Lately my company's been looking to redo their website. This is not suprising given the fact that through 07 they've gone through a significant amount of change, and now their online identity is nothing like their corporate one.
The traditional site, at least as far as a few years ago, gave the customer insight into a business and its operations. Decent sites had a lot of pretty pictures, simple chunks of digestible information, and more or less kept to their own.
However with the advent of Web 2.0, social networking and linking upon linking, companies have started to change the way they expose themselves online. They're no longer relying on getting a high rank in Google - they're starting to take matters into their own hands - even Tea has it's own myspace.
I guess what's good about it is that the company can showcase its followers in an 'unbiassed' medium. 'Unbiassed' can't escape the inverted commas due to a nominal amount of coaxing of users to become 'friends'. But regardless of how companies leverage web 2.0, does it make a difference to their business?
I'd say why not? The more links you have from Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, the more exposure you inevitably get. Who cares where the traffic comes from - by the time the user gets to your site, the last thing that you'll worry about is how you think the user percieves hitting your site through social bookmarking. Who cares? They've stepped through the front door, time to get acquainted.
Whether or not Web 2.0 is a phase or not, it's obvious that it's changing the makeup of the www. It's up to business if they want to resist what they can't stop, or use it to their benefit.
posted @ Wednesday, January 09, 2008 7:42 AM