From toys to tools

The definition of social media is becoming blurred as publishing environments such as web sites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter intermingle and seamlessly interact with each other.

When looking at creating a new web site, professional services often concentrate only on the hard attributes of interface design, corporate design guidelines and visual brand delivery. This is understandable, these are easy to understand and operate, time is often at a premium and a new web site often also throws up a range of internal issues – diverting attention away from the opportunities a new web site represents.

Having a fantastic looking web is a great start – but is not an end in itself. Unless the site is visible and useful to existing and potential customers then the whole exercise is an abstract design project – interesting - but ultimately pointless from a business point of view.

We talk a lot about a firm’s digital footprint. For us this means how a firm engages with the multi dimensional web – ie the web site sitting at the centre of a satellite network of social and professional media tools.

Users are increasingly coming to web sites from these platforms – ie their experience of the web is often quite different from that of the principles in the firm. For example, most firm principles I have met think Facebook is something their children obsess about, Twitter is for odd losers talking about what coffee they had this morning and blogs – well no-one has time to blog do they?

Yet these platforms are evolving from toys to tools very quickly, how your firm is perceived and ‘filed’ in a potential customers head is no longer only dependent on the central web site – it is an accumulation of points of contact - if a researcher sees a piece of information from the firm on a trusted third party source they are likely to view the firm in a more positive light.

How a firm uses these tools together will guide the footprint they form and crucially the direction they are heading. This is a central part of thinking about a new web site and how it performs an active marketing, rather than a passive story telling, role.