A mile and a half up the road from our office in London is an area - Borough - which has undergone huge investment over the last few years. There are plans for even greater development, including constructing the tallest building in Europe, the Shard of Glass, designed by the man who co-designed the Pompidou Centre, Renzo Piano.

A search on Google for Shard of Glass reveals some interesting things about how brands function online. There is an official site for the Shard of Glass, but it has the unintuitive name www.shardlondonbridge.com and is not to be found on the first page of results. The number one result is a website called www.shardofglass.co.uk. This is the unofficial website for the Shard of Glass, built by James Hatts, the man behind the local community site www.london-se1.co.uk, home of a thriving message board about local issues.

What else is on the Google front page? A spoof website about ice lollies that contain “shards o’ glass”, news coverage of the project’s announcement, a book called Shard of glass, a software company called Shard of Glass studios … you get the picture.

Why is the community site result number one?

• It has an intuitive url
  
• It benefits from a large number of contextual links including links from influential sites like dmoz
  

The community site is number one despite consisting of a news story and little other information. Why is that?

Well, let’s look at the official site. This contains beautiful panoramas of the site, location maps, statistics - a smorgasboard of relevant information.

BUT search engine crawlers see less than fifty words of this. Here are those words:

“Home A Vertical City Timeline Renzo Piano Image Gallery Development Team Contacts Information You need flash to view this. State-of-the-art office space Efficient, flexible floor plates from 14,456 sq ft (1343 m²) to 31,473 sq ft (2,921m²) to let. More info Truly mixed use A truly mixed use vertical city in one building. More info T&Cs Sitemap”

Notice the absence of the phrase “Shard of glass”. Notice the presence of the phrase “you need flash to view this”.

There is no interactivity in the official website, no fresh content, no reason for the crawlers to visit it. (The news page is as invisible as all the rest, and without syndication, noone else will be carrying its headlines). Its links are partly from professional partners and partly internal.

I do not write about this because this corporate site is particularly worse than any other websites. A search engine optimisation expert last week (the largest in the UK) informed us that only 3% of websites are accessible to the search engines. But the two Shard of glass websites neatly symbolise the problems with brand websites. They are too often invisible online because of poor design, and this weakens the underlying brand. The Shard clearly has a community of stakeholders which lives around it, is interested in it, part of which lives at http://www.london-se1.co.uk. If, during the lifetime of the project, there is a controversy about its development, or any issue on which it needs the support of its stakeholders, it has no links with them. It is marooned, isolated. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Shard and other brands, can reach out into their communities of stakeholders. To do so is not just good politics, it is good business.

It’s good to see the success of Kellogg’s new chat website to support their Drop a Jeans Size campaign.

Drop a Jeans Size - a smart name for what was the Special K diet - advocates a simple two-week diet where two meals a day are replaced with a bowl of Special K (in any of its varieties).

To support the campaign, the site uses online message boards and blogging groups to drive mutual support among dieters - and powerful word of mouth for the Special K diet.

Kellogg’s clearly understands its audience.

There are now nearly 1,000 postings in the public message boards alone, fuelled by a mostly female audience from around the country. The tone is familiar from message boards on sites such as handbag.com and ivillage; open, supportive and interactive, (though it’s a shame Kellogg’s have set up their boards in a way that doesn’t allow threads to be followed or commented on).

Perhaps the most innovative element is the fact that Kellogg’s appear to be using blogging to allow dieters to form small support groups, inviting friends to join them. A great idea for engaging the audience, offering a helpful support tool - oh, and it also spreads the word about the diet and the Kellogg’s site.

We are working with a customer in the automotive sector looking at commentary in both message boards and blogs. It has brought out some interesting characteristics of web users. The volume of commentary in blogs is somewhat lower, and that in message boards somewhat higher than we had anticipated.

I am not aware of any research which compares blog-writers with message board contributors. It seems to us that there are distinct contrasts. Bloggers tend to solitary, opinionated, contrarian, message board contributors are friendly, clubbable and consensus-seeking. Bloggers are cats and message board contributors are dogs. Not very scientific, I know. I am always quoting some Delahaye research which showed that 23% of blog comments are negative and only 11% of message board comments. Previously I had assumed that this was because of the nature of the conversation. The blog is a monologue (with interjections) and the message board is a dialogue, or even a public meeting. Now I am beginning to think the differences go deeper.

We will look for chapter and verse.