The New Landing Pages

With social media talk fluttering about, your product’s website doesn’t necessarily need to be discovered via search engine results or billboard ads (for more info, go to www.yourwebsiteyay.com). The past 3 years has brought forth a new set of “landing pages” for your brand. Here are some of them:

a. Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Yahoo! 360 (eep, they’ve closed!)… the list goes on. But which one should you join? Which platform should you grow your community? Should you pick at random? Should you do all? The key is to experiment, yes but according to Gladwell’s principles in Blink!, you may already know the answer — go for gut feel. If you still need social proof, take a look at your referral traffic in your stats page. In my case, I run a blog for a local men’s lifestyle magazine and we figured that Facebook and Plurk (not Twitter), give us the biggest referral traffic next to Multiply.com. It’s gut feel, solidified with stats.

b. Apps: Brands are slowly realizing this, by taking their brand name into sponsoring or co-developing applications mostly for your mobile phone. The iTunes store, open social app development for social networks, the Nokia Ovi store, the Android store — a plethora of opportunities lies in ubiquity. So let’s think for a bit: do we put that flash game in our website or do we bring the game to our users onto their Facebook profiles and iPhone apps? I say the latter!

c. Brand Ambassadors: There’s nothing like good ‘ol word of mouth. Genuine word of mouth. Not those conceived “viral” messages that get passed on artificially. I personally think PR practitioners should be more attentive to what goes on in the circle of their “stakeholders” on the web. There are tools for this — Twitter hashtags are great ways for finding people who have good things to say about your product. Why not encourage them to love you more by giving them a little push (like a review unit of your upcoming phone). It isn’t about losing credibility. It’s about selection and being a smart marketer.