Let Social Influencers Save Your Corporate Website

That all-important expression of your brand known as the corporate Web site is becoming irrelevant.

Why? Consumers now prefer to learn about you by going to independent online forums and review sites instead of reading the slickly produced messages on your own corporate site. Unless you start making your site a more credible destination for consumers to talk with each other, your digital brand could fall off the radar screen completely.

But there’s good news. Tools exist now to help you save your Web site by giving your social influencers a voice.

You might need a little convincing that you have a problem. Let’s look at this example:

Suppose you’re a customer at a department store considering the purchase of a lawnmower. If you had the opportunity to talk to a store salesperson or to speak with an actual owner of that model, whom would you prefer to talk to? That same principle extends to online purchases. In fact, new research from Forrester shows that people ” completely trust” recommendations from consumers over the corporate Web site at a rate close to 3 to 1.

It’s time to take a hard look at your site and figure out how to better employing social media to achieve your objectives.

Here are four ways to help you undertake this evolution:

1. Make your distributed marketing work double-time.
In the past year, many companies have begun to deploy distributed marketing practices, where the goal is to engage customers where they congregate online. This includes building presences within existing social networks, joining the conversation in user created forums and many other social media tactics. These are all great strategies. Engaging your customers in the places they visit is a great way to cut through the noise, glean insights and gain respect. That being said, there is a large opportunity being passed up. The opinions and thoughts created within offsite destinations are often not seen by first-time shoppers who have found their way to your site. In effect, this positive user-generated content goes unleveraged and simply fades away in the forum where it was conceived.

The real opportunity lies in re-appropriating this user-generated content in places like your corporate Web site in order to extend its influence. If a brand has created an off-site community to nurture product owners, the opinions and thoughts of those owners should also be presented in the site that a new buyer frequents.

2. Always go niche.
The recent explosion in social media adoption has provided brands with a great opportunity. Instead of including opinions from just anyone, they now have the ability to tap into the specific niches that will best influence site visitors. Often, the data needed to define a niche exists without any extra information gathering including profile data from an off-site community, site-side browsing behavior, and geo-targeting metrics.

For example, if you are looking to convince visitors of a product’s reliability, present the opinions of product owners with over five years of product ownership. Better yet, include the opinions of those owners who live nearby the site visitor. A recent Edelman report shows that 68% of people trust ” people like themselves” up from 22% in 2003. The closer the owner’s relationship to the visitor, the more convincing his or her opinion will be.

3. Remix and steer the voices.
You may be asking: ” But, how can I leverage consumer voices if people are occasionally critical of my product?” First of all, a negative opinion on your Web site is not necessarily harmful. Customers search out destinations that have a collection of balanced, honest opinions and won’t be sent packing by one negative comment. In fact, presenting something negative tends to give your site more credibility.

That said, there are various ways to present user opinions. Some companies choose to display an average star rating in place of written reviews (thus filtering out overly-negative language in comments while still providing value and feedback). Other businesses use negative reviews to help them expose product or promotion issues and to demonstrate responsiveness. Whether it’s a problem with the product itself, or with how it is perceived, responding to user reviews can reduce returns long-term when changes are implemented based on such feedback.

4. Allow users to engage the voices.
Allowing visitors to see consumer opinions on your corporate site is only the first step. The second step lies in allowing your users to talk back. As a site visitor, if I see a comment that says, “This car really holds up over the years,” that’s great, but I want to know more. “How many miles have you put on it?” and “What climate do you live in?” are questions that come to mind. Think about executions that allow visitors to engage the voices in a conversation. You may not be able to set-up direct Q&A, but any type of deeper engagement will be seen as a competitive advantage over other online destinations.

Another option is to invite regular, non-sales employees (e.g., product engineers) to participate in the conversation. Consumers trust information from regular employees almost two times as much as if it came from the company’s CEO. Sun Microsystems has done this quite effectively with topic-specific employee blogs.

A corporate Web site will not become an effective marketing tool by merely sprinkling user-generated content here and there. In order for visitors to be strongly influenced, they must have trust and belief in the entire site they are visiting. This will only happen by taking advantage of social influence marketing to deliver the core messages in the voices of real people. By providing access to and engagement with real consumer opinions, site visitors will treat your corporate Web site like the destination you pay for it to be.

Dave Friedman is president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish.