Goodbye, Sweet Microsite

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on December 17, 2009.

Microsites have been around for most of the Web years. They’ve been the pet of marketers who wanted to create a rich, immersive, consumer brand experience, that didn’t reside one navigation tab away from a corporation’s news releases and annual reports. The failure of the microsite has always been attributable to one enormous issue: lack of traffic. Companies that spent small fortunes on their microsites were not so pleased with their $/visit metric, and more chagrined to find they had to invest significantly more in $/advertisement metrics to generate some interest.

Enter Microsite 2.0: the Facebook Fan Page!

Brands are charging towards the platform that is irresistible with its many hundreds of millions of potential customers just waiting to be with you. Unlike those microsite islands, Facebook is in the middle of the party, and provides huge advantages for brand participation:

• Engagement and “radiused exposure” of brand messaging through the power of the Wall Post
• Automatic reach through its easy external push/pull of RSS, SMS, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr
• Developer control through FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that provides surprising openness to the look and feel of the Fan Page, and hooks into a Facebook user’s profile, and feed data
• Built-in Analytics that break down the walls of anonymity with access to fan data including demographics, habits, and contacts

Ironically, along with all the new faculties and connected potential of the Facebook Fan Page, comes the old challenge of how to create a truly engaging brand experience. The toy maker Hasbro has launched a large-scale broadcast campaign driving people to Facebook.com/cranium, but the experience rings hollow with what might be staged videos and Tweets. What looks easy, usually never is. Goodbye sweet microsite; hello, same, old, marketing challenge.