Make Your Company's Site a Social Hub in 2011

EyeforTravel published their 2011 Trends and their number one pick is the increasing need to integrate social content and activity on your corporate website.
As budget freezes start to thaw, it’s time for them (companies) to consider how to integrate social media functionality, for example, incorporating the power of Facebook comment boxes on site to provide a feedback loop for consumers onto their main site. Sites will become a hub to aggregate and explain activity on social networks, and add long-form value.
I totally agree that this is an important trend for 2011 and here’s why:

• 93 percent of people active in social media say they expect companies to have a presence in social media and networking sites and 85 percent of them want the companies to communicate and interact with them on those sites.

• The rate of content sharing on Facebook has increased 500 percent in the last six months.  the average Facebook users now shares 12 pieces of content a week.

• Shared news content links  in Facebook send three times more traffic to news websites than Google News does.

• The UMass Social Media adoption surveys presented at the SNCR Symposium at Stanford University in November showed that while the adoption of social media by companies and organizations in many sectors is rising fast, there is still a large disparity between those active in social media (60% of the Fortune 500, 75% of Inc 500) and the number that connect that content and activity to their corporate websites (less than 30%).

• In June 2010 the Washington Post interviewed thought leaders in the social media and marketing space and asked for the 10 mistakes companies make in social media.  Debbie Weil, author of the Corporate Blogging Book warned that companies that rely solely on external networks relinquish a certain degree of autonomy. She recommends that organizations and companies using social media have a hub on their primary Web site where users can find links or feeds to blogs, Flickr photo galleries and other third-party Web sites. This also gives customers or constituents a single go-to URL. (There is that word hub again.)

How do you integrate social content and activity on your site?  Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group published this roadmap that lays out the steps you need to follow

By my own observation of the corporate websites of the Fortune 100, top 100 hotels, Inc 500 and Entrepreneur 100, of the 70-odd percent that have not yet integrated their social content and activity most are still at step one, or at best, step two.
The PR version of this dilemma is the corporate newsroom.  Most companies now have one, but they are definitely at the bottom of this ladder.  And there really is no need to languish down there -  social media news hub services like PRESSfeed can catapult your site to number five on this ladder in a few weeks.  (Disclosure: I am a partner and helped to develop this social news hub)
You can of course work with your IT department to develop a social news hub, like Intel did. It’s likely to take a lot longer than a few weeks, but the tools are readily available.
Step 6 and 7 on this ladder are where this trend is heading:  Users stay on your site using a social log-in like Facebook Connect and that log-in triggers sharing of the content onyour site.  Content shared in this manner ends up in their social news stream, is seen by others and usually gets shared again by 5 of their friends or followers. According to Facebook’s Developer Network Director, Ethan Beard, more than 100 million users started logging into Facebook Connect on third-party sites in the last 12 months.   And it is spreading – it’s already been integrated with YouTube.
A social registration and log-in helps your visitors – they save time and keeps them connected to their friends.
It helps you because you become part of the their social graph.
Which step are you on now? Do you have plans to upgrade to a social hub in 2011?

Originally published at ProactiveReport

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