Adam Ostrow at Mashable has a great post about whether or not social media is hurting or helping corporate websites. Current brands, Vitamin Water is the example in the post, are sending fans and users to social sites like Facebook or MySpace to engage with a campaign versus the traditional corporate website.
The benefits of sending to social sites are obvious including more interaction and an easier way to gather a group of users interested in your brand versus sending them to a corporate website.
Adam hits the point with something we’ve been saying for awhile: get your fans in one place. While corporate websites are great for branding and having a secure presence for all the information about your company, many are static and not interactive. Plus, you’re not offering any incentive to come back to the site and collect information about all of the interested people clicking.
By driving people to Facebook and having them simply click that they’re a FAN of the brand, you’ve got them. You may not have really exciting stuff to give them now, but that doesn’t mean you won’t later on. For your already loyal set of fans, they’ll gladly join the page. And for the “fans on the fence” or new fans, you’ll be able to entice them on a place they’re already familiar with.
Here are a few doing a great job in driving folks to their social sites:
- Universal Pictures: While they have set up basic websites for some of their summer movies, Universal is also sending fans to designated Facebook Fan Pages. (The official Bruno website is actually a MySpace page) Land of the Lost. Drag Me to Hell. Public Enemies. Bruno. Funny People. (I have to wonder what the marketing team at Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is thinking about this. There site isn’t interactive at all besides a simple game, which is comparable to most movie sites. Think about all of the interaction they could have had on social media with the characters and content!)
- Southwest Airlines: The crafty crew at Southwest Airlines set up a photo contest using their official Twitter account where users submitted a photo of a very specific travel or tourism-related picture. The company offered a travel package to the winners. If you check out the Twitter account, you can already see the overwhelming response. Why? Well, it’s easy. A simple upload of a photo and a tweet takes 2 minutes. Plus, people are on Twitter and thus familiar with the platform. Sending people to the official Southwest Airlines website for a contest would be a bit odd wouldn’ it?
- Skittles: And then of course there is Skittles.com, which is completely shifted into a social site. (Right now it’s YouTube. In the past, Twitter and Wikipedia were the backdrop of the site.) We all remember the backlash, but there website still has everything on it to get more information about their company from a social media perspective.
What do you think? What other corporate sites are driving people to social media sites?
