Blogcritics received an e-mail yesterday from Aneisha Howard, public relations director for Lisa P. Maxwell. As she wrote, this "small creative agency based in Chicago, IL, recently launched a new web site. We feel that the site will be unlike anything you have ever seen and that it has the capabilities of changing the way companies interact with consumers.
"The Lisa P. Maxwell web site has live streaming video of all its 30 employees and allows visitors to chat with the employees in real time. The site strips down the content that takes over most agency sites and replaces it with the company’s most valued assets, the employees.
"This technology has the opportunity to not only change corporate web sites within the advertising and public relations worlds but change the way all web sites go about connecting with their visitors."
Radical concept. However, as with all radical concepts, technological or not, one needs to test them well before making them public.
The site itself is almost stark, a light blue-grey background with the pictures of the thirty employees displayed. Other than that, there are three links.
The first is WTF, whatever that stands for, which is a brief hype on the agency, which highlights making clients famous fast. "This site is a live case study in viral marketing – not, as is the case with most agency sites, a repository of irrelevant content that promises more of the same."
The second is a list of senior people one can e-mail, and the third is an interesting but not very helpful group of attributes they want in new employees, without a job listing.
But the revolutionary part of the site are the live feeds of people with whom one can chat. As one runs a cursor over the pictures, those highlighted in green are available. Those highlighted in brown are not.
Conspicuously absent from the site were a list of clients, a profile of work done, or even awards won. While these are apparently old tech, they are a simple way to let people quickly review an agency's capabilities.
Worse was the experience of trying to learn something about the company from the people available for chat, although most of senior people were in orange.
Purely by happenstance, the PR director, Ms. Howard, was the first person with whom I chatted. The verbatim transcript, with my internal comments in italics, follows:
mark has requested a chat.
Aneisha: Hi Mark!
mark: Hi Aneisha, saw an e-m from your boss on BlogCritics.com & thought I'd check out the site.
mark: How well has it been working?
Aneisha: Very cool, thanks so much for stopping by, what do you think?
Aneisha: It's been great, we've had a great response so far!
mark: How are potential clients reacting…is it easier to get your foot in the door?
Aneisha: Yes, much! We've had prospects from all across the country contact us. They can see we're creative instead of us just claiming we are!
mark: As the former head of the DC office of Ketchum PR, I've got more than a casual interest in your approach. How do you show you're creative? There's so little content on the site other than pictures.
Aneisha: Our clients, prospects and media have loved our approach. Typically all agency sites take the same approach. We're showing ultimate transparency
mark: I'm going to be a bit pushy here, if you don't mind. I still don't understand how you demonstrate creativity. I didn't even know your job title until I clicked on your name. Do you have the ability to show me products & programs you've run?
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