The Micro-site Isn’t Dead. (It's Just Not Useful)

If there’s one type of headline that gets attention—it’s about claiming the death of something.  Well, I’d like to proclaim the “un-dead” nature of a format which I think has the potential to become something more powerful than we are currently seeing today.  The Micro-site first became adopted by the marketing community as a tool of convenience. It simply became too unwieldy to continue adding sections to our large company/product Websites every time we wanted to promote a new product, feature or service.  And specifically for advertisers—well, they needed an online extension for their campaigns to live in the digital space.

And so the formula had begun.  Launch a campaign, build a micro-site, buy online media to drive traffic to it. Everything was in it’s place—advertisers now had a presence on the Web, clients were happy about it and the big money was still being pumped into the traditional channels because that’s how it’s always been done.  In the past year lots of us have had a grand ol time proclaiming the death of the micro-site, and with some validity.  Fact is that the internet is littered with thousands of them, and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them.  On top of that, most of the micro-sites I come across are difficult to use, take WAY too much time to load, crash my browser or use contrived marketing language written by professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft.

The reason micro-sites have come under fire is because the “amateurs” have provided more compelling experiences in many ways.  Sorry, it’s true. If you Google a product name, it’s not uncommon to come across a blog which has reviewed that product and is ranked higher than the professionally produced micro-site.  How do you think Engadget became so wildly popular?  Still, I think the micro-site format has legs.  Here’s why and here’s what we can do differently.

Analyze Digital Behavior
Where I see the opportunity for micro-sites lies behind simple human behavior in the digital space.  Think about how the typical person interacts with digital media. My friends and family outside of the industry still send me links via e-mail.  Simple copy and paste—the lowest barrier there is. Most “regular” people I know still bookmark WEB PAGES.  They aren’t managing multiple feeds, readers and social bookmarks like I do. I am not a representative of mainstream digital behavior.  I don’t have numbers to back this up, but going on intuition and personal experience, I’m fairly confident that this is the case.  Think about how you use the Web. For all the talk about mobility, widgets and portability my guess is that you still spend a lot of time on simple, good old fashioned hypertext WEB PAGES. Micro-sites have lost some luster not because of the format, but because marketers and everyday people don’t often think alike.

We the people are looking for something we can use, and instead get a lot of bells and whistles which don’t reward us for our time.

Offer Content, Context, Connections
Next we have to ask ourselves why formats like blogs, social networks and other manifestations of emerging digital media have become so popular.  Blogs look nothing like micro-sites. BUT, what they have in common is the delivery. Web pages—pages that can be bookmarked and e-mailed among other things.  And they offer niche content, lots of links and of course the ability for people to talk back. Long form content is the new design language—I have become a convert. Debating the above-the-fold argument is a moot point—we should start channeling our energy into debating how we can provide VALUE to users who are clearly getting it elsewhere. I propose that we breathe new life into the micro-site format by fundamentally re-thinking it.  Look at the visual above this post.  What if micro-sites evolved into content heavy, long form Web Pages that aggregated not only your own content, but content from any place you could think of?  Instead of being concerned about linking away from the “site”—that would be one of the primary objectives. I’ve found through my own experience in social networks that if you link to others and do the legwork of curating relevant content that people remember this, and guess what? They actually come back for more!  Micro-sites can deliver this, simply because the format consists of Web pages and links. We’ve just over-engineered the whole enchilada. 

Develop A Content Strategy of Distribution + Aggregation
Take a look at Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games. The content actually lives across multiple platforms—and it’s all about content. Producing it quickly, updating it, uploading it via the popular networks which fuel the long tail. It looks nothing like a micro-site but if you break down the components, it’s still a Web Page, or at least that’s one of the main components.  The core difference is content and distribution, Traditional micro-site thinking has marketers writing the copy, designers and developers building the site and a launch date followed by a maintenance plan.  But if micro-sites begin to evolve into more “blog-like” experiences, they can quickly be launched, edited, refreshed, and have all the flexibility in the world to pull in the open source 3rd party applications which are pervasive on the Web.  Events can be live streamed, photo galleries can live on Flickr, video galleries, on You Tube.  And there’s a tremendous opportunity to actually embrace users who are generating their own content about your products. You can make them the star—and they’ll probably link back to you in return.  The difference isn’t in the technology as much as it is in the mindset. In order to pull this off, we’ll need to think more like bloggers, uploaders, journalists and mash-up artists than marketers, copywriters and designers. Take a look at what 37 Signals does when they live stream video—it take very little production value to achieve this and the result is a sort of direct engagement which users on the Web are craving.

Ask "What’s Next"?
Like anything else, what I’m proposing isn’t a silver bullet, and it would take big mindset shift for many organizations to pull this off.  But, it’s worth looking into. I recently came across a micro-site for HP featuring Shaun White, and not being the demographic I really can’t judge if the site experience makes sense, but I did notice one thing. The site had clearly embraced a more “2.0” approach by offering multiple social bookmarks.  But if you actually bookmarked a video, returned to your link, it took you to the first page of the micro-site where you are greeted by Shaun’s talking/dancing avatar. You have to dig up the video all over again.  I’m not a 20-something but I have a hunch this would piss them off. But I don’t blame the format—if that video was worth sharing, a simple URL could have sufficed.  Better yet, getting involved in the comments about it would take things a step further.  It’s probably a good time to re-think what the experience of a Web page can be—I think the simple format has a lot of potential, if we just look at things with fresh, new eyes.

Comments

[Dave King]

A "mute point"? That's a kinda cool expression :)

[David Armano]

This is why I blog David. So people can correct my bad spelling and grammar. :-)

[Adam Kmiec]

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006226

It's far from dead.

[David Weiner, PR Newswire]

Microsites are still very useful and will be until corporations make their sites more navigable. Microsites are very valuable also for analytics and data since they consolidate users, views, etc. Also, in the world of PR, every press release, multimedia news release, social media release, etc. is to a certain degree a microsite. These announcements would never get viewed behind the folded walls of a corporate web site ...

[Rohit Bhargava]

How about calling them micro-aggregations instead? ;-) Actually, if you think about the success of Alltop, it is mostly due to this same principle, that people are still looking for single experience that can help them navigate to others. It's like the ultimate traffic circle where you can then get redirected to all roads. Thanks for following our Voices campaign ... I just left Beijing and am in Singapore now. Though I'm sad to be gone from Beijing, it's nice to be in a place where I can actually see your post and comment!

[Doug Schumacher]

What strikes me as most problematic for microsites is how they live in isolation. In the HP and Lenovo cases, neither site is mentioned anywhere on the home page. Both microsites treat the products in a fairly generic manner, and maybe that's to make a broader statement.

However, many microsites get a lot of support in terms of paid media, pr, social media (per your comment, David Weiner). People only remember the vaguest details about campaigns, and most search queries are relative simple, based around the brand name. At least with HP and Shaun White, he comes up high in search results on Google. But search Lenovo and Olympics, and the site doesn't come up in the first 3 pages.

Given the money that goes into a microsite and it's surrounding campaign, not supporting it on the home page seems like giving up a lot of potential impact.

[DA]

Doug, not sure if your observation on lenovo in search results is accurate. I did not have the site bookmarked and found it on the first page in Google search. Not in the top three, but there.

[marianne richmond]

David,

I think you nailed it..."bells and whistles which don't reward us for our time."

And IF the producers would think more about their brand strategy and how their users use the web, and less about the bells and whistles that entertain themselves, the microsite might be s more effective part of the brand experience instead of an interruption of it.

[Steve Shay]

I concur. Content is still king. Without good content that can be viewed, interacted with, shared, commented on, you are left with time-wasting marketing fluff.

I also feel that most digital marketing campaigns/projects that involve a microsite don't plan for the long term use/evolution of that microsite as audience awareness moves to consideration, blah blah blah. The microsite is just built, launched, and stays there becoming a rotting apple and probably forgotten a year later by consumers and client alike. Wow, am I negative today.

[Matt Haverkamp]

The problem with microsites is that they have always been part of the print model - make it once and vomit it out to the entire world. Who cares who saw it you got the cash.

I have been hoping that Microsites would die for some time. But I think you are on to something especially with the distribution. The problem is marketers are too short sighted and not into the long tail. It is what have you done for me lately.

[Will Waugh]

David
Great post and I have cut and paste the link to send to my peers.
I did suggest something like this recently and it does not compute. Microsite is a dirty word around here. Any other thoughts that have been successful in communicating this experience?

[Jim Amos]

Good article, read it over at adage. Wrote a similar but more scathing article about microsites a while back [http://thenextengine.com/2008/07/10/top-5-reasons-to-avoid-building-campaign-microsites/], somewhat out of frustration. I deffo agree with the points you made here: if only agencies putting out this stuff can evolve and learn where the true value lies, instead of assuming value is in the whizz-bang nature of flash or other superfluous features. Also, I look forward to the day when vertical scrolling on a page, and even, shock-horror - 'below the fold' is not considered evil lol

[andrew parker]

Great article

Deep linking is easy to do in flash and I was really disappointed that the otherwise stellar Shaun White site didn't use it.

Another benefit of the microsite I think to users is the clarity of the experience. They are there to perform or experience a certain task and there's something nice about that.

Most blogs and sites overload you with all kinds of information and microsites don't seem to.

[Jeremy Horn]

I agree with your concepts of aggregation and flexibility. Your ideas sound a whole lot like Modular Innovation (a trend I have been following quite a bit lately). I am going to recommend this article to my readers as part of The Product Guy's Weekend Reading...

http://tpgblog.com/2008/08/08/the-product-guys-weekend-reading-august-8-2008/

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com

[Jonathan Trenn]

I've never felt that this should be an "either or" scenario. Then again, that's how I feel about most things which is why I usually cring when I hear "...is dead".

Your point about Lenovo is well taken and I see that as an excellent example. But that's geared toward one campaign, a two week session.

I'm still thinking that people that are looking for information on a product or a service will want the basics: features and benefits. From that foundation, you can build out on what you're talking about. User experiences. Aggregation of what others are saying about it.

My guess is that there will be several factors in play. The type of product or service. The likely demographics of a purchaser. Where the person may be in the purchase cycle.

[Alex Wipf]

Great post David. I wrote a rebuttal on our blog to spur the discussion as far as taking the microsite out of the marketing toolkit to make it work for brands more.

http://culturalfuel.com/2008/08/25/the-microsite-is-dead-long-live-the-microsite/

[Donna Barnett]

Interesting post!

[Kabala]

thank you...

[israil]

thanks a lot

[sanat]

great

[kurtlar]

thanks