The Company Website Is Making a Comeback

For years now, companies have been vying for attention on social streams controlled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people flocked to those streams, and corporations figured they had to follow. But now businesses are realizing something has been lost in the transition, that there’s nothing like being able to control exactly how they speak to customers, and the humble website seems to be surging back.

The comeback is bolstered by new interlinks that make it increasingly easy for websites to suck in and selectively repurpose some of the very social content that diminished the open web in the first place. These tools are typically used to highlight particularly interesting online conversations, to aggregate responses to a question posed by a consumer goods seller or media organization, or to facilitate question and answer sessions. So while the content comes from social streams controlled by outside companies like Facebook, it’s reshuffled and re-prioritized in a way that makes sense to the owner of the website.

This allows companies with products to sell to pull off a neat trick: Captivating potential customers by talking about those potential customers, rather than about the product. Everyone likes to hear about themselves. This means that, as cheesy as it might sound, Twitter and Facebook users get an ego boost on seeing their opinions, words, and even faces reflected on a corporate website, even if it’s through a silly contest, poll, or roundup.

“What we do is what I call marketing with a mirror – we hold the mirror up to the audience and they respond to it,” says Sam Decker, whose company Mass Relevance helps companies like Patagonia and HBO sift and repurpose social streams on their own websites. “You know when the camera in the football stadium shines on some people, and they stand up and say, ‘look at me, look at me?’ You just got engagement and participation. And that’s exactly what we’re doing, we’re playing back their own participation in the brand experience. That’s what you can do with owned media, with a website.

Decker says Mass Relevance has grown to 100 employees and 300 clients, doubling its business in the past year. It is riding the same wave as RebelMouse, a New York startup that helps media companies like Time Inc. and Fox and retail partners like Shopify repurpose social data on their own websites. CEO Paul Berry, formerly the Huffington Post’s chief technical officer, says he started the company last year because friends in the media business were constantly asking him to help better showcase fast breaking news from social streams on the websites that generated their advertising revenue.

Now the company is launching an ad product that does the same thing for advertisers, helping them place their Facebook and Twitter posts on other people’s websites, for a price. Those advertisers have been pouring effort into their Twitter and Facebook streams, only to realize it’s not been earning them much return, driving neither traffic nor sales.

“Company blogs and websites are missing their own best stuff,” Berry says. “The people who actually care about you are the ones who come to your site.” 

And with the right content, as fresh as a status update but polished like a magazine ad, those hard-core customers might return again and again.



RebelMouse CEO Paul Berry. Photo: RebelMouse