With an increasing number of businesses today investing in building an active social media presence - be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. the way businesses build their websites is changing.

Increasingly, you'll go to a company website and find a Facebook widget, showing you how many of your friends like the company's FB page, or a Twitter widget, showing you some of the company's most recent tweets. There are a whole bunch of reasons why it makes sense to do this. Some of these include ensuring better ROI on SMM efforts, enabling people to connect with companies on an individual level and have conversations with them, building a long-term relationship with website visitors and others. Many sites/portals even allow you to create accounts using your Social Network profiles and that even helps companies pull more information about users than is normally available to them besides making creating accounts easier for users.

Clearly, the elements that make up a good company website are changing. But is this change limited to e-commerce/retail and general B2C websites? What about B2B websites - is there a way for B2B company to make their sites more Social - while ensuring that it maintains its corporate B2B demeanor?

Well, that's exactly what I'd been assigned to do last month. I was to work on completely revamping the website of one of company's divisions - the one that I primarily work with. This particular division focuses on Consulting and Technology and is purely B2B in its business model.

The current website, which (and there's no easy way to say this) is far from perfect has remained unchanged since 2006. Understandably, when it was built, it wasn't geared for Social Media. This time around though, it's was different story.

There was a whole list of changes that I'd suggested for the new website that I thought could apply to a lot of B2B websites out there that I wanted to share through this post, but before I do that, here are 2 important guidelines that I kept in mind for the entire exercise:

·   Take stock of what Social Media Properties that business has established, which it wants to leverage through its website. In my case it was Twitter & Facebook, but it can be LinkedIn or some other network as well.

·   It's critical to the website's ability to succeed in its purpose if the traffic isn't distracted from the main call-to-action. In my case, it was all about generating leads (main goal = Contact Us form) and so I didn't want to give too many opportunities for visitors to leave the site

And here are my list of elements from the obvious ones (like the Contact Us page) to the not-so-obvious ones (like About us ((it's different from Contact Us)):

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Following the success of its Write The Future campaign (32 million views digitally since its launch less than a month ago), they’ve now launched the "Write The Headline" campaign – an interactive digital communications experience which basically involves a giant LED sign on the Southern Life Center building in Johannesburg.

The ambitious interactive installation allows fans to submit personal messages to inspire their favorite players, and then see their headline transformed into a huge player animation that will tower over the city of Johannesburg (through a giant LED sign on the Southern Life Center building).

Fans can submit a 57 character personal message (in 12 languages) through Facebook.com/nikefootball, Twitter, Facebook, Mxit (South Africa) and QQ (China) to over 50 of Nike’s athletes from around the world. Up to 100 headlines are then selected each night and transformed into digital player animations that are projected across Johannesburg. When a fan’s message is used they receive a personalized notification showing them a picture of the headline and the animation created from it.

(download)

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Nikes_Write_the_Future_Campaig.zip (230 KB)

Portfolio Night is a great concept and it’s finally coming to India (thanks to Ogilvy India). It’s sort of like the Auditions round for American Idol (or MTV Roadies), except for creative talent working in the Advertizing industry.

I’d love to go – just to see other people’s work being critiqued by the experts – but they don’t allow passive participants it seems. L I wish they’d do a showcase of some of the best talent and work, at the end of the event – now that I’d be able to attend.

Some of their ads are pretty funny. Here’s the good ones:

It’s direct with its message – no pussyfooting around the core idea. It’s also reaching its exact target audience directly  and that too at the perfect place and time. It’s extremely simple to setup anywhere in the world with minimal resources and not to mention very little cost. Brilliant stuff.

I was planning a post about the colossal waste that is the "Save our Tigers" campaign, when I came across this.

Now I'm not surprised that someone else has taken it up already - there are tons of smart people out there. What I was surprised about however is how comprehensive his critique is. He's hit the nail right on it's head and I concur 100%.

So without taking up any more real estate, over to Tantanoo:

‘Save’ is perhaps the noblest of all four letter words that I’ve come across. It doesn’t have the hidden desperation that other four letter words have. ‘Save me’ sounds much better than ‘Love me’, much more earnest in its desperation.

When I first saw the ‘Save our tigers’ ad on teewhee, I rubbished it, you know, like we rubbish everything from Save Haiti to Save Hockey. That way. But having 400 friends on Facebook does have its disadvantages especially when sending invites to stupid clubs is the favourite pastime of some of them. But when some of the ‘sane’ friends also sent me invites to join ‘Stripey the club’, I was sure something was amiss.

It happens so that ‘Stripey’ is an innocent tiger cub whose mom ventures out in the forest and doesn’t return. You know, like women venture out in Goa(or Delhi or Bombay or <insert Indian city>) and don’t return. But let’s not digress. So Stripey’s mom has been killed by some poachers or so the commercial says and it then punches a figure of ‘only 1411 tigers left’ in your face. Very poetic. Figures always move people. You know, when anchors were screaming the number of Swine flu victims on news channels, people were scared shitless. Similarly this 1411 figure brings a sudden horror. Add to it a cute tiger cub and you have a win social initiative. Good job Aircel. Not.

Save the Tiger – www.saveourtigers.com , in my honest and unwanted opinion, is a very poorly executed social initiative. I am not sure if this has brought any mileage to Aircel but apart from creating some buzz, the initiative hardly does anything worthwhile. It lacks the soul and resolve that a social initiative requires. It applies armchair activism to an issue where its effect is debatable, and the extent of change that can be brought is extremely limited. Let’s do a quick post-mortem of the initiative.

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More than 67% of global Internet users arrive at web sites through Direct Domain Navigation, making domain names an awesome medium for advertisers to reach their target market. (Domain Advertising’s nailed this concept here).

Here’s a great example that demonstrates the effectiveness of direct domain name advertising, specifically advertising on parked pages (domain names that have no websites for the uninitiated). It’s well targeted, it’s a creative approach (even for direct domain navigation advertising), it’s cheap(er) (more so in this case because they’re all .co.il domains) and, while I’d like to see actual stats in terms of number of site visits, coupon redemptions, etc., it’s apparently worked well.

I was reading an interesting Case Study about How Nike Used Interactive Video to Draw Crowds at Sporting Events recently realized that it’s Perfect for so many companies – including my own.

(download)

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Augmented_Reality_An_Awesome_w.zip (773 KB)