Have you checked the traffic to your corporate website of late? And if you have an online customer community or even an industry forum frequented by your customers - have you checked out the traffic to those sites? It is pretty clear that customers have a strong message for traditional corporate websites...

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff asks what does that mean for the traditional corporate websites:

- Does the brand site become the community?
- Does the brand site have a prominent link to the community? (Much like Dell)
- Does the brand site remain completely separate from the community?

I suspect that in the longer term there will be pressures to integrate social functionality seamlessly into corporate websites so that customers can remain in active mode - rather than having move to another part of a website to somehow switch from passive to active persona. Active mode will just be expected and will be "chips to play" for most brands. For strong brands with demanding interactive customers this will of course happen sooner rather than later.

However, it does raise some interesting questions of how you design websites for both informational and interactive/social requirements - without one requirement detracting from the other.