I recently went interstate to meet a potential client. Naturally, I had studied their website before the meeting – and had thus formed a preconception about the company based on what I saw online. But when I walked into their office and held a business meeting, I had a completely different experience. My first impression – the digital one – was at odds with the real-life one.

It’s not the first time this has happened. And it makes me think, “Why?”

Let’s face it. People are copycats. Particularly on the web – where it’s too easy to find a trend and say, “Let’s do it too”.

But by simply adopting the Next Big Thing for your website, without giving thought to how it will support your business, you run the risk of compromising the customer experience.

When it comes to your web content, you should be striving to achieve authenticity and consistency. These two factors are critical if you want to ensure the customer experience is seamless across the digital and non-digital channels.

Authenticity is achieved when you create content that truly belongs to your company. It’s content that supports business strategy and clearly links to the direction the company is taking. It breathes life into your brand and gives the visitor the sense that they have come ‘home’ to your organisation.

Consistency is critical to ensuring that the customer experience is the same whether they are browsing your website, walk through the doors of your organisation – or even pick up the phone.

These sound like simple strategies but, unfortunately, they’re often missed.

It takes work to ensure that the identity of your website matches the real-life identity of your business. Instead of relying on a junior web manager to add content wily-nily, just for the sake of adding content, you should elevate content strategy and development to a senior position on the corporate to-do list.

And you should constantly be asking yourself, “Whose website is this? Does it really belong with our company?”

Having also designed the 2010 report – which won awards and accolades for its bold design, and is discussed in more detail here – we wanted to take this year’s report to a new level of engagement and interaction.

The report’s home page features snippets of the most compelling stats and quotes from the report.

As you scroll down the page, more and more snippets appear – cementing the notion that Stockland has a plethora of positive outcomes to report upon.

The report’s flexible structure works on any browser, including iPads and iPhones.

We congratulate Stockland for winning the best sustainability report for the property sector at the ACCA Sustainability Reporting Awards 2011 for last year’s CR&S report – and we wait with bated breath to see if this year’s report is similarly lauded.

Huh? Connection, please!

Well, to help promote the “Cheeky Check-Up” Facebook page – launched by Cancer Australia for the early detection of breast cancer amongst young women – the team at Bienalto got our creative thinking hats on.

We came up with a fun, interactive game that taps into people’s happy memories of playing with fuzzy felt as a kid – and resonates with 2011’s trend for hip 20-somethings to get crafty.

More importantly, it encourages young women to get to know their look and feel, so that checking themselves for signs of breast cancer becomes second nature.

Called “Felt Yourself”, it’s a fashionista’s avatar game based on the idea of fuzzy felt, where players can choose different personal features, clothes and accessories to create a Facebook avatar.

Each section of the game prompts a different breast awareness message. The player can post their avatar as their profile pic, encouraging peer-to-peer engagement and further dissemination of the message.

The “Cheeky Check-Up” campaign was created by Cancer Australia after research found that younger women are less confident than older women about their ability to detect a breast change. The Facebook page contains information about breast changes, a breast awareness quiz (which can be ‘shared’ with Facebook friends), online videos of TV community service announcements, and a Cheeky Check-Up reminder (Nudge).

Since the launch of the Cheeky Check-Up Facebook page, over 26,000 active users have been recorded and almost 8,000 breast awareness surveys have been downloaded and completed.

Bienalto encourages all young women to join in the fun on Facebook, and help to spread this very important message.