Is your website having an identity crisis? – The changing face of the website

Not that long ago to ‘have a website’ was something both novel and leading edge and, for many, considered to be one-upmanship on the competition.

Hopefully it would provide the level playing field required to help the local butcher become a world-famous sausage brand with thousands of international orders flying in over the ether.

Just add a few keywords to your web site title, description and keyword meta tags and millions of folk would instantly find you on the first page of search engine results.

These days it’s just not that simple.

In fact, some are questioning whether websites are dead or at least dying.

My own view at the moment is that it’s more a case that the role of the website is having to change and adapt as a result of other elements being fed into the online mix and which do certain jobs better .

For me, the main role of the website is now to act like the ‘virtual head office’ where visitors can gain access to official information and library-type content, obtain ‘About Us’ and investor-type information and find links that lead to outsourced tools and applications branded to the organisation but hosted by specialist third parties such as e-commerce, e-learning and webinars.

As far as online marketing is concerned, this responsibility without doubt is now being handled by social media. If you think of social media as being your marketing department situated across the road from your website head office then this kind of helps you appreciate the relationship. The two maybe separate but they’re still connected.     

Social Marketing
Marketing is principally about promotion.

Ideally it should also be about customer acquisition, engagement and brand relationship building which ultimately leads to new and repeat sales.

In the pre-digital age brands often attempted to encourage this by inviting consumers to write to them with their feedback or to obtain future new product information. Now they’re using social media.

Social media has opened up a whole new world of customer acquisition and engagement possibility.

Millions of people are now members of online social communities and the interest in online socially based engagement has been well proven by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

By establishing a social marketing presence, brands and businesses can engage with both existing and new potential customers in ways never previously possible via their website.

To be successful with social marketing though, it’s just like it was with websites – once you’ve created it you have to support it and keep it fresh and up to date.

Video is a great form of social content and allows you to provide interesting insight into your business or brand – e.g.: going ‘behind the scenes’; ‘meeting the team’; seeing how things are made etc. This is all good fodder to kick-start conversations and relationship building between the outside world and the business.

It’s also very easy to propagate content between different types of social media so that by taking one action you automatically multiply the effect and increase social reach.

For example, if you have a YouTube account linked to Facebook and Twitter then whenever you post a new video to YouTube it will be instantly flagged on your Facebook and Twitter sites so that your different communities are all made aware at the same time.

Furthermore, your communities can easily spread the word by clicking simple links to notify others they know about content that they like and is worth sharing. (A process known as ‘viral’).

Social media activity is also very search engine friendly and can generate good early visibility for brands and businesses in relation to natural search engine listings.

So, let social media fulfil your online marketing function – but where does this leave your website?

The New Website Role
Your social media site can and should of course be linked to either your main website (or a dedicated campaign site if part of a specific promotion).

Whilst social media channels are setup to handle online communication and engagement well, they are still limited in other ways and because they are template based they do not allow for the conveying of strong individual brand identity – something which websites do well.

So, use social media sites to attract and engage, develop on-going relationships and promote new products, services and PR events but also use them to drive visitors to your website where they can actually then either buy something or e.g. obtain more in-depth information, search other digital content libraries and gain a more comprehensive overview of the organisation and it’s people.

An Overall Digital Marketing Strategy
These days, more and more companies are using digital advertising in addition to TV and the press.

Digital advertising allows for more tailored customer group targeting and the return on marketing investment can be easily measured by reference to website statistics analysis.

Ideally, any contemporary digital marketing strategy should include elements of paid search and pay-per-click advertising as well as the use of social media as well as re-purposed website.

In addition, all elements should pay conscious attention to issues such as search engine optimisation (SEO), user-centric design, user journey planning and the identification of key marketing goals and targets which are measurable via web analytics software.

On an ongoing basis, website owners the need to ensure that they constantly analyse the results of website data and identify problem areas which need further action.

End.

Social Media – Finding The Angle

Social-ability
Some businesses and brands lend themselves better to identifying social media opportunities than others.

These are typically those with existing strong and medium-long term customer relationships such as banks, building societies, loan, finance and insurance companies. Regular repeat customers of various FMCG brands are also good news (think tomato sauce and toothpaste). These examples offer pretty good ready-made bases for developing social communities around their product or service.
 
Car brands also have good ‘social’ potential as there are always plenty of Jeremy Clarksons out there ready, willing and able to publish their considered opinions and join in alpha male car stuff debates.

On the other hand, the property sector appears to be a bit more difficult as the relationship between seller, agent and purchaser or tenant is typically short-lived and not oft repeated and housebuilders, second-hand sellers and agents are all notoriously ‘sensitive’ when it comes to possible negative comment about their product.

Social and real estate
And yet the property market is actually ripe for ‘social’ with plenty of opportunity for housebuilders and commercial developers to establish ongoing early relationships with potential customers and e.g. solicit feedback on new proposed designs, specs and features. The secondhand market and your average estate agency re-seller might struggle a bit more difficult to find an opportunity for ‘social’ however.

(I’ll be blogging in more detail about social and real estate in the near future…)

Social and traditional
Even more of a challenge are products that traditionally don’t appear to have much in the way of an obvious direct B2C interface and where the traditional relationship is e.g. solely between producer and supplier – at least in terms of the supply chain. And yet these are some of the ones I find most enjoyable to analyse and look for innovative angles.

I’ve always had a seeming natural disposition towards wondering what goes on behind the scenes with products. As a sad child, I was always drawn to product labels on the back of things like shampoo bottles which typically had the name of Jane someone-or-other to write to in the consumer department and then there was Tom Champagne and his prize draws (‘Oooh vicar!’) at Readers Digest – great name – but did he or Jane ever really exist I wondered? I’ve always since thought of these people a bit like ‘Room 101’ or ‘The Cones Hotline’ – just sitting in some dark and dusty room hoping noone would actually phone.

Now, it’s social media and it supporting desktop, mobile and ‘pad’ technologies that are making true B2C and B2B community dialogue possible.

Social – enabling novel engagement
I guess, in a way, that in a B2C capacity this is really rather like an extranet and I do like the idea of being able to look for interesting angles in relation to engaging end customers with product originators and using social media to educate, enlighten and entertain by e.g. providing YouTube video clips that document and track the product journey through it’s various stages.

Only last night in fact I was watching a TV programme about Eddie Stobart and at one point one of their truck drivers was attempting to negotiate an extremely narrow lane to pick-up strawberries from a fruit farm and then deliver them to a Tesco depot – and because of the contract with Tesco there was only a half hour window for delivery.

The stop-go trials and tribulations of the transport leg of the journey made for compelling viewing and at one point caused the driver to remark on the fact that little did Wimbledon goers appreciate the complexities and difficulties in relation to the strawberry-to-bowl process. But they would if they had also seen the same programme or – more importantly and pertinently –  were able to access the clip via YouTube as part of a social media campaign and then discuss it on Facebook – and maybe then be offered a special promotion via their mobile for a Tesco strawberry discount or a visit to an ‘Eddie’ depot (of which there are 40 apparently and a truck fleet of 2000 – all which have female names – blimey I didn’t know there even were 2000 female names…..)

Find the angle and implement
Brand identity, acquisition, engagement, conversion, retention and cross-selling (and the rest) are all now able to be bolstered, supported and elevated by social media. There is probably no business or organisation that could not benefit from social media.

The real challenge is finding the appropriate angle and implementing it.

‘Housebuilders are backward when it comes to IT’

This post is in response to a discussion thread within the ‘New Homes Hub UK’ discussion group on LinkedIn as posted by Simon Wilkins.

The discussion addresses an issue that I have a long association with and which has been interesting to re-visit.

The Curate’s Egg
Rather like the curate’s egg, the industry is good in parts and there are certainly some housebuilding companies who are genuinely modernist when it comes to the use of IT and new technology.

However, these are still possibly the exception rather than the rule.Things weren’t helped by the fact that any exposure to hands-on computing until 1991 had involved DOS based software with it’s dull, cryptic interface, keystroke commands and monochrome screens in orange or green.

Real Men Don’t Use Computers
Until the late 1980’s I, like many, had equated technology solely with computing and in turn computing with science and maths – both of which I’d always managed to studiously avoid.

In housebuilding, unless you were an architect, quantity surveyor, accountant or an IT geek, you didn’t get involved hands-on with computers – you just pondered over the results they produced and made ‘he-man’ business decisions based on the output.

Seeing The Light
This was during my phase as development director at Balfour Beatty Specialist Homes where I was responsible for new developing joint venture business and project managing the pre-construction phases of custom urban mixed redevelopment projects and niche high value housing.

I enjoyed my time at Balfour Beatty and was not only involved in the P&L operational aspects of housebuilding but also charged with looking at how my subsidiary might develop in a strategic sense.

This was the era when Balfour Beatty was owned by BICC Plc – which at the time was a major global cable technology business.

BICC was very keen to investigate how the adoption of new technology might be usefully embedded within Balfour Beatty’s construction and spec development businesses.

As a result, I found myself being asked to look at how technological-focused thinking might be applied within the residential development lifecycle – and which ultimately included the use of modular design, factory based prefabrication, Just-In-Time delivery, building materials technologies, joined-up IT using networks to improve the efficiency of data and knowledge transfer and – the one that really caught my imagination – intelligent building systems for automating the quality and efficiency of a building’s internal environment in response to its real-time use and function.

This was also at a time when the Japanese construction giants were poised to develop a foothold in Europe and there was a definite sense that their technology-driven approach could pose a serious threat to the old-style, labour intensive, in-situ wet building methods and claims-driven mentality that so characterised the UK building industry in particular.

However, we all know what then happened – the Japanese economy took a nose-dive, the technology-driven threat disappeared, the UK went into recession and by the time the industry recovered in the mid-late 90’s the good-intentions of pre-recession strategy and change were forgotten and – even despite the attempts by the Latham Report – the industry largely went back to it’s traditional ways of thinking and doing things.

By this time, I had left direct employment within the housebuilding industry and was servicing it from a specialist consultancy viewpoint in relation to technology – partly providing ‘gatekeeping’ type knowledge to an enlightened few as well as project managing various early ICT related projects typically concerned with either data transfer or marketing.

As a result of internet and WWW I began specialising in digital media communication – initially from the perspective of construction sector project team communications but then broadened out to designing and delivering web based multimedia information, marketing and CPD e-learning systems.

Between 1995-1998 I spent 75% of my time engaged as a consultant on two large pan-European R&D projects concerned with identifying new construction sector related broadband products and services and working with a mix of major construction groups, national telecom operators and technology companies. This was a particularly interesting period and led to various related spin-offs including my involvement in construction sector related CPD education with a specific focus on ICT and multimedia.

However by 1999 I had broadened my operational activities to encompass a wider variety of industries including medicine and banking and working with doctors and bankers has provided a useful insight into how other sectors perceive and interact with IT (and technology in a broader sense).

And Finally…..
Looking back at the housebuilding sector with my technologist hard-hat on, the fact that it lags behind in its adoption and appreciation of IT is, I believe, the result of a number of factors including:

– An historical lack of internal R&D

– Old-style corporate culture which is perpetuated by handed-down philosophy and autocratic hierarchical management with only lip-service being paid to e.g. employee feedback and innovative ideas and suggestions.

– Lack of bottom-up / holistic strategic thinking

– An ‘After you Claude’ mentality but which is then direct conflict with the equal mentality of of ‘Not invented here’ syndrome.

– Supposedly customer-led but in reality hates having to adapt its product citing tight margins, overheads, building costs, keeping prices low as the key reasons for resisting change.

– Housing is largely provided by a national based industry mostly immune to non-native competition and the associated different ideas and approaches that might otherwise help to enforce change

– Real change is only often effected as a result of either legislation or market competition

– Technology is not seen as an intrinsic aspect of core operational business

– Rather than having strong degree of internal expertise and knowledge technology is often seen as a specialist function and left to external consultancies and agencies to provide

– Lack of sustained support and promotion of technology by associated professional bodies, trade press and CPD level education.

Educashun
Having to again address the perception that ‘Housebuilders are backward when it comes to IT’ is rather disappointing in the sense that after all these years nothing has seemingly changed very much and that the sector has somehow managed to remain unaffected by all that has happened in relation to technology since the early ‘90’s.

However, it is also encouraging in its implied suggestion that there is still an opportunity to educate and help effect change.