When I was a marketing director for a company that developed a web authoring tool in the '90s, our website was the most important part of our marketing mix. We spent hours agonizing over wording and design, imagining that each pixel could affect our brand. It was the primary way we spoke to our customers. In addition to telling customers who we were and what we did, the website needed to reflect our corporate values and our personality.
Today, there are infinitely more ways for a company to reach customers. My current marketing team includes an evangelist, Joey. His job is to be active and spread our message in the communities -- both real and virtual. He tweets regularly with product updates and news. He maintains a dialogue with users on forums and community sites. He hits all the local technology and design events and mingles with customers at parties and conferences. To many people, Joey is a better reflection of the personality of the company than our corporate site. To the folks he reaches, the company is young, fun, and energetic.
The re-launch of Skittles' website last week will likely get the consumer marketing world thinking about the role of the corporate website in the social media era. By removing all the junk we think a website needs and simply linking to the brand's social media pages, Skittles is sending a powerful message: Customer thoughts and opinions shape the brand. What is Skittles? According to one tweet, "Skittles are a delicious rainbow." Another tweet proclaims, "Skittles make me hyper and act strange... I love them!"
Skittles is allowing its social media strategy to drive the corporate marketing site, and it appears to be paying off. With nearly 600,000 friends on Facebook, Skittles clearly has fans willing to spread the rainbow. Consumers are talking and sharing their Skittles' experiences about Skittles-infused vodka and getting over a sugar high. While there are only so many bad things you can say about a simple fruit-flavored sugary candy, parent company Mars has relaxed its hold on the brand and enabled conversations to occur in a natural, unobtrusive way all over the web, not just on its own site.
Using widgets, microsites, and social media applications, many other brands have realized the power of distributing content outside of their own domain. Before the vast majority of people knew what you could do on iLike.com, that company found its success on Facebook, gaining almost a million new users the first week the application went live. To new users, the iLike experience is bound with the Facebook brand.
Another company that found success away from its main domain is Office Max. Who didn't go to Elfyourself.com over the holidays and create a personalized dancing Elf to share with friends? The experience was fun, engaging, and one of the most viral campaigns ever. OfficeMax's intent was to give customers a fun experience for the holidays, and many attribute the campaign's success to its unobtrusive branding. Rather than housing the campaign on OfficeMax.com, the company let it live independently, off the corporate domain.
Widgets have been helping brands connect with fans away from corporate domains for a few years now. The entertainment industry has been the quickest to adopt the medium, recognizing fans' interest in sharing content on social networking sites. Go to any music lover's page on MySpace and you will likely find widgets that contain everything you need to experience the music and the feeling of a band. Widgets allow fans to express their affinity for their favorite bands, and they allow the artists to increase their exposure by housing their content in a format that is easily sharable across social networks.
Many bands have abandoned their own domains to concentrate on their MySpace pages. The MySpace platform makes it very easy for bands to feature their music, start a blog, and communicate with fans. And, when a band provides widgets for fans on top of the MySpace platform, it becomes easy for their fans to spread their music across the network.
The next generation of widgets is promising a whole new level of engagement, allowing consumers to interact with widget content, personalize it with their own assets, and publish it for friends to see. What makes this prospect so exciting to brands is that engagement can be tracked and measured with analytics solutions from Google and Omniture, regardless of where the widget is posted. As a result, the brand gets far more information about consumers than it does from visitors to the corporate website.
So if your company has an active social media strategy, think about this: If you took down you company website and only linked to your social media sites, how would your brand look? Would your customers be able to articulate who you are and what you do? If so, it might be time to start dialing down your site and dialing up your social strategies.
Michelle Wohl is VP of Marketing for Sprout.
