'Oooh! Suit you sir.' The Fast Show's sycophantic tailors' catchphrase may have fallen out of favour recently but the bespoke approach to digital marketing and communications is very much cutting edge. One size most definitely does not fit all.
As technology and understanding of how to use and integrate it into our daily lives grows, the twins 'social media' and 'community' are making their presences felt in an increasing number of briefs from clients. This quarter's projects have given us the chance to take a closer look at how and why these online communities spring up.
Whether it's the next Lily Allen or Artic Monkeys plying their trade and hoping to catch the eye of the A&R man trawling through Myspace pages or graduates keeping in touch with old university friends through Facebook, there's no denying that the online community is fast becoming an accepted part of the way we use and interact with the web.
So we should all be jumping on the bandwagon and building our own Myspace or Flickr to encourage and build an online community around our websites, right? Not necessarily. We've always subscribed to the idea that just because you can, doesn't mean you should and the idea of creating communities for the sake of communities, much like the idea of giving client a website for the sake of having a website, doesn't sit well with our approach.
As we become more web savvy our expectation of what the web can and should offer us grows. In simple terms, if a website or an online community doesn't offer something useful or relevant, why would you visit or use it? What interests one set of users, doesn't necessarily interest another and just because it has worked somewhere else certainly doesn't guarantee that it will work for you.
That's not to say that the latest developments aren't worth looking into; quite the opposite in fact. As an Information Architect (IA), it's my job to do exactly that. Consider us the tailors of the web design world (although hopefully a little less creepy than the two on the Fast Show). It's our job to take an off-the-peg idea, say online communities for example, and to work out first of all whether or not it will suit the client and then, more importantly, to tailor it to produce something that is truly of value to their users.
Over the first half of this year we've had the chance to work with clients on a wide variety of projects, covering a range of sectors and interesting brands. A significant number of them have approached us for help identifying a genuine opportunity and need for an online community around their product. Get it right and you'll be able to tap into a rich vein of web users who have a genuine reason to visit and keep visiting your site. Get it wrong and you risk not only missing opportunities to interact and build a relationship with your target audience but also spending not insignificant chunks of your marketing budget on something that doesn't work.
This is where the value of understanding what the client wants and researching what the users need comes to the fore. To borrow a phrase from a fellow IA, this 'grown up approach to planning projects is what we all need to do more often'. And armed with this level of understanding, we will really begin to see the ideas of social media, online communities and web 2.0 really come into their own.
Send us your opinion on this by email to: ideas@fsnm.co.uk.