Where “your babies” = your website and “coming for” = they want to assimilate all of the web into their web of… Ah let’s just get to it.
We recently happened along a very well-meaning article by who seems to be a talented social media/marketing person from what we can see, here: http://technorati.com/social-media/article/the-future-of-your-brand-identity1/.
On the surface everything looks roses pollinated by cheerily singing bumble bees on a warm spring day and the bumble bees don’t sting and you can pet them, but here’s the thing, you pet a bumble bee and you do get stung and they are not nearly as soft and fluffy as they look, and what we mean by that is, unfortunately this article may be leading most businesses of any size down a path that is going to sting.
Last bug analogy we promise, let’s dissect this bumbling bee.
For those unfamiliar with this type of online sparring, quotes in bold and snarky replies to quotes in normal type face. All quotes come from the above linked article by the talented and well-meaning Francesca Heath:
The future of your brand identity is your website, not your Facebook Page
That is actually a brilliant beginning. It’s 100% true and nice to hear from what appears to be a social media person and we were pleasantly drawn in expecting to hear… wait a minute what’s all this…
Two to three years ago, some people were talking about the death of the brand website. The seemingly unstoppable rise of Facebook and the promise of spreading content across the social graph from brand Facebook Pages was an attractive elixir for many marketers.
Who were these people!? Oh, there’s a link to that person. Yes that person was incorrect, good call.
Fast forward to today and we have a very different scenario. The brand website has never been more important. Websites are now being re-invented as the primary social hub for a brand. It is now no longer good enough to push people to a brand Facebook page for the social experience and websites are not just destinations to be found with search engines. We are now entering an era of the social website.
What is a social hub for a brand? What’s that mean? If it means it is where an inanimate idea speaks with the voices in its head, okay we get that, that’s awesome. If it means it’s where a brand speaks in carefully scripted sound bites to an audience which has limited or no ability to respond in any genuine way, perfect, you nailed it. If you mean business websites do, or should, interact in a real way like they would be forced to (forced the key word, force is everything) on sites like Facebook, that is completely incorrect, impossible, and if it were possible should not be undertaken by any business unless that business is Facebook or another social media site.
So why do we say it’s impossible for a business site to act like a real social hub even if for some reason it wanted to? Because no one cares about being social on some brand’s website. People aren’t tools. No one loves a brand so much they will spend the sort of time they spend with friends, family, and stalking people on sites like Facebook, and why on earth would a business even want that? That’s what Facebook is for, let them do that there.
The inclination of any business to want so desperately to become the center of attention is cute and understandable, but as realistic as childhood dreams of one day riding your unicorn into your job as a profession mud pie maker on the 100th floor of your rainbow. Yeah rainbow. That’s where they work because they are a kid.
In real life the only social interaction which should happen on a business’s main website is carefully moderated question and answer time and pasting testimonials into relevant areas, and the rest is selling your product. Hopefully selling it in an interesting, engaging, and original way, but let’s not get too social.
Maybe we are reading more into “social hub” than was the intent, maybe question and answer time and testimonials was all the, we’re sure well-meaning and talented, author had in mind. Words have meaning though dang it and scripted and moderated Q&A is not a “social hub.”
As for the last sentence of that paragraph… seriously? Entering an era? O.o Like the Bronze Age or Industrial Revolution but like this era all revolves around what businesses do with their website? Really?
The rise of the hashtag and its subsequent support across all the major social networks (LinkedIn excluded), has created a situation where it has never been easier to group conversations and interactions across networks and digital platforms into a single location.
This is just a lie. There is absolutely nothing simple about grouping anything across these networks. It’s a mess, especially for a business with multiple users who need to log in. It’s all closing browsers so Google forgets who you are or Facebook otherwise they insist they know what you want, especially if you are logged into Gmail, and they literally won’t let you log into this other account. It’s learning how to use however many social networks you use completely different interfaces. It’s asking the Facebooks and other social sites for help through Google and Google trying to log you into their social network because hey, they know you! And then never finding the answer because who on earth writes their Q&A sections the same bots who index? Never been easier? It’s always been easier. It is way easier to have a few separate accounts not all trying to integrate each other or remember who you are. Is it really that difficult to remember or write down your logins for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and a couple others? Was that ever really harder than trying to navigate this integration of social media gone amuck? Give me 5 simple logins and logouts any day. We’ll bet most people feel the same. You listening Google and Facebook! Stop trying to help you’re making it worse!
Facebook, whilst impressive in its scale with well over a billion active users, is not the only gig in town anymore. There has been impressive growth on other social networks such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LINE, Google+ and others. In fact Facebook is not even the only social network that has achieved a valuation of over $100 billion, with Tencent in China achieving this recently and clocking up over a billion users in the process.
We don’t get what that has to do with a business as a social hub, the title, or the preceding paragraph. Everyone knows there is more than one social network… And since when does a social media’s pretend internet money worth have anything to do with what’s best for a business on a different continent?
So, with all this possibility for interaction with consumers on social networks, brands are looking to their website to become the owned media social destination for cross-platform social campaigns. Far from websites dying because of the rise of social media, they are now destined to become the branded social hubs of the future.
They shouldn’t be looking to their websites to be a social destination for cross-platform social campaigns. A buying destination yes, but go talk on your own time and get that skateboard off the pavement you’re scaring paying customers you darn kids! Businesses should be looking to their website to do exactly what the title of that article says, to brand their product or service. That’s all. Let customers go to social sites to be social. What is this idea that any business even should run their social campaigns across platforms? What is the use of treating a Twitter campaign with their word count and the user mindset like a Facebook campaign with a completely different platform and a completely different mindset? What about YouTube? Cross-platform is a neat word, but one with limited benefit.
The issue brands have in achieving this is typically one of organization, politics and control. Typically, social teams run social engagement on social platforms and the web team runs the website, with very different entrenched views on what type of experience should be delivered. That needs to change. There needs to be one consumer engagement team, with the website as the primary hub where consumers can engage in deeper social experiences connected to multiple social channels.
- There is absolutely no such thing as a “deeper social experience” where a brand is concerned. Let’s not drink our own Kool-Aid guys. Brands provide a service or product. Hopefully it’s nice. Hopefully they like it and come back for more. That’s it. You start squeezing that sand too hard and it will fall through your fingers.
- The people who take care of the website should be trained in and have experience in mass media, advertising, sociology, psychology, writing, design, those kinds of things. The ones who do social media should be good at and enjoy being social (which is typically not those introverted brooding creative types) and they should be strictly overseen by the creatives in charge of the website because they ideally have knowledge of all of those things which make for successful branding on a large scale. If you have people capable of doing both (or willing to do both) that is awesome. Even then, they should be two different things.
That was harsh. Was the entire post just quibbling about what the term “social hub” should mean? Maybe, but it’s an important quibble because we have seen this before where a relatively new medium hits the scene and there is an overreaction and all medium tries to copy it—print trying to be radio, radio trying to be television, television trying to be internet, business websites now trying to be social. Keep your website your website. Use social media to be social separate from your website, other than carefully scripted Q&A time and the occasional testimonial of course.
Note: Francesca Heath, the author of the article we were picking on, is Communications Director of Engage Science, a social platform, which makes sense now in context. They don’t turn websites into a social hub it looks like (even though that’s sort of their tagline), but they do it looks like offer a way to capture the good stuff going on with those social sites concerning a business and help pick and choose how to make it work for your site, which is fine, if it works it’s a great idea probably and we’re sure there is probably more to it than that. We have no problem with what they actually do, just with how this article presents what they do and the claim that turning a business’s site into a social hub is some sort of good idea—if you missed it, it’s a bad idea.
Here, to show there is no ill will we will help Engage Science with their branding—
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