By definition it may seem that the answer to this question is yes. It’s simple. A user starts a web browser, enters your company’s domain name, and your website appears. You have hopefully spent some time thinking about those users, but making sure your site is connected to the web means more than viewing your site in a web browser.

Search Engines
The most obvious example is search engines. Companies write software called “Spiders” that visit your site and ask for every page. You have probably invested some money into “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. One goal of SEO is to make it easy for the spider to find, prioritize and index the important content on your site. This is accomplished by improving the HTML code behind your web pages.

HTML is one language of the web, but a more powerful language is XML. For instance, to optimize your site for the Google spider you can add an XML sitemap file to the root of your website. This tells the spider where to find content, what content is important, and when content has changed.

XML can take different forms and that’s where it gets interesting.

Feed Readers
Many people read their favorite sites without ever opening a web browser. Instead they use a Feed Reader.

Many websites offer their content in XML formats called “Real Simple Syndication (RSS)” or “Atom Syndication Format (ATOM)”. A feed reader, which may look like an email application, checks your site for updates and sends the information back to the user. Internet Explorer 7 has a feed reader built-in and you will notice in the screenshot below that the content of the Elexicon blog looks very different in the IE feed reader.

Mashups
As soon as you provide an XML feed, other websites can combine your content with other sources to create a new experience. The richness of your data enables unforseen value as others start to piece it together with additional web resources. Here are some examples:

Widgets: A web feed allows users to put your information on their site. This is great for SEO and for your user. If your company has a dealer network, each dealer site could host your news widget and drive traffic to your site while adding value to theirs. In the screenshot below, you can see a simple widget displaying the Elexicon blog feed on my Google home page.

Geocoding: If your data has a geographic connection you can include the latitude and longitude. Many digital cameras will geocode and timestamp every photo when it is taken. If you upload your photos to the Flickr website, then sites like flickrvision can combine the Flickr feed with a map and you get a fascinating worldwide photo tour in real-time.

Aggregation: Others may chose to load your data and analyze it for patterns and trends. For instance, Twitscoop reads all the words from the microblogging site, Twitter, and creates a real-time tag cloud revealing the most popular topics of conversation on the web at any given moment.

Here is a Mapdango map of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which pulls together weather, events, photos, history and more.

Sites like technorati are trolling for content and if your information is tagged properly, it will likely be included.

Visualization: Besides aggregation, advanced visualization is another trend. Software is used to analyze data and create new ways of seeing things. SpatialKey is a new company doing some nice work in this area.

Application Programming Interface (API)
Another level of web integration is providing an API. An API allows others to develop even more robust web applications with your data. It will be easier to do business with you and it will offer valuable exposure for your company. A great example of this is the UPS API which provides information about a package in an XML format. Web users have used the API to create multiple ways to track packages, by map, IM via Twitter, and more.

What you can do
It is not enough to think only of people visiting your site with a web browser. You need to think about what rich information you can provide to the web. Organizing your data will benefit your company and you may be surprised what it inspires in the web community. There’s a lot going on; just look at the full spectrum of sites in this analysis dubbed The Conversation Prism.

I really, really like State Farm Insurance’s new “Intersections” television advertising campaign featuring customers describing their situation in life (new father, father whose daughter just got driver’s license, etc.) while standing on a big red “spot.” Kind of like if you zoomed in on one of those maps with a big “You Are Here” spot to find that, well, there you are at the crossroads.

I’ll bet a focus group or survey would reveal that just about everyone picks up on the fact that the elliptical shape of the red spot matches the ovals in the State Farm logo. And to top it off, the “I’m there” slogan is a wonderfully minimalist update of the 65-year old company’s “Like A Good Neighbor State Farm Is There” classic jingle.

Finally something clever as opposed to the clichéd, sappy, over-the-top, or patronizing approaches from the relentlessly pervasive advertising for the FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) industries.

More background and info: State Farm web site. (Doesn’t look like the campaign has found its way online except for this press announcement, unfortunately. There’s lots of potential…)

McDonald’s has so many billboards and such a well-known brand that it is not much of a risk for them to have some fun with the medium.  Gizmodo pointed out a new McDonald’s billboard outside Chicago that functions as a sundial. 

Billboards can be an eyesore, but this is a novel approach that apparently was dreamed up by the Leo Burnett agency.  I guess they had to search high and low to find a billboard location with just the right orientation.