Is the Corporate Website a Digital Dinosaur?
Below is an article that was originally published September 15 on ClickZ, written by The Public Interest Registry’s Lauren Price.
Watch recent television commercials or flip through any magazine, and you'll notice that the countless print and video advertisements directing you to a company's Facebook and Twitter pages as opposed to main corporate websites. This marketing tactic - combined with the highly commercialized rise in social media – has many speculating that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter will soon replace the corporate website as the main method of brand promotion.
Even Facebook has publicly expressed its belief that it will soon replace corporate websites as the center of the commercial world. The truth is that websites are not digital dinosaurs. In fact, if done correctly, websites and social media today can act as promotional partners to maximize a company's digital ROI.
Like social media, traditional websites are realizing monumental growth. The Internet today boasts over 200 million websites, with a 7.9 percent increase in domains registered in the past year. And while social media certainly has had a significant impact in the way we consume news (how many of you heard about Osama Bin Laden's death on Twitter before it reached CNN?). A survey conducted by the Public Interest Registry (PIR) shows that 81 percent of Americans still turn to a company's website first to find information on the entity, product or cause, while in contrast, 16 percent of Americans choose Facebook as their primary source for information (eight percent choose Twitter).
