From one central web(site) presence, brands are increasingly moving towards a ‘hub and spoke’ approach, utilising social media tools to engage with their stakeholders, wherever they may be hanging out.

The spokes might include twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and some kind of blog, with directions back to the main ‘hub’ which provides more detailed information and access to the other ‘spokes’.  In a perfect world, each spoke would have a real, live person from that brand visibly responsible for the two way communication it engenders (like Frank Eliason at Comcast).

For individuals, lifestreaming solutions like posterous, tumblr and friendfeed (that aggregate content from blogs, social networking sites, bookmarking sites and uploaded material like youtube videos) are increasingly taking over from copy heavy blogs.  We are overwhelmed with content and don’t have time to read or view as much as we used to even 18 months ago. 

Microblogging seems to be a solution, with auto posting to a lifestream allowing content from all the spokes to be viewed in one place on the main hub. For brands and organisations, the problem comes when perhaps you don’t want a customer complaint or a campaign aimed at a specific niche audience reposted and plastered all over the home page of your website.

Which means that the central hub has (at least!) four jobs:

- demonstrating what the is organisation doing and thinking right now…
- …while being relevant to and appropriate for the person visiting and anticipating what their needs might be
- communicating appropriate and positive brand values
- providing company information and points of contact

With communication between brands and their users becoming ever more transparent, the role of PR in the online environment as omnipresent defender of corporate reputation is going to get ever more important.

posted by gemmaT