No website is an island

Skylab is hiring!

There once was a time when a your corporate website was your only online presence. Potential customers either found you by searching or were drawn in by some form of traditional promotion. They stopped by, read what you had to say and were either swayed by your message or not.

It all seemed so easy back then, but times are a-changing it would seem. The proliferation of the social web, with its ever expanding number of communities who are enthusiastically sharing, rating, blogging, tweeting and mobilising their identities are making the online world a vast and varied landscape where the ‘then’ norm is not the norm any more.

This view was crystallised recently when we were alerted (by Twitter) to the relaunch of a well-respected Scandinavian design house’s website. On the same day, said company also launched their Facebook profile, a new Twitter stream and a Flickr page all tied together by their snazzy new company blog.

The reason this caught my attention was not just the ambitious plan by this particular company to launch so many entities at once but that this is now the accepted norm.

All these entities were launched at the same time, and as we know, this level of social media engagement requires a significant amount of internal time and resource, each platform and network requiring differing types of content, updating and moderation.

It got me thinking as to how fast this situation has not so much crept up on us but has actually jumped up behind us and shouted ‘Boo!’ Are we now at a point where, as website developers, we must consider not just the website but also the blog, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr as being the bare minimum of corporate online presence? If so, this means we will have to quickly become designers AND strategists. In pitching for this kind of work in future we will be required to present the obvious website visuals but support them with a cleverly considered social media engagement plan.

We’ll be keeping our beady-eyes on this particular company and how their new, wider online footprint is working out for them in weeks to come - or should that be hours to come?