I truly believe this – *every business must have a blog*.
Well, to be honest, every business _should_ need a blog – I’m just not sure when we’ll go from “should” to “must”, so get one now and avoid disappointment.
Way back in 1995 I would tell anyone who’d listen that they *had* to have a web site because eventually everyone would use the web to determine what companies they were going to deal with.
As hard as it may be to believe, this was a radical idea at the time and many scoffed. Few would scoff now – can you imagine doing business with any company that had *no* Internet presence?
The next frontier isn’t the desemination of information via corporate web sites – that’s now table stakes. Increasingly businesses will need to convey authority and enter into conversations with their “fan club” (in the “Seth Godin sense”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/flipping_the_fu.html of the term).
Month: January 2006
Do you type the www. whenever you want to visit a site? No? Well, you are not alone.
Just as we learned that we didn’t need to say “http://” when promoting a domain, many marketers are now dropping the www as well.
And since most sites are set up to redirect users to the web site even without the www, people are learning they can cut out four keystrokes by skipping the “dub-dub-dub”.
But what happens if _your_ web site isn’t configured correctly?
You end up turning customers away like the TD Bank has been doing for years now.
Try going to “td.com”:http://td.com – here’s what you see:
Loads of visitors will look at this message and assume that their site is down (or has been hacked or something).
Some might guess that TD just mis-configured their servers and try again with the www but the vast majority will assume the site is down.
Ken Schafer is looking to do a piece for One Degree about how Canadian companies are using instant messaging as a marketing platform. If you know anyone doing this – or if you and/or a client have success you’d like to share – post in the comments or contact Ken directly.
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