It is amazing how easily I can fall into the trap of not following my own advice…

I often tell people that corporate web sites are a thing of the last century. They are só 1999. In those years, when there was nothing else available but a number of crappy and expensive CMS tools, the most natural thing to do for businesses was to launch their own sites on the Internet. And the fight for visitors made some owners of search engines filthily rich.

But nowadays there are big social networks available, for free, with plenty of features and widgets. Social networks are huge applications that ordinary CMS-systems will never be able to compete with. Why create a photo album when uploading pictures to Flickr is much easier? Why build a corporate calendar when we have Google Calendar and Meetup? Why host your own slides and white papers when you can easily make them available with SlideShare and Ning? Why install your own FAQ system when there are plenty of good Wiki sites available?

And even more important: why not use the rich social features (with millions of existing users) that an ordinary CMS can never provide?

More and more content is moving away from corporate web sites to social networks. It won’t be long before the corporate site is nothing more than a shallow façade with a 1-page mash-up of content that is hosted on ten or twenty specialized platforms. And maybe even that single page can disappear in the end…

I firmly believe in this big migration of content to social platforms, and thus it was quite strange, and a bit silly actually, that I was trying to define the content pages for a brand new site for the business unit that I am leading. I had drawn a traditional site map, just like ten years ago! I’m almost embarrassed to say it had headings like “vision”, “products”, “projects”, “services”, “contact”, and stuff like that. Can you believe it? But then I realized that I was falling into the trap of not following my own advice.

Why was I trying to create the 10,000,000th corporate site with no visitors?

Why was I planning to publish content on a location where there are no people?

I’m glad I came to my senses before any harm was done. I revised my plan, and now my plan includes content to be published on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Flickr, YouTube, and Delicious. After all, that’s where most of our customers are.

And yes, we might have 1-page mash-up of aggregated content, for the more conservative old-style “web surfers” out there. Possibly… When we have time.