…reply.to.all… The personal and professional blog of Steven De Costa (edited by Barb)

You don’t need a website – you need a home base

At risk of sounding like I fabricated it just to introduce this blog, I was sent a simple request for quote recently, with the requirements pretty much summed up in the opening:

“I am a classical guitarist. I was wondering whether you might be able to provide me with a quote for the development of two websites: one for me as a solo guitarist and one for a duo.”

It got me thinking about the amount of website content out there that might be better positioned within the warm embrace of various social media platforms rather than just floating around in the ether, all out of context. And I realised that this is particularly relevant when someone has more than one set of information and more than one desired audience. In the old days, this would equate to more than one website but recently, the diversity of social media spaces has opened up the opportunity to replace static web sites with ‘online profiles’. Instead of peddling your product on site A and pontificating about industry developments on site B you can share everything you need to say online across some diverse social media platforms: your facebook account, twitter and LinkedIn profiles etc, and then draw it all in under the one umbrella – an online profile home base.

Your classic website tends to have a singular focus but often what that website represents is one element of something bigger, you! For example, my business has a site at www.links.com.au which is important, but my profile, and that of the work I do, extends beyond that and is better represented through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn respectively. I realised that I needed somewhere online that captured everything in a series of branches extending from the source. The extensions make plenty of online noise on their own but seen in the context of each other they truly resonate.

So, back to the guitarist. As an experiment, I suggested he set up a flickr account to post captioned images of performances and then setup a twitter account and begin to update this with his ‘stream’ of influence in his field. He could also set up separate Facebook pages for himself as a solo performer and for the duo: at risk of doing myself out of work Facebook has a, free, online page builder that’s not half bad if your requirements are pretty simple. He could then set up a LinkedIn account to provide an online CV and yet another method to grow his connections. Where he might go beyond that is to develop a wordpress blog, and this could also serve as a formal website. Once all these branches are covered he could then connect them with a simple social media page, or ‘home base’, provided by www.flavors.me, which for $20 per year he can link to a specific domain.

You can see how I’ve done all this for myself at www.stevendecosta.com.au. My blog is at www.starlen.com.au, twitter is at www.twitter.com/starl3n, LinkedIn is at au.linkedin.com/in/stevendecosta and the complete profile adds authenticity to the work I run through www.links.com.au.

All in all what you end up with is an absorbing profile for connecting with your audience in a myriad of ways, not a static and charmless information site.