Corporate Websites Need to Evolve
Jeremiah Owyang has a great post this morning on the need for evolution on corporate websites.
We’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.
Great point! You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t sick of that. This is precisely the reason that consumers don’t use corporate websites to research products. They’re only getting one side of the story, the marketing speak. What we really want to hear is both sides of the story. We want to hear the real story from consumers who have hands on experience with the product so we can truly find out what the product is really like. The endless amounts of user generated product review sites and blogs are testament to this.
Jeremiah goes on to make several suggestions, one of them being for corporate sites to allow customer feedback right on the site.
A savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism.
While I agree that it would be great to have the non-biased product reviews on the corporate site, I don’t think that quite solves the problem. That’s because we don’t and can’t trust the corporations to be truly transparent. To think that a company will allow unfiltered negative reviews along side their products is absurd. That’s why third party social review sites are here to stay.
Instead I think these corporations would be better severed to be active on the social review and other social media sites. They should be interacting with the consumers to recognize their faults, improve their products, right their wrongs, and build consumer trust in the process. As Jeremiah points out, this can also be done on community sites that are setup by these companies, like Dell’s IdeaStorm.
Do you have any other ideas how corporate websites can improve?
Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of
Trust me– we are working on it.
Working on what?
haha sorry. Some of us in the corporate world are working hard to make companies understand the value of these other information sources and the fact that while they cannot control the message of their brand online and they can and should participate outside of simply sending a bloody cease and desist.
I’m happy to say that more and more of our clients are focusing on less on brochure ware and more and more on user experience, which is allowing us to leave behind the traditional elements repeated throughout corporate sites. I expect this trend to continue as clients become more savvy (ask better questions and do more listening) about the value of building communities online to improve their products/services, customer retention, reputation management and as a way to diversify revenue streams (often through affiliate marketing to their online community).
thought you might be interested to know that in addition to IdeaStorm, we interact with customers on blogs every day…in terms of their specific customer service issues, thoughts they may have for us or about us as a company or just commentary about our business.
We have just recently also added customer reviews and ratings to http://www.dell.com which are proving to be another great way to learn from our customers, but also for our customers to interact with each other.
I hadn’t even thought of it but I have never been to a corporate site to find something inspiring or innovative. The old school needs some new school. Good call on this one…..
Richard, thanks for chiming in. Dell really is blazing the trail for corporations and social media. Even though you guys have made a few mistakes you’ve learned from them and haven’t let them stop you from moving forward.
Cameron, we are trying…and we learn everyday, but the conversations are most valuable, even when we make a mistake.
It looks like consumers do not need coporate website to tell them what other consumers think about their products. Look at hyttp://iQmer.com/. I just discovered this website and looks like the consumers themself build the content on the good and bad.