When someone hears your company’s name, they type it into a search box. What comes back is the first meeting. It happens before the call, before the deck, before anyone from your side is in the room. A company with no footprint does not get the call. That part of the standard advice is right. The part that usually follows — be everywhere — is not.
Absent is bad. Stale is worse.
A company with no site is a rumour. A company with a LinkedIn page last touched two years ago, a blog whose newest post announces a product that no longer exists, and a social account that still says “coming soon” is something worse than a rumour: it is proof that nobody is home. Every surface you open is a promise to keep it current. Most companies open five and keep one. The four stale ones do the talking.
What a footprint is for
It answers three questions. Are they real? What do they do? How do I reach them? A footprint that answers those three, correctly, from any device, is complete. Everything beyond that is optional, and optional things need a reason to exist.
Ours, by what it is not
The sculptor’s rule applies to the footprint as much as to the product. Vazio Esculpido’s is one domain. On it: one page that answers the three questions, this blog, and links to the products, which have sites of their own. Google knew four pages of ours when we checked this week. This post makes five. That is the whole thing, and all of it is correct.
There is no analytics script and no cookie banner. We do not know how many people read this, and we do not need to. A footprint is what people can find about you, not what you collect about them. The site loads its typeface from our own server rather than a US font service, for the same reason: a visitor from the EU should not hand their address to a third party in order to read a page.
The studio has opened no channel it cannot keep alive. Where a product’s buyers live on a network — Konstkontoret’s do, in Sweden — the product goes there. The studio itself does not need an account to be found.
There is a client section on our home page, built, styled and wired to EchoNext. It is switched off, because the wall behind it has no approved testimonials yet. It goes live at two. An empty wall says less than no wall.
There is no newsletter. This blog has three posts. A subscribe box would be a promise made before there is anything to send.
Keep it true
A small footprint is only an advantage if it is maintained. Ours is a page, a blog updated roughly monthly, the product sites, and an address that is answered. When something on it stops being true, it comes down. It does not wait for the next redesign.
That is the whole method. Have a footprint. Make it small enough to keep true. Then keep it true.