People don’t believe corporate web-sites
I’m just starting a project with a well known UK medical company around the popular topic of “user generated content”. Aside from intensively disliking the word “user”, I wonder sometimes how big corporate Britain is going to survive the next stage of e-growth. We have have blog, forums, social networking and now so much activity that exists outside of the sphere of corporate influence.
Old marketing is dead – we all pretty know that by now – and is being replaced with what customers think they want. They cannot have been made clearer when a post on said company’s forum from a new visitor asks an opinion on a particular surgeon. Great, an opportunity for the board admin to help out and she does this by posting a link to the main web-site showing what the marketers had written about this surgeon. The original poster summarily dismissed the comment, really quite off-hand actually and asks for REAL opinions from real people. Wow. If this person, who subsequently got great comments about their surgeon and went ahead with the procedure, didn’t believe the corporate bullshit but would listen to the idle ramblings of Joe Average then that says a great deal about the role of the corporate site.
This episode has somewhat accelerated my drive in this project. Which, ironically, is struggling to get proper funding as we are unable to illustrate a (traditional) measurable RoI for it!
