Gone are the old days when corporate websites must have their own dot com domain in order to start their journey as an online brand. Many people have given up the idea of becoming a one-stop portal like what our local big players are trying to do with InSing and Mocca. These two websites remind me of how a TV channel can be so dominant in itself, trying to capture as much attention as possible. We can’t blame them as they came from the TV days, trying to implement this irrelevant TV strategy to the Internet age.
Too corporate!
Being too corporate makes them really hard to be closer and personal to their potential customers. Because the companies are really big in size, it’s not easy to have someone to take the role and responsibility to step up and be personal to the customers on the social media. Hence, most companies adopted a very “corporate” website where their customers will feel there’s a wall in-between for interaction. It’s especially true to the banks who want to be personal and yet their websites are not providing such a facility.
Social media came in to the rescue!
Social media has proven to the world that collaboration is the way to go!
If we wish to have a certain feature online, it’s not efficient to pay huge amount of money to re-invent the wheels when someone out there already has a working platform. One company after another, we are seeing them embracing the social media as part of their websites. For example, we can see Creative and Dell on Twitter where they are building up their database through Twitter and keep their followers up-to-date for their latest promotions! How about looking for Adidas on Facebook?
Are you, as the company, ready to take the plunge?
It is really not easy to take the plunge. Imagine the big companies are so used to spending the money to build their own online platform for their customers. Having to share the same platform with their customers on a stranger’s website, it sounds really an issue to the company!
Joining Twitter, Facebook and MySpace is just about signing up for a space. And if the company is not comfortable to take the risk, they can always ask a web agency to assist them to build an online campaign.
Well, we can all understand how hard it is for a big company to decide on such a business strategy which has never exist before. There has never had such a media where there is two-way communication before. TV, magazine, radio and newspapers are all one-way communication. It’s safe, and any interruption can be managed since they are in silos. Whereas in social media, one person’s interruption can build a community interruption which may or may not be manageable for the company.
But if you don’t take the plunge, you are going to be outdated very soon! Take your choice…
Image credit: Matt Hamm
