Corporate web sites tend to be “heavier weight’ — like glossy sales collateral that you hand out at an industry convention.
Business profiles tend to be “lighter weight” — like flyers that you hang on bulletin boards around town (at the grocery store, the little league park, town hall, etc).
With the maturation of the web and the proliferation of social networks, two things are happening:
- fewer people are visiting trade show booths (web sites) to pick up corporate collateral.
- more people are gleaning information from flyers (business profiles) tacked to virtual bulletin boards that are spread across the social web on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and even Twitter.
@TechCrunch reported yesterday that Facebook is planning to substantially redesign their business profile pages to give brands a better way to present themselves and interact with users. Facebook is also hoping the redesigned profiles will motivate businesses to buy more ads elsewhere inside of Facebook to drive traffic back to those new and improved profile pages.
Facebook vs. MySpace: The Battle Over Business Profiles
The timing of Facebook’s announcement appears to be a direct response to MySpace’s recent announcement that they are launching an enhanced profiling service to help SMBs market themselves on the web. Charlie Rose recently did a fascinating interview (see below) with MySpace founders Tom Anderson
and Chris DeWolfe.
Charlie Rose – Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson
During the interview Anderson explains the company’s effort to enhance small business profiles on MySpace, saying:
. . . the same way you want to discover music or video or that sort of thing, you want to know about the companies and the people and the resources that are around your community. So if I want to find someone that I want to do business with, if I need a contractor for my home, why not look at his MySpace profile and see the reviews of people that I understand where they’re coming from?
Flyers on bulletin boards spread around town used to work pretty well for small business owners. I think that day will come again — at least in the virtual sense.
