Consolidated Online Presence
I’m beginning to see a common theme in the status of the online presence of most of my clients. They nearly have all of the pieces of a solid online presence, but those pieces have never been consolidated into a strategic online presence. They had a designer put up a website 5 years ago. They caught the Facebook bus 3 years ago. Twitter took a little more time, but they have a couple Twitter accounts for different aspects of their business. And they’ve been collecting email addresses for a while, but newsletters are spotty if they are sent out at all.
No vision exists for the total online presence.
Facebook is going one direction, the website another direction, and the newsletter in a 3rd direction. What is needed is someone who can come in, do the necessary research, and determine a consolidated path forward where all platforms are utilized for their relative strengths with a clear goal or set of goals to be achieved. Once implemented, close attention must be paid to user analytics to make sure the strategy is working.
The set of skills required to set an overall online presence strategy comes more from a business background than a web designer or social media background.
I also see the desire to consolidate happening with personal technology. I continue to meet people who want to simplify their lives. The new technology is overwhelming. On one hand, people want to utilize the new technology to assist with their business, but on the other hand they don’t want the requirement of learning the technology to take more time than not using it.
I’m seeing a huge need for people to understand how their phone can connect with their computer and to their tablets. People want to know how to save time by saving documents in the cloud instead of on one computer. They want to be able to access those documents on their computers, tablets, and phones.
These desires to consolidate a company online presence or personal technology use is driven by the two main scare resources – time and money. An online presence without a strategy is like IKEA furniture that is still in pieces in a box. A solid presence will not happen until those pieces are put together.
Anyone who can work with companies to consolidate their online presence or with individuals to simplify their use of technology will have a job in 2012.
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