Through a great exchange over Twitter and his Blog, Dirk Shaw revives a concept that I’ve been harboring over the past year: how important it is to bring some element of social networking activity back to the brand home site.

Whether it’s a blog, B2B, B2C, or your basic brand hub, it pays to bring these elements back in for many of the same reasons that the social network platforms are doing so well:

Your site: in the context of people

One of the major elements of social media is that it is blending people and technology at the interface level. To me, it’s a societal backlash from decades of corporate-era computerization-as-efficiency-builder. Starting with data centers, then mainframes, then PCs, and moving towards ubiquitous computing, this blend of people as machine-operators is only going to become more important.

MyBlogLog is an early example, along with site reviews on Amazon. Putting product on a site used to be good enough. Now you need to start creating a strategy to bring that product or service within the context of the people who are more apt to use it.

Of course, many companies will say that they can’t do this, that there’s not enough interest, or that their product wouldn’t get the attention to drive social interaction. There’s an answer to this too:

Adding your people to the page

What if we completely disregard the apparently high-minded notion that people will want to see and be seen around product or service. What about the basic element of putting a picture and a small bit of text of the person or people responsible for bringing that ite to the page people are viewing?

I talk about this at length in the Bring Twitter Back Home article, but the basic gist is how poerful of a sales tool it is to add the “Why” in the context of people on the page. Why did the buyer pick this product to sell over another? Why did the designer lay out the page like this? Why did the writer choose these words to depict the product. These are perceptually personal insights that provide users with dynamic reasons to add the product to the cart they may not have ever considered. This isn’t earned media at all, but it walks and talks like it, and may be a way to catalize engagement or test the potential.

Of course, this doesn’t even touch the concept of people doing your distributed content marketing for you. Curious what you think about the topic, as it seems to me a crucial element of increasing sales today, and surviving tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. Boosting Loyalty By Integrating Social and CRM
2. The Brand Cause: Focusing Social Media Strategy
3. Social Media User Experience: Is it the Contrast?
4. Four Critical Social Media Readiness Questions to Ask First