I've been building websites since 1994. Back then I built an e-commerce store that made real money, a real estate site that did a good job marketing properties, and a directory of local resources. For nearly 15 years I continued to build the same kinds of sites which are basically silos of information that somewhat mirrored the model of old media which is one way communication. Essentially websites were considered extensions of traditional marketing. While this is still the predominant mode on the web for small businesses and non-profit organizations, the web has been undergoing a paradigm shift in the last few years that was initially called Web 2.0 and is now more generally referred to as Social Media.

You would have to be living in a cave not to have heard all the talk about Social Media. Many Tech Beat articles have covered different aspects of the trend. But basically it comes down to tools that make it easy for anyone to create content on the web and the resulting explosion of that content from videos, to blogs to Facebook pages and Twitter comments. I think even cave people have their own social network.

So what does this mean for your website? The mantra for years among Internet marketers has been “Content is King.” That is, providing lots of relevant, timely, useful content will give site visitors a reason to visit your site. The great content will also improve your site's results in searches at Google, Bing and other search engines because their robots will visit your site more often and gobble up all that content to add to the keywords associated with your site. I still think this is true, and will continue to be true for quite some time. But now, with everyone participating in conversations on the web, I believe a new prince is riding up to your website and you should lower the drawbridge. That prince's name? Everyone.

OK, enough with the cliché metaphors, I promise. But the image is still apt. Most of our websites are still castles of one-way of communication. What I am suggesting is that websites will need to open themselves up to visitors and allow them to contribute content through comments, discussions, images and videos. The conversation about your organization and your brand should not be taking place only on social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. And when they do you should be thinking about how you might incorporate those conversations in to your site. What I am suggesting is that your website could become a platform for streams of activity and not all of it created by you. Content that you or others create on your site should get posted to selected social media sites. And content being generated on various social media sites should be pulled in to your site to add to the dynamic quality of your home on the web.

It may sound like a great deal of work, especially since many website owners want to build a site and forget about it. But with the proper web applications much of this interactive content sharing can be automated. For example, we build sites most often using an open source content management system called Drupal. This application is very powerful at its core, and offers over 4,000 community built modules that can be added to increase your site's functionality. Many of these modules are specifically designed to make it easy for people to participate in creating content for your site. There are modules that allow people to create accounts on your site using their existing Facebook identities, there are modules that automatically post selected new content to Twitter and other social media sites. There are modules that automatically pull content from Twitter, Facebook and other sources into your site. I'm sure other systems can do similar magic. We especially like Drupal because it's easy to build new functionality and the developer community is very responsive to innovations. For example, only a couple weeks after Google announced their new social media tool Buzz, a new module was posted on the Drupal site that interacts with Buzz.

So, the technical side of this new paradigm of interaction and dynamic content for websites is not a problem. The problem is us as website owners learning to embrace this concept and to use it to our advantage. I must admit at our company we have not yet figured out the best way to make this happen. If you visit our site there is limited use of these tools. But we are working on it because we know that this user generated content and participation is not going to go away and we would rather flow with the current than fight it.

If you would like to learn more about the currents of technology visit the Redwood Technology Consortium, consider becoming a member, get on the mailing list, and join us at our events.

Bob Morse is owner of Morse Media, a web development company in Eureka, CA and is on the Board of the Redwood Technology Consortium.

Copyright 2010, Eureka Times-Standard Newspaper. The print version of this article first appeared in the 4/8/10 edition of the Times-Standard.