Are web pages the new TV and phone?

According to Jason Fry writing in the Wall Street Journal, those inventions of the past – regarded in their generation as curiosities, in later generations as necessities – walked the well trodden path personal web pages will in the future.

Why? Two reasons, really. Personal web pages:

1. Allow others to find you online. Once they find you, web pages allow you to share with others the level of information you feel comfortable.
2. Brand you the way you want to be branded.

It’s the second point that is crucial to businesses. Defending and defining your identity online is often a neglected priority. Owners and key decision makers rationalize the choice by noting “it takes too much time,” “it’s too complicated,” or “the person who did it left and I don’t know how.” My personal favorite is, “I used to have a good website, but I didn’t update it and now it’s all out of date again.”

“The Internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too.” – Curt Monash

We think about web pages as a way to buy and sell goods and services, web pages as a source of information, and web pages as a way to “get our name out there.” We think of web pages as some static text in a pretty wrapper.

But we forget the day of the paper pamphlet is over. Information is evolving, it’s dynamic. Web pages are living, breathing representations of our missions in the world. As soon as a person hears your name, they can use Google to find out what you stand for — good and bad, true and untrue.

Try it now — go to Google and type in “[your name].”

Now type “[your company name] sucks.”

What happens?

Many people may find that troubling. Our age is marked by worries about too much information floating around too freely — some of us want as little to do with the digital world as possible, and most of us who feel differently still sometimes wish we could keep that world’s tentacles at bay. Given that, it’s off-putting to imagine that having a Web page could become an expectation and a near-necessity. But technology and the social changes it ushers in have always been coercive. We’ll get used to the idea, just as we’ve gotten used to all the ones that preceded it, and soon enough we’ll be able to tell a lot about a person by, say, the mere formatting of their home page — including if they made it themselves or had the communications company do it for them. Whether we like it or not, it’s too late to cram the personal-information genie back into his bottle. Better to make sure he serves us.

What does your online identity say about your company? What does it say about you?