Don’t Build Your Brand on Rented Land

Is your website a dying relic of the internet’s past? 

With so much of our digital engagement today happening through social channels, there’s an ever-growing narrative that your website just isn’t that important anymore. That what you really need to do is nail your content strategy. Get big on TikTok. Tell your story through short form videos. Build supporter trust through influencer campaigns. That Gen Z doesn’t even use websites anyway.

That narrative couldn’t be further from the truth — especially for social impact brands. 

Don’t Build Your Brand on Rented Land

The reality is that social platforms will always be an important part of your broader marketing and content strategy. But they’re fleeting channels that shift as quickly as our cultural tastes evolve. 

And when you over-index your efforts on social platforms, you’re building your brand on rented land. And sometimes, the billionaire landlord in charge of these channels decides it’s time for a change. And then all your efforts — and your hard earned following — comes crumbling down. 

People have been predicting the end of the website since “Web 2.0” was a hot new buzzword. And people will probably be doing this 5, 10, and even 20 years from today. 

If anything, current trends actually suggest a yearning for more of our interactions online to happen outside of social channels and on open and distributed digital infrastructure, like websites, podcasts, email, and niche communities on platforms built to serve them – places that brands “own”.

Of course, your website can’t drive action and grow revenue in a vacuum. But when it’s supported by creative content and a solid distribution strategy, your website is still the number one owned asset for your brand. 

Let’s look at the changing nature of the internet, how it’s shaping our modern culture, and why your website remains your most powerful tool for building your brand, growing awareness, Inspiring action, expanding your community, and driving your fundraising.

How the Web is Changing and Shaping Modern Culture

Our digital landscape has evolved over time — and it might be on the cusp of another major shift right now.

The Web Started Out as a Bold Experiment 

In its first iteration, the World Wide Web (that www at the beginning of URLs) was a new technology that promised to connect us, instantly, across the globe. Information, democratized, at the speed of light. The great equalizer.

And the beginning of the web really felt this way. This probably won’t make any sense to younger listeners, but to this day I remember the excitement I felt when starting up the AOL dial-up sequence, as it played its 30 second 8-bit musical performance connecting my boxy, first generation iMac to the world wide web. Those sounds still trigger a wave of nostalgia.

The early internet had its problems, but the overall vibe was one of joyous wonder at how this new technology might improve society and bring us all closer together. 

The internet began as a distributed network. Anyone with internet access could now publish content, media, and ideas, and everyone else could consume them. 

But you had to know where to look.

This led to the beginning of directory sites that helped aggregate that content. At this time, all content on the web was hand-curated by the webmaster in charge of whatever site you visited by manually typing the URL into your browser bar. 

But as more and more content started growing on the web, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find and discover the information you were looking for. 

Enter Internet Search

Search truly became integral to the internet experience with the rise of Google. 

Around the year 2000, Google quickly grew to become the de facto internet search engine. Search was a transformational moment in the internet’s maturity, but in a way that many people didn’t realize — especially at the time. Because for the first time, a major brand had an outsized control on what information we saw and what information we didn’t see on the internet. 

And all of this was determined by a black-box algorithm designed by engineers at Google, that everyday internet users had absolutely no control over. This same black-box algorithm — although it’s changed many times since then — still shapes how much content on the internet is created to this day. 

But search was helpful, and life on the internet was largely good. 

The next big shift was “Web 2.0.”

Introducing the Social Internet

Whereas “Web 1.0” was largely a passive experience for most internet users, “Web 2.0” suddenly shifted to a more social, conversational internet. 

In the early days, this took the form of blogs with comments, where lively, active discussions around different niche topics sparked exciting conversations. Pretty quickly, social platforms and networks started to eat the web (and websites) that made up much of “Web 1.0”. 

By 2010, if you were on the internet, you were likely active on at least 1 major social network.

Social networks promised a web that was more personal, based on connecting us with our peers from real life and others around the world. A web that was shaped more by human connection and less by institutional publishers and content hubs.

With the explosion of social networks, the internet began to deeply influence our culture — and not just online. They became woven into our interactions as people began moving more fluidly between online and real world interactions.

A few key features of these networks that fundamentally changed our digital experiences are still with us to this day — in more advanced forms. The concept of “friends” or “connections” online. Subscribing, following, commenting. The invention of the “Like button.” All things we don’t even think twice about today, seemed like revolutionary shifts during this period of the social internet’s growth.

Then another major shift started to take place. 

Attention and Engagement Overtake Connections

In the early days of these networks, our feeds were all about timeliness. We wanted the latest and greatest updates from our friends and brands that we followed. Our feeds were chronological, and we refreshed compulsively to get the newest updates.

But that all changed when social networks started to prioritize engagement over timeliness. As these networks worked to boost daily active users and time on platform as key metrics of success, they learned that timeliness was not necessarily the best strategy for engagement. 

On top of that, they also found that the most engaging content wasn’t content that users had opted in to see. Soon, content from accounts and brands that people hadn’t subscribed to or followed started populating our feeds as well. 

Updates from our friends were suddenly replaced with profanity-laced political tirades and misleading clickbait that hacked our psychology for likes and comments.

And now, creators and publishers were incentivized to create content based on the business model of the social platforms versus content they believed in and that could best serve their audience and followers. 

Are you seeing a pattern here yet?

The Modern & Evolving Internet

Today, we’re all too familiar with how our social feeds and media consumption affects not only our experience online, but our individual understanding of reality and our broader global society — for better or for worse.

And although there’s more people than ever on social media, there’s also an emerging cultural rebellion against the centralization and privatization of the internet. We’re all becoming more aware that the current version of the internet might not be sustainable in the long run. 

We’re seeing a growing trend and resurgence of open-distribution media gaining popularity. Podcasts, newsletters, niche communities, and yes, websites are quickly gaining traction with users who want more control and autonomy over what content and information they give their time and attention to. 

There’s a movement towards building out protocols and infrastructure to support a decentralized, distributed version of the social web dubbed the fediverse — a set of social networking services where your content, followers, and digital relationships aren’t controlled or owned by any individual platform, but instead by you as an individual creator and consumer of digital content. 

So what does this all have to do with your social impact website strategy?

Build Your Brand on Land You Own

The big takeaway here is that the channels you truly own and have full control over are sacred within this rapidly-evolving and unpredictable digital ecosystem. 

Social channels are great for discovery and distribution. And you should use them to build your brand and increase awareness and credibility for your organization, cause, and mission. But ultimately, you need to invite your audience to join you in your owned channels so that you can build deeper, lasting relationships over time. On your terms, free from the pressure of social algorithms and the influence they have on your content strategy. 

And the most important owned channel of all is your digital hub: A storytelling center. A fundraising center. An action center. A digital community center. The home of your brand.

That’s your Website — a powerful digital flywheel that builds momentum for your cause and grows support and revenue for your organization — and one that you own and control. 

This article is part of a series. Read the next article here.