There is plenty of advice online and success stories about large corporations using social media. If you are like me and are a small business owner, you likely don’t have a team of 100+ employees to go through all of the social media channels and monitor, tweet, post, etc. You could hire a social media company to help you with this if you are promoting a consumer product or service. Then again you could spend an hour a week promoting your business yourself. Either way, what does this mean for your website?

My friends over at Sano Agency, a social media company, say your “Website is Dead.” They no longer see a website as a viable way to market. I agree with them, but I wouldn’t throw out your website. I would just come to conclusion that built-it-and-they-will-come principle is dead. Your website needs to be alive and it can be alive with all of the other marketing efforts you are doing and provide real ways for clients to get in touch, interact, and buy.

I am a huge fan of WordPress, in fact this blog is running on that platform. The power of WordPress or any other CMS platform like Drupal, Joomla, or .NetNuke is that they let you connect your site with social media. They let you engage the larger web community rather than having your site as a castle on a remote island. They do this by allowing third party plugins or programs to be added to your site that allow you show your engagement in the social media world. You can show your tweets for quick updates, use your LinkedIn profile as an about us page, provide opportunities for people become fans of your business on Facebook, and show photographs of networking events and projects on Picasa or Flickr.

Further these engines allow you to promote changes to your site such as press releases, blog posts, and events to the social media networks and search engines.

Next time you review your website, ask yourself some honest questions. Is it a place I would want to hang out, explore, & find out more? Or is it dead?