Steve King of SmallBizLabs posted this question a couple weeks ago.  In the blog post he refers to an article in Entrepeneur.com that says between third-party apps and social media, some businesses it may not find a website necessary any longer.  I couldn’t disagree more.

What we need to do is change our definition of a “website.”   In the beginning a business website was little more than a corporate brochure.  You couldn’t modify or add new content to the site without going to your webmaster who went around proudly announcing he was a purist and preferred to “hand code” everything.  Of course, you had no idea what that meant, except that your website was always out of date and you were pissed off at how much money you were spending on something you couldn’t even prove was bringing you business.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies are still stuck in this 1990’s time warp.  So no wonder they are glomming onto the idea that social media will replace the need for a company website.  At least with social media they have something they can manage, modify and update themselves.

The flaw in this argument is that you really don’t have as much control as you’d like with these tools, you just have more than you’re used to.  And spreading yourself across the Internet through Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and any other number of social media sites doesn’t give your customers a home base to find you, especially if they are not using the social media sites that you’re using.  If your business is dependent on  Facebook or Twitter, and your account gets suspended, what will you do then?  While you’re fighting to have your suspension revoked, where do your prospects and customers find you online?  Jim Connolly has a great blog post about suspensions here.

I’ve built several dozen websites over the past few years and in the past three years 100% of them were built in WordPress or Joomla!  These open-source CMS (content management system) platforms give business owners the best of both worlds.  By using an SEO-friendly CMS system, the business website becomes that necessary home base.  The business has complete control over the site with easy to use interfaces and an endless supply of widgets and plug-ins to meet any sort of requirement they would have for the site.

Having a website doesn’t negate the need for a social media strategy any more than having a presence in social media means you don’t need a website.  Think of those social media sites as referral engines.  They have the incredible power to push customers to your home base where you then have the opportunity to continue the conversation you started and also start selling your product or services.

The video posted below is a pretty powerful argument for social media.  If you’re to believe the statistics no business will survive unless they embrace this new medium.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about how social media affects us personally.

Social media helped shrink the world.  Today we can sit in our living room in our shorts and bed head hair and carry on incredibly engaging conversations with strangers across the globe.  People judge us for our minds, our intellect and our ability to present our opinions in an engaging, challenging manner.  We used to form opinions of people in a tenth of a second – based on how they looked, behaved and sounded.  But if you’re meeting someone virtually, then really, the only way you can form an opinion is by assessing their intellect.  So in a way, it really levels the playing field.  Remember that geeky girl in high school that nobody ever paid attention to?  Or the really overweight guy in college that nobody took seriously?  If you meet them online, the only thing you have to go by is their intellect.   And so we begin to know people first, not by their appearance, but by their heart.  There is no way we’ll be judging this book by its cover.

Conversely, social media and the internet makes it easy for us to stay inside and avoid face to face meetings with each other.  If you’re shy, unhappy with your appearance, or don’t want people to see what you look like “IRL” (in real life), then you can still build a network of friends, business colleagues and acquaintances across the world while never stepping into the world.  I don’t know if that is good or bad.  It makes me think of a science fiction movie where everyone is isolated in small chambers, staring at a computer screen all day.  We don’t ever actually leave our chambers, our whole lives are acted out on the Internet.  Sort of like the Matrix, but without computers trying to kill us.  It is a scary concept but entirely possible.

Just like we need a healthy balance between face to face interaction and online community in our personal lives, we also need to balance our social media strategies in business with other, more traditional mediums for connecting with our customers.  Pick up the phone and actually talk to a customer sometimes instead of sending an email.  Write and publish a printed newsletter that is engaging and relevant and snail mail it to a customer instead of popping out yet another HTML email that they’ll probably ignore.  In addition to creating an online community, maybe have an open house at your business or invite customers to a networking conference.

The advent of social media has fundamentally and permanently change in our lives -  both professionally and personally.  I just don’t want us to forget that nothing can replace the importance of meeting people face to face, and connecting with our customers in real life too.