The Perfect Microsite… is now Social

I was reading this post:

http://wearesocial.net/blog/2009/04/death-microsite-act-4/

and was wondering why anyone thinks that Microsites are anything useful anyway. Most microsites exist to support a campaign and are temporary anyway.  The fact is that I don’t like them because they generally support an expensive marketing campaign and are essentially identikit anyway.  They’ll have some cool content, they’ll “hero” a brand and then there’ll be a “register” and a “send to a friend” type of thing.

Microsites have been dead a long time – Agencies just don’t know it

The thing that always amused me about microsites was how they generated traffic from all the wrong people. A large proportion of the traffic was from workers/friends at other agencies wondering what the agency that built it had just done. A large other part of the traffic was from those who received the campaign anyway, and so weren’t new customers.

Microsites start in the wrong place

Basically, social networks make the rules change so significantly, that Microsites become much less important (unless you are still working to the same metrics as 10 years ago – Hint: they’ve changed!).  It’s far more about who the audience is than what you are trying to promote.

Microsites (or their replacement) must now be social.What that means is yet to be understood as nobody has yet done a highly successful social campaign yet.  When it does, all I hope is that agencies don’t just do their usual “copy and screw it up” routine.

Marketing costs will reduce, Community Consulting will Increase

This is the key. The world will change to be much more about who your community is and where they talk, rather than trying to setup “microsites” which are at best temporary and at worst a celebration of how much money an agency can make out of a stupid company just for some old style print design on the web.

Community is now so important that it cannot be ignored. Most of the major companies are aware of this, but it changes marketing into a much more conversational activity. It’s not even about permission to talk to me, as I now have an expectation of a conversation with any brands.

How do you manage community?

Psychology and Sociology are far more important in marketing now than they ever were. Maybe the key people are not techies or designers any more, but those that are able to understand people and the business models of a client. It’s a very different world.

Marketing/Advertising agencies – they’re dooooomed

According to everything I read at the moment, traditional marketing agencies (offline, online, digital etc) are doomed.  I don’t agree.

The business model of throwing money at an agency to get a revenue from sales will change. The talent for advertising and marketing will also not be focussed on several main companies/groups, but will in the end transfer to a bunch of smaller much more loose knit collaborations. The winning agency will become the agency that embraces community.

I read recently that there is more advertising budget from blue-chips going into starting and maintaining social networks (both internally and externally) and all that goes with it. However, I think that’s the right area, but a misguided proposition.  I suspect it’s been sold-in by agencies without a full understanding of what they’re doing.

Companies will never be able to build big social networks, because they aren’t trusted.  People will not join as they will feel “sold” to.  The ones that do join, are almost certainly not the people they want to talk to either, unless their long-term aim is to get those people to consume more of their product.  That’s fine, but unlikely to work, as people are feeling less and less affiliation with brand and are more and more seeking out their own personal communities.

Companies need to recognise that they need to participate in the network to build up credibility. Then recognising that they have credibility, they will need to push the idea of value… for the community but not necessarily for them.

Shareholders won’t (and don’t) like it, unless the business model is entirely around the advert model (I have the eyeballs, you pay to place something in front of them).  In the end, shareholder led companies care only about the money.  Social networks are difficult value propositions in that sense.  Control of the message and conversation is reduced. The internet makes web investment more of a gamble than more old-school industries and models, so it requires a different type of investor and a different type of shareholder.

So, advertising will – and is – become more about showing how companies can be more community-centric and community-valuable.  Unless agencies pick that idea up, and more importantly work out how to sell it to their clients, then they will struggle to retain clients.

There will always be companies that stick to the old models until new ones come along. I remember listening to a Unilever representative about 2 years ago saying that they were going to “wait and see” what happens with social networks and associated business models before deciding on whether to throw marketing budgets at them. Unilever and others appear to be the safe industries, that will throw large budgets at “tried and tested” approaches.  These are the companies with the safe investors.  These are the companies with an unimaginative view of the world.

If your agency has that kind of client, then you’d better watch out that they don’t drag you away from the future and drag you down with them.