I’ve only been subscribed to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog for a couple months, but I’ve found his perspective to be very thought provoking. Yesterday, he posted an article from 2007, as an aside to a more current post, and I have to say the title, Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website, caught my attention. While I don’t talk specifically about Jeremiah’s core ideas, his thoughts stimulated a different discussion for me regarding the future of the corporate Web site.

The idea that the corporate Web site might be outmoded is something that’s been on my mind over the last couple months. There are so many new tools, and in the current paradigm many companies see these as a fragmented communications approach that lacks focus. However, a new paradigm might categorize the various modes of electronic communications, RSS, micro-blogging, wikis, blogs, Facebook, and other tools as the full communicatons picture when done in concert together with the same emphasis that the company Web site gets, rather than pursuing these new modes as a secondary, not necessarily as pertinent communication mode, as many organizations do. It’s a bold idea.

However, this approach would have to be open, and open to all… and that’s a scary idea.

Jeremiah nails that here:

“Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
“This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace.”

This is the beauty of the Web. This the power of the Web in its rawest, most unadulterated form, but you can’t control it, management can’t control it, and the board of directors can’t control it, it’s people driven, and while a scary prospect at first, it’s the people that we’ve taken the responsibility to serve. We should absolutely want an environment where we can know what the people want with perfect clarity, and then be prepared openly and honestly evaluate those requests.

Just because you presented the better solution, doesn’t mean that the client will always take that route. Somehow, this defies good sense, but on the other hand, people are not always using good sense when they make decisions. There’s an emotional piece that equally defies good sense, and there’s nothing related to good sense as far as feelings are concerned, only what is and the hope that one will learn something from the experience of those emotions. Still, though, in the service of the client, you have to research and present the best option for them, and hope that there will be an intersection of what the client wants, what the client needs, and what the best solution is.