Saxum|PR

Social Media Integration − Where PR meets Web design

January 8th, 2010 by Nick Sayre. Posted in Industry Expertise, News

For years, Maxus Creative has offered Web design services that elevated the online presence of its clients. Some clients had a dated Web site that hurt their credibility, or worse, they had no Web site at all. Thankfully, we were always there to kick things off in a positive direction.

But times have changed, and so has the Web.

More and more organizations are realizing the power of inviting their target audiences to a two-way conversation. That’s what social media is all about. We realized the need, as well, so we did our research, found the best options and got to work. When we took a fresh look at the Saxum Public Relations site, we decided to integrate our social media and design objectives. Public relations and Web design are meeting in the middle. It’s called social media integration.

The previous Web site played a small role in our social media strategy. It was a one-way communication outlet. The first step in solving the problem was to identify which social media outlets to integrate into the site. That was easy. Saxum has already determined which social media channels were a good investment of our resources. With that in mind, we began to integrate those channels.

We opted for WordPress as a content management system (CMS) because we wanted to integrate Renzi’s blog into our site. WordPress had an established reputation for blogging, but now it is fully capable of publishing and maintaining an entire Web site. And now our blog is on our own domain, which is a big help in findability. We created user accounts for our team members and developed a plan for them to contribute to the site. Pretty cool.

We implemented a Twitter feed on the site by modifying Twitter’s own widget. This allows additional visibility to the microblogging channel in which we are already investing. That was the goal, right? We also added the option for visitors to communicate directly with our team through online forms, such as “Getting Started.” This goes back to our idea of initiating a two-way conversation; visitors can respond to the Web site.

We’re always looking out for better ways to make the Web and our social media efforts work together, so you can bet new features will be added to the site as we go.