10. Build your brand with Web 2.0 tools
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Fiachra Ó Marcaigh, Director, AMAS
Throwing away opportunities to build their brands online – that’s what you can say about more than 80% of the sites surveyed for the AMAS eCommerce research.
Of the 50 leading Irish sites, only eight had Web 2.0 features such as RSS feeds, blogs or online video on their sites. Of course a website itself helps to build a brand. Provided it is well executed and carries the brand messages and graphic design, it communicates the brand to visitors to the site. But the problem is in the last part of that statement – “visitors to the site”.
No matter how good a website is, how strongly branded, it does not carry your brand messages outwards. Even with an eNewsletter attached your brand is preaching to the choir – those who have visited the site and have signed up.
Discover Science & Engineering: The national science awareness campaign uses online video, blogs, user-generated content and social networking as well as websites to extend its reach. (Discover Science & Engineering is an AMAS client.
The answer – and a way to reach younger age groups who make much less use of traditional websites and email than us oldies (over 25s) – is Web 2.0. That part of the Web that is most focused on networking, sharing and linking is an excellent place to build your brand online. Here are some practical examples:
1. A blog lets you break out of the website “broadcast” mode and become more conversational
2. RSS feeds get your content into people’s feed readers
3. Online video can entertain and inform
4. Photo-sharing sites mean that you can distribute promotional and product imagery
5. Social networking sites – from Bebo for teens to LinkedIn for professional networking
6. Social bookmarking on sites like delicious.com promote the brands bookmarked
7. Directories and wikis. Write yourself up!
Web 2.0 brand-building is not the answer to everything, and it’s not suitable for every business. But for many, many companies, it is the next logical step to building their brands online. Yes, companies still need websites, but they need more.
It’s not so much about “the website” as about an organisation’s overall online footprint. This footprint may include hundreds or thousands of other references and links from all sorts of online locations.
As one multinational’s brand manager said recently: “We spend less time building websites as destinations and more time building online communities and interacting with existing ones.”
Fiachra Ó Marcaigh is addressing the IIA User Experience conference on November 25 on the theme of building and protecting your brand online. For more information, visit www.iia.ie
Back to contents of State of the Net issue 11
