A recent article in Ad Age highlighted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' first foray into leveraging social media for this year's Oscars. (The Grammy's also integrated social media in their awards last month; Mashable wrote a story on it.) The Academy is executing what seems to be a few really on-strategy initiatives to build interest and involvement prior to, during, and after the broadcast, including seeing how your predictions stack up against the community. They also have a Facebook page where fans can interact and check out behind-the-scenes photos and videos. (Of course try using Facebook search to find the page. Just try.)
It seems like they are taking the right steps and thinking strategically about how to initiate a social media presence. And they launched a new website to accompany their social media strategy. However, in the Ad Age article, David Berkowitz of 360i makes an interesting point: "Right now their site seems stuck in a time when the web was a lot less social." He notes that the Facebook page is a fantastic social experience, but that their newly-launched website is quite static.
Along with my colleagues at Goodman&Company, I just completed a website strategy for a leading global business software company. The initiative is focused on the company's website (as opposed to other web properties, like social media platforms), and the strategy we developed is very progressive and innovative. I won't characterize it as "web 1.0" or "web 2.0" or "social". It simply supports the goals users bring with them to the site and enables the types of interactions in which buyers of complex enterprise software engage.
If you are in charge of identifying potential software vendors and ultimately for recommending a particular vendor on behalf of your company, you are going to be doing research on various software options and the companies that make the software, comparison shopping among vendors, exploring costs, talking with peers both in and outside of your company, presenting to upper management, collecting the input from colleagues, etc. The web can play a role in all of these interactions at some level. Building full capabilities against all of these interactions would be a very 1998 thing to do. We recognize that some of these interaction can be facilitated online, some can be supported online, and some can be enabled online. We also recognize that what various users need to accomplish vary by such factors as seniority, role, industry, need, context, and buying stage. But that's not the point.
The point is that the company's website itself - and any company's website - can and should be a place for interaction among various audiences to take place. Facebook and Twitter cannot be the only place that "social" happens. If you make social interaction a key tenant of your user experience strategy and bake it into the site's DNA, it will amplify all of your social media efforts (not to mention drive customer engagement). And it's not about inventing yet another place where someone has to create a new profile and a new social graph. You can leverage existing social networks and embed them into your site experience by leveraging OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc.
Most people separate social media from the web, as if the web wasn't social from it's inception. The web was founded on social principles. Don't forget your website when building a social strategy.