There’s a growing trend in marketing circles that leads away from the campaign microsite as a staple for communicating a brand. It moves toward the use of social media sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Does this mean social media is reaching further into the web content world and taking away from traditional forms of online content for organizations?

In an article in AdWeek Magazine, Brian Morrisey discussed the changes that are taking place for companies marketing brands online.

The Campaign Microsite

Used for various marketing purposes, the campaign microsite started out intially as the approach traditional marketing used to move their campaigns online. It is usually a short-term site designed for a specific purpose:

• email campaigns usually contained links to microsites for further information;
• used to publicize new products, services for a company;
• used to market new movies.

Enter Social Media

These days marketers are looking at social media sites for ways to reach consumers. The number of users on sites like Facebook and MySpace are staggering, the opportunities huge for a company to market their brands.

Using a microsite meant enticing a consumer to come to the company. Using social media sites means going to the consumer. It’s a different approach that many marketing companies believe is necessary in this age of user-generated content and social networking.

The AdWeek article refers to company’s like Coca Cola, Dove and Verizon who have gone the social media route and built brand pages on the Facebook site.

The costs to build these pages is much lower than building a microsite (brand pages are free in Facebook - so companies only have the cost of labor for developing a page to worry about).

Is the microsite on its way out? Probably not, according to the article. But its importance has dropped dramatically amongst the list of tools marketers now have at their disposal to reach this vast internet audience.

By Barb Marsher

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