Web Presence or Brand Asset?

Search on the term "web presence" and you'll find page after page of web-enabling firms guaranteeing to deliver you to the web promised land. For a (shrinking) fee, they'll provide you with a presence on the web. Simple and fast. And no doubt they'll do a decent job. Web design is a commoditized science these days.

Thousands of designers, millions of templates... even the analysis of web usability has been reduced down to a series of eye movements in a laboratory. Where the buttons should go, what they should say, what colors to use, what content to provide, how to lead people there... it's all been pretty-well figured out. Follow the steps, and you've got a website.

You Have a Web Presence
And there you have it. Finally, nearly 20 years after the advent of the public web, absolutely anyone can have a competitive presence in no time at all. And after you've followed the formula, you, too, can feel pretty proud of yourself for getting there. Congratulations! Enjoy your moment.

But what you may not realize - perhaps until it's too late - is that this great accomplishment is just the beginning. Because although you've established a presence on the web, you're far from managing your "presence" on the web.

Because although your website can provide your prospective customers with all the information they want or need to purchase from you -- and can even provide them with the ability to purchase your products and services at the click of a button -- you've done nothing more than open a virtual storefront. And you've no more guaranteed your success than if you opened a store on a remote street in a remote town and put out a shingle, hoping street traffic will provide you with the customer base you need. You might as well flip a coin to determine your success.

Now that you've built it, will they come?
If you're a savvy businessperson, or you've hooked up with a value-adding web firm, you'll quickly realize you need to drive traffic to your beautiful new site. And it's not easy to be found in a democratized ocean of websites that are... well... commoditized.

Now, large on the horizon loom the spectres of search engine optimization and marketing, banners, adwords and *gasp* consumer-generated media. Quickly, you must learn what these things mean and how they apply to your business. Must you become expert in them all? Which ones are most important for you to tackle? How much time will they take? How will you get it all done?

If only we had more resources!
If you're a small organization with limited resources, you're no doubt thinking to yourself at this point "if I were a bigger company, we'd have the money and time to do all this stuff the right way!" But guess what? You'd be wrong!

You'd be amazed at how many large organizations mismanage - or even virtually ignore - their web presence. Though they may have more resources at their disposal to do the job, they're limited by another set of constraints, namely arrogance, ignorance, negligence and ambivalence (more on each of these to come in this and later posts).

It's remarkable how many Fortune-500 organizations -- companies that would never dream of neglecting their global sales functions, their accounting and finance functions, their supply chains, or even their their advertising media and brand management -- will assume that their web presence will somehow just "manage itself."

Benign Neglect
This unintentional form of neglect runs the gamut. An organization might assign the wrong people to the job in an attempt to save some money, giving responsibility to the well-meaning but under-qualified IT guy, or the Sales VP's admin, for example. These people may have worked hard to learn the technical or superficial skills it takes to manage a website, but they are woefully unprepared to lead an organization's strategic web presence.

Or, they may make the equally naive mistake of allowing more appropriately qualified IT, marketing, sales or PR people manage a number of possibly decent - but unrelated - websites that are established with the best of intentions, but ultimately work at cross-purposes as they fragment and confuse a company's customer experience, messaging or brand image. And more than anything, what these organizations often succeed in doing is creating a disconnected series of activities that are counterproductive to what they claim to want to do!

Websites Run Amok Do Not a Brand Asset Make!
Both inside and outside their organizations, Fortune-500 companies have let their websites run amok. Hundreds of external websites. Thousands of intranet sites. Sprinkle in even a few blogging employees and shareholders, and you've got a recipe for chaos that costs companies millions each year in lost productivity and lost opportunity! Having a presence and effectively managing that presence are two very different things!

The distinction is as important as the way you manage your entire brand - it can affect the way your customers view you, the way they purchase your products and services, the way prospective employees view you and apply (or don't apply) to your open positions... your web presence is, simply, your most important brand asset.