Microsites have been around for most of the Web years. They’ve been the pet of marketers who wanted to create a rich, immersive, consumer brand experience, that didn’t reside one navigation tab away from a corporation’s news releases and annual reports. The failure of the microsite has always been attributable to one enormous issue: lack of traffic. Companies that spent small fortunes on their microsites were not so pleased with their $/visit metric, and more chagrined to find they had to invest significantly more in $/advertisement metrics to generate some interest.
Enter Microsite 2.0: the Facebook Fan Page!
Brands are charging towards the platform that is irresistible with its many hundreds of millions of potential customers just waiting to be with you. Unlike those microsite islands, Facebook is in the middle of the party, and provides huge advantages for brand participation:
- Engagement and “radiused exposure” of brand messaging through the power of the Wall Post
- Automatic reach through its easy external push/pull of RSS, SMS, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr
- Developer control through FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that provides surprising openness to the look and feel of the Fan Page, and hooks into a Facebook user’s profile, and feed data
- Built-in Analytics that break down the walls of anonymity with access to fan data including demographics, habits, and contacts
Ironically, along with all the new faculties and connected potential of the Facebook Fan Page, comes the old challenge of how to create a truly engaging brand experience. The toy maker Hasbro has launched a large-scale broadcast campaign driving people to Facebook.com/cranium, but the experience rings hollow with what might be staged videos and Tweets. What looks easy, usually never is. Goodbye sweet microsite; hello, same, old, marketing challenge.
If you’d like to talk about how to bring your brand experience to Facebook in a valuable way for your customers, drop us a line.
3 Comments
Very thoughtful.
Not sure I totally agree with the article, there are still a lot of people who are not on Facebook and never will be. Facebook is a massively important part of any campaign but it’s important to see it as that…a part not the whole!
As usual marketing people seeing Facebook as an instant traffic delivery system are just being lazy. There’s just as much work required to get Facebook traffic to your fan page as there is to a microsite.
To the poster above… Yes, not everyone is on Facebook. But what percent of important demographics isn’t? Sure, there isn’t a lot of detached grouches, children under twelve, or people in developing nations. But there are a lot of people who are stimulation addicts. I’m in a mcdonalds. I couldn’t handle not to be on my phone. Stumulation addicts spend money. The Facebook-as-a-verb crowd spends money. Such a massive force to be reckoned with. I would expect that Facebook will continue to attract high-profile businesses unless FB really drops the ball and pulls a myspace.