Websites vs. Content
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
I accept that people and brands are going have a use for their own websites (I still do). Given that, the important questions are: What role will your website be playing within the overall context of the internet as a whole? Are you spending an amount of money, effort, and time that is appropriate to that role? Would you be better off putting that money, effort, and time into developing content?
One of the first things I realized after I published my post yesterday, was that the diagram over-emphasizes the importance of websites. Ironic, because I've been arguing against the importance of websites. (BooneOakley showed us yesterday that there are some very smart alternatives to the branded .com with their new site entirely within YouTube.)
Most brands aspire to be wildly popular at the top tier of the web. A smash success would be becoming a hugely popular and well recognized internet phenomenon. But, then they turn around and spend a ton of money on a flashy branded microsite that is going to live down in one of the bottom tiers of the web. And after they put it up, they spend even more money on display advertising in order to beg people to leave that top tier of the web and come down to visit their site.
On the other hand, a discrete piece of content is not bound by these different strata. It can live and travel fluidly around all the different environments of the web. Videos, images, text, and even single words or phrases, can be easily taken and re-posted in more personally relevant places. And replicated over and over. All facilitating the spread of the original idea, and making it more likely that new people will discover it.
If you're going to build a website, you should at the very least think of it as a loose aggregation of portable content. Reveal the network that your brand is a part of by sharing other people's content (and showing your personality through this content). Make all of your own content easily sharable: use YouTube to host your videos, use JPGs in HTML so that they can be copied and pasted, use standard blogging platforms to make it easy for people to take and link back to your message.
The .com is only dead if you cut it off from the network. The more connections you can enable, the more chances it will have to thrive.
One of the first things I realized after I published my post yesterday, was that the diagram over-emphasizes the importance of websites. Ironic, because I've been arguing against the importance of websites. (BooneOakley showed us yesterday that there are some very smart alternatives to the branded .com with their new site entirely within YouTube.)
Most brands aspire to be wildly popular at the top tier of the web. A smash success would be becoming a hugely popular and well recognized internet phenomenon. But, then they turn around and spend a ton of money on a flashy branded microsite that is going to live down in one of the bottom tiers of the web. And after they put it up, they spend even more money on display advertising in order to beg people to leave that top tier of the web and come down to visit their site.
On the other hand, a discrete piece of content is not bound by these different strata. It can live and travel fluidly around all the different environments of the web. Videos, images, text, and even single words or phrases, can be easily taken and re-posted in more personally relevant places. And replicated over and over. All facilitating the spread of the original idea, and making it more likely that new people will discover it.
If you're going to build a website, you should at the very least think of it as a loose aggregation of portable content. Reveal the network that your brand is a part of by sharing other people's content (and showing your personality through this content). Make all of your own content easily sharable: use YouTube to host your videos, use JPGs in HTML so that they can be copied and pasted, use standard blogging platforms to make it easy for people to take and link back to your message.
The .com is only dead if you cut it off from the network. The more connections you can enable, the more chances it will have to thrive.
3 Comments:
distribution is the new destination. word!
For me, the .com question is one of commitment.
Are you going to commit yourself to create a behavior of visiting your .com and reward that behavior in your users?It's an incredibly time, labor and cost intensive commitment, but if done well, it could pay off. But it means creating remarkable content and engagements iteratively and rapidly. It means rewarding my attention with every single visit. It means treating a return visitor differently than a first time visitor, and treating a habitual visitor like the best friend he/she really is.
The truth is, no one has executed on this level yet. That means there's an opportunity for it.
If you can't yourself to doing something truly remarkable with your .com, take Mike's advice and spread yourself across the social platforms your customers are already browsing.
Hey Mike--
Awesome post, and imo one of the few pieces where you explicitly state tactical strategies in light of all of the pearls wisdom you've written in the past.
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