Creating a buzz about your product or service that turns out to be a bummer experience for those that visit your site “high” based on what they read about your company on a social networking site is the equivalent of a buzz kill. The experience leaves a bad taste that lingers. They won’t be coming back and more than likely the end result of the less than 5 seconds they spent on your site will have lasting negative impact.

The moral of the story is that businesses need to invest in developing and optimizing their web site properties and assets before plunking down a lot of time and resources on social media. Social media should reinforce your SEO and Web site efforts not lead the way. Most small business web sites today have barely gotten up to Web 1.0 standards and now are faced with getting up to speed with Web 2.0 which is now considered passé.

Having a Web 2.0 and beyond web site requires infrastructure changes not cosmetic updates to layout and graphics. A competitive business web site today needs to have superior navigation, search, interaction and content that are developed via usability and conversion research and development. This involves creating a process for update and development of your site or application that identifies and tracks your key metrics for providing a user experience that gets better over time. In order to do that effectively, web site owners need to define and segment their user populations based on their industry. For instance financial versus health oriented sites will have different user populations unique to their products and services. Once identified and tracked, their user experience can be optimized for their specific needs, preferences and behaviors.