Everyone has a platform if they choose to make opinions public and widely share experiences. For brands that are making an effort at honest propositions and quality control, the benefit is a lot of positive comment.
This is the first truth that should be understood when exploring the evolving role of brand websites. For those brands with a poor attitude and who take their customers for granted, however, it means their failures are highlighted and amplified -- everyone has their own little digital publishing empire and we all know that bad news sells best.
There is, for example, more personal newsworthiness in tweeting that your Ryanair flight is late than there is in announcing that your Virgin Atlantic flight was on time. In this context, online communications take on a role that is a hybrid of PR and customer services. A discretely placed 'contact us' in the website footer really doesn't cut the mustard any more. People expect to be treated as equals by the brands with which they choose to engage. Having only the 'contact us' link on the website is, frankly, an insult to consumers.
The second truth to accommodate is an uncomfortable one both for brands and for the agencies that serve them. They no longer dictate the conversation -- it's already taking place, whether they like it or not. With intelligence, tact, wit and sensitivity however, agencies and brands can join in with that conversation and even steer it and change its outcomes.
But to question whether social media should be part of the communications mix is naive. Facebook, which claims to have 20 million active members in the U.K., accounted for 14.5 per cent of all U.K. internet page views during September, according to Experian Hitwise. That's equivalent to one in every seven page views.
Social media is already part of brands' communications mix. They can choose to turn it to their advantage or shove their heads in the sand. If brands choose not to join the conversation about them, it will simply carry on without their input.
Both of these issues point to websites that should be more about listening and less about selling. This seems to be the biggest leap of faith you can ask brand managers -- or creative directors who are used to getting on a soapbox on behalf of their brands -- to make. They find it hard to imagine spaces in which they are required to shut up for a bit.
Sites in this new communications paradigm are much less about 'bigging up' brands and more about making heroes of the fans by putting them at the centre of the action. It's less brochure and more after sales support, less David Ogilvy's 'we sell or else' and more Dale Carnegie's 'how to win friends and influence people'.
That, by and large, points away from, for example, the extensive use of Flash and towards more flexible, easy to amend, refine and reshape websites based on easy to edit code bases. Perhaps there will even be websites created with consumer contributions as part of site development teams by, for example, being able to add their own content.
Social psychology and behavioural economics tell us that people trust their friends more than they trust brands and that our 'lazy minds' prefer to abdicate decision making to a group, rather than waste cognitive effort thinking things through for themselves. This underlines the need for brands to be where collaborative decision making and opinion forming is taking place, rather than trying to draw individuals into their tightly-controlled private spaces in the hope of influencing them.
So, brands website efforts have become an outreach programme, rather than a publishing enterprise. In turn, this means they need to adopt a radically different notion of what success looks like. There are still far too many KPIs set around the number of people who click on a banner and arrive at a site. Their experience of a brand or any attitudinal or behavioural change is completely disregarded. The transition we should be seeing in the role of websites is: informative > immersive > participative.
Brand websites are starting to move beyond the stage of providing only the facts. Mostly, they've moved on to elaborate Flash-based entertainments -- immersive environments in which customers are wooed and seduced, or so brands hope. However, increasingly media-savvy and cynical consumers are looking for more of a two way street. They want conversations with brands on an equal footing. That means participation. Consumers expect to be able to speak directly and individually to brands, but also that brands will respond sincerely and with interest.
This means that brands and agencies have to think of company websites more as channels than publications, more of a tool than a brand asset and more of a shared platform for the consumer as well as the brand than a simple one way broadcast mechanism.
Internet bank First Direct have taken this idea to its logical extreme and launched a dedicated website that collates live comments about the brand by internet users in a bid to overcome perceptions that banks lack transparency. It does not filter out negative comments and showcases all consumer opinions about the bank by aggregating comments from 8 million social media sites.
An application called 'Live feelings about First Direct' feeds live comments about the brand to the site. It also features a 'Talking Point' area where consumers can let the bank know what they think of its customer service.
First Direct understand that the key for many brands is that their 'website presence' will not be on their own website. Instead, the role of brands' domains will be to point customers and prospects to the many other places on the net where brands are participating in the wider conversation.
Steve Taylor is head of digital planning at CMW.
