Use Your Corporate Web Site to Put Your Customers on Your Board of Directors

By Ken Mays



Would you give your most passionate customers a seat on your board of directors and allow them to direct the future success of your business? Some companies are using the new interactive powers of the Internet to do just that. Instead of hiring a market research firm and spending tens of thousands of dollars on focus groups and surveys, web-savvy business owners are accessing the new social networking powers of the web to let customers do everything from setting prices to designing products.

If you're a fan of science fiction and fantasy writer Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game, Shadow of the Hedgemon), you may have already participated in this process. Card's online community (HatrackRiver.com) provides the author with valuable feedback while he is in the process of writing his newest novel. In fact, Card takes the time to acknowledge the assistance of his online community in the pages of his published work.

All this brings us to the discovery of a major paradigm shift in web development away from static, ready-only pages. Yesterday's "static" web sites were akin to online versions of the corporate brochure, serving up the same information to each user: product features, company histories, leadership bios, mission statements and so forth. The problem with this has always been the dramatic disconnect with how the Internet user wants to interface with information on the web.

From the very beginning, web users liked the idea of the personal control the Internet afforded them. They could access information whenever they wanted, for as long as they wanted. Best of all, they could view it objectively without interference from sales and marketing people.

What they really wanted from the very beginning was the ability to react and interact with the information they harvested on the Internet. After all, the web's greatest boon has always been the creation of communities of people with similar passions, goals and ideas. Until recently, this kind of interactivity was only available on a limited number of sites like Yahoo, MSN and About. Today's new web development tools, however, have finally made interactive web sites affordable for small and medium-sized businesses, too.

Let's take a quick look at the major elements of an interactive, or Web 2.0, web site.

¥ The use of blogs, forums, chat rooms and surveys to garner real-time customer comments and views and create a true participation-drive web site experience

¥ The ability for customers to rate and rank products and services

¥ News feeds, podcasts and streaming videos

¥ A content management system (CMS) that allows the owner of the web site to manage content without the help of a web development company

¥ The ability to cost-effectively add new interactive features

While popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are garnering all the credit for this dramatic shift to user interactivity, it is really the customer who has driven the change. Folks in marketing understand that this is nearly always the case - it is usually customer demand that creates new ideas, products and services.

This brings us right back to the importance of leveraging all the new interactive web technologies to allow customers to talk directly to businesses. In today's online driven economy, the customer is still king. However, for businesses with interactive web sites, the customer is also the chairman of the board.



Ken Mays, an award-winning writer and designer, is president and creative director of Mays & Associates Inc. (www.ad-mays.com), a Columbia-based web development and graphic design company specializing in the development of Web 2.0 portal web sites. He can be reached at 410-964-9701 or e-mail ken@ad-mays.com.