Recently, I went to a day-long seminar called wwww.dc to learn about business-to-consumer site design. There must be lessons, I imagined, we could learn about marketing to businesses that are born from consumer marketing. My hunch was confirmed. Here’s what I took away:

A Baseline Measure

The exponential growth of the Web is sobering. In 1997, there were only 100,000 sites. By 2006, over 100,000,000 sites were active, with three to four thousand going online each month. In other words, every 48 seconds a new site goes online. That dramatic explosion has changed the way consumer product and service companies approach their sites.

Build Community (Maybe)

The buzz from nearly every speaker was about building an online community on their sites. In particular, we learned washingtonpost.com creates and sustains a community by:

• Creating live online forums that bring readers of The Washington Post into active, daily contact with the site
• Updating blogs at least once a day
• Being considerate of others by using software filters to shut down offensive language
• Sending out reporters with digital cameras to augment their stories with images that create a more intimate relationship between the reporter or writer and the subject.

What’s the lesson for you?
The only “community” that’s likely to be built on a professional service site is around a blog that keeps visitors up-to-date with changes in narrowly focused fields. In those fields, live, online forums can be winners. But aim for monthly updates, not daily. And, of course, those forums must be advertised online, via email and through traditional channels.

Take another tip from washingtonpost.com and use that digital camera you bought last year. Professional photographers are not required for every assignment. The Internet has become very forgiving of non-professional photography (Thank you, YouTube). And “non-professional” cameras are delivering better and better images.

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