those experiences need to be native to the domains. Users need to be able to discover the brand organically. They need to be able to interact with the brand in a way that is natural within each online environment.
And those experiences need to be so compelling that your audience seeks them out (that they are either something that they want to find, or something that their friend wants to tell them about).
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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5 Comments:
you are full of shit.
I don't think you are full of shit and i do think you are exactly right about where brands need to focus their energy. Almost a 'if you can't beat them, join them model'.
That said, one of the things I'm really excited to see develop on a technical side is facebook connect? Any thoughts on how brands can use that to build bridges between their own domain and those places social network sites.
Mike! You got your first flamer/troll!
You made the big times.. congrats.
Anonymous, you keep it coming, you lonely, lazy, coward; you keep the web running.
Haha - Got a good laugh out of anonymous.
I think good ol' craphammer and I had an argument about this awhile back. I think it's not really an either or sort of thing. To go out and make the quintessential 2003 microsite is suicide these days, but its still important to have that home base of operations.
The key word in the MTV study is regularly. But in the 30 hours or so a week they spend online, they actually probably go to, if not hundreds of sites, close to it. So our job isn't necessarily to avoid the microsite, but to make it chunkable, to provide pieces for the audience to bring back with them and share. And then make bits that connect back to the mothership so their friends can find you, too.
That's sort of the basic idea of facebook connect, no? Create something that flows easily in both directions so the expectation isn't necessarily for you to be a regular, but to keep an open line of communication when the time comes for talking.
That said, it does change the microsite from being a short term campaign-related burst to a much longer term, more relationship-y endeavor.
And at the risk of going on way too long, I'd also say that things like facebook applications run the same risk as microsites. They're often used for short campaign bursts, and they're still requiring a user to do something out of the ordinary, even if facebook.com technically remains in the url.
I agree with what ur saying...this space is about finding "compliments", as opposed to "competing"...the conversation with brands has been going on for many years now..it would be great to see brands replace a lot of their fear and un-knowing in this arena and shift it to leadership and innovation...stay-tuned.
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