Your Web Site is Invisible
Summary: The most sophisticated and costly corporate web site will be useless unless your customers know it’s there, and how to find it. Outreach using email and news feeds may be at least as important as the design of the site or its content. Only after your customers arrive ‘on-site’ will its design and content be able to do their job of creating and maintaining communication between you and your customers.
————————————————–
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.
That’s the prime difference between your company’s web site and traditional media.
You can put your best foot forward online and nothing may come of it – no new business, no enhanced visibility. Your message may remain unseen, no matter how much you invest.
That’s because a web site is a passive medium. It offers no way to reach out, grab someone’s attention, and pull him or her into your world.
Unlike a magazine cover, a tabloid headline, a print ad, or a billboard, all of which are visible whether the reader thinks about it or not, your web site is invisible until someone decides to go there.
Until then, it might as well not exist.
Learning from the Papers
This is a problem that print media have been struggling with since the 1990s. Managers of corporate web operations can learn from their experience.
The media needed the maximum number of viewers to justify the sale of advertising in their on-line editions. Getting those readers proved difficult. Tactics like ‘keywording’ and search-engine optimization only went so far. Thus for most of the last decade, on-line advertising was a hard sell. Only since 2000 has Internet advertising begun to show promise, and it’s done so because publishers with on-line editions realized that they had to be proactive.
If you build it, AND you capture their attention, THEN they will come.
Almost every successful on-line publisher – The New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and a huge number of smaller operations, including blogs – has either daily email newsletters (often several of them), an RSS feed, or both.
Emails arrive in the reader’s inbox every morning with a list of important stories and features, plus links to the publication’s web site.
The Times may not know exactly how many readers reach its site via these emailed links, but they do know that the number of people receiving their email newsletter is a sizable fraction of the number of hits their site logs daily. They also know that these people are apt to click-through to other pages on their site, often many pages.
The same is true of most major media web sites; their newsletters bring in eyeballs, and because eyeballs count, they can charge more for on-line advertising. As a result, the time is fast approaching when on-line media are going to be very profitable – several already are.
RSS and Atom
Most major media also syndicate news to attract readers using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom.
In effect, these services run like a news ticker on the client computer. When a story is posted that a reader might be interested in, the computer’s newsreader program might pop up a message and say so. The reader can then click on the embedded link and go directly to the web site that posted the story. Alternately, news items can be captured to a personalized news page, one’s own real-time newspaper.
RSS and Atom feeds also can be captured by ‘news-aggregation’ sites. Google News is an excellent example. Aggregator features are being added to high-traffic portals like My Yahoo as well as Google, giving access to an even larger number of potential readers.
So far, RSS and Atom are less effective than email newsletters in generating hits, but that’s only because usage is less widespread. It’s also a little harder to install and configure a newsreader than email, so fewer people have done it. That’s changing, however, as browser plug-ins and add-ons to email software improve daily.
So let’s assume that you email a newsletter and implement RSS and Atom feeds on your site. And let’s also assume this generates increased traffic (as it will). How do you keep them coming back?
Content
Simply stated, your web site has to be interesting or your emails and news feeds won’t generate much repeat business. Your annual report may draw stockholders and a few securities analysts, but how many potential customers will be interested? Dry press releases or dull capabilities stories won’t do. Nor will recycled information. Stories that change only in detail will bore the socks off your reader-customers.
That describes many corporate sites. They are repositories for aging press releases, catalog pages, annual reports, and contact information. But they could be so much more!
For example, if you are a large company, there is almost always unreported news lurking somewhere within the organization. Unfortunately, the mechanism designed to ferret out and publish this information is usually absent.
Here’s why. Your press relations, shareholder relations, and marketing communications groups are nearly always demand driven. They respond to the requirements of management as and when it decides to publicize something, and they field questions from the press. Few if any corporations engage in proactive reporting on their own turf.
Finally, marketing communications departments tend to have the lowest possible headcount commensurate with workload. Obviously, this leaves little time to scout for news within a company.
But it is this kind of news that will keep customers coming back for more. Unexpected, interesting things that are carefully vetted, but which don’t appear predigested.
New Business Through News…
As an important aside, internal reporting can result in new business. If someone in R&D develops a new device and a customer finds out about it on the web site, he may see it as a solution to a problem – Bingo, new business!
It seems apparent that if you spread your internal news net wide enough, and make sure you contact your potential customers through email and syndication, a simple news-gathering effort will show a return on investment, possibly a very large one.
…And Executive Blogs
Smart web managers also are going to take a page from high-tech companies like Intel, Google, Microsoft, and others. They will give the boss a blog.
These companies use blogs written by top and middle management to comment in real time on anything that might interest either employees or customers – new capabilities, research results, market news, contracts landed, company philosophy, the state of competition – you name it.
These blogs make for some of the most interesting reading in the technology industries, and both customers and the press love them. They almost always come back for more.
It’s safe to say that a company without executive bloggers is denying itself a great way to get its message out and humanize the company – and the people in the corner offices at the same time.
The Corporate Site
So, in the end, what makes a good corporate web site?
Think of it as something like a newspaper’s web site, but with content consisting of an almost infinitely sophisticated capabilities brochure. Content should be constantly changing and be of vital and ongoing interest to your customers and shareholders.
At its worst, the site should propagate your corporate message.
At its best, it WILL generate significant business.
Obviously, it must be ‘on message’ and reflect well on the company. The text should be well written and edited and should be genuinely interesting to your customers. Home page content should be refreshed often. There should be new and interesting material appearing as frequently as possible. An internal news operation and executive blogs are perfect for this.
Beyond that, the site should project professionalism and gravitas appropriate to the company. Its pages and animations should be tasteful and load fast (Remember that you have only seconds before a reader gets impatient and clicks away, perhaps to your competition.).
The Tripod
But even if you get everything right, nobody might show up to see it because your site constitutes only two legs of a tripod.
One is the site infrastructure itself, the HTML, XML, design, style sheets, etc. The second is the content, the written word, graphics, and animations.
The third leg of the tripod is outreach, email newsletters and news feeds using RSS or Atom. Unless your strategy is proactive, your site traffic will be weak and random. An outreach program takes much of the chance out of the equation, and nets you many more page views than otherwise possible.
In fact, a mediocre site supported by an outreach program is apt to outperform the most sophisticated site without one.
So, if your web program is going to be worth the investment in time and treasure, and if you expect an ROI, make sure it stands firmly on all three legs.