Beyond - a digital engagement consultancy - london, new york, san francisco

Last week we took part in a pitch for a brief to build a web site for a consumer company that has an extensive online product catalogue but which sells through retail. Halfway through the pitch (which was specifically to build a web site) the head of marketing asked, “do we really need a web site, anyway?”

It is a sign of the times that the question was a perfectly reasonable one. If you read this month’s Wired, the front cover of which blurted “The Web is Dead,” you will understand where he was coming from. Why not just move your web presence to Facebook? If you look at the size of the audiences on Facebook for some of the biggest brands, you can see that it may well make sense.

There was a good piece in AdAge the other week that pulled out some interesting stats. For example, Coke now has 11 million fans on Facebook, but just 242,000 unique visitors to its site in July (Compete data), down 42% from a year ago.

Maybe Coke is learning something because last week my wife noticed that the Vitamin Water web site (Vitamin Water is now owned by Coca Cola) no longer exists. www.vitaminwater.com takes you directly to their Facebook fan page with 1,746,875 fans.

So is the web site dead?

I would argue that for every brand it’s different. It is most important to understand how and why your brand is engaging people online and then choosing the right place to do it.

Facebook clearly has a number of things in its favor:  it has a potential audience of 500 million, is a platform designed for engaging people and there is zero barrier to entry, which is particularly important for smaller businesses.

However there are some limitations to consider, which will mean that a lot of brands could never go down the route of Vitamin Water. For example, www.miniusa.com has created a really rich web experience which includes product configurators, awesome branded content and a shop which you just couldn’t replicate in Facebook. What’s more, you don’t own the property. You could never get the same level of analytics you could from your own property. Further, what’s to say Facebook won’t start charging you or change the rules in other ways down the line.

So is it time to turn off the web site? I would say that for low involvement brands the answer is much more likely to be yes. However, for high involvement brands the answer is an unequivocal no. For everyone else, it’s probably more about creating a single digital experience where each platform has its own very specific role.