The days of the monolithic corporate website are numbered.

Twentieth century corporate structures, which, to borrow sentiment, if not words from Lee Bryant, put the World's window upon your organisation in the hands of the IT guys in the basement and the marketing department are crumbling under the weight of peer-to-peer recommendations and reviews, consumers tweeting about their experiences, audiences creating their own groups on facebook, and outraged citizens discussing the expense claims of MPs on blogs.

Increasingly, if someone wants to find out more about you or your brand they'll seek out the  honest, authentic views being shared by their friends and others online rather than visiting a corporate propaganda site.

The only people who visit your website are people who already know about your ideas, products or service. What it doesn't do is reach out to new audiences who don't know about you. In the current financial climate, it makes more sense than ever to scale back the effort put into creating a traditional, silo like web presence and start thinking about using the whole web as your canvas.

Many social networking services and content sharing sites have large audiences generating, sharing and consuming content and ideas. They're going to be discussing your brand, or at least content related to what your organisation is doing, whether you're there or not. It's far better to know what they're saying, and to respond appropriately, rather than to simply ignore it in the hope that the people you're trying to target with your message won't find it themselves. Instead, you need to make sure that your message is out there on the services that people are using, and that you're there listening and engaging.

We're always on the look-out for good examples of organisations using this technique and here are a few of my favourites:

Mara Triangle: Joseph Kimojino and the other Rangers working in the Mara Triangle, the North-Western part of the Masai Mara game reserve in Kenya, have their work cut out for them. They use twitter to thank contributors, provide updates on a ranger who was shot by poachers and offer details of successful anti-poaching operations. They post videos, like this one of crocodiles tearing apart a zebra, on video sharing services to reach out to users there. Their photographs, which often include beautiful scenes of wildlife in their natural habitat, get hundreds of views on flickr - and are always linked back to their website for those who want to learn more. You'll also find Joe and friends on facebook, friendfeed and elsewhere online - not just posting content but also responding to questions and engaging with supporters.

Do the Green Thing: Built by Headshift, Do the Green Thing helps people learn how they can take small, but significant, actions to live a greener lifestyle. Instead of loading their site with content, they push content out via iTunes, youtube, flickr and twitter (where they have nearly 4000 followers). This not only saves Green Thing having to build the infrastructure necessary to host and distribute the content themselves, it also helps them more quickly build an audience. They've also got a clever facebook application that offers users the opportunity to pledge to make a behavioural change and, when they do, displays this to their friends via an update on their activity feed.

Using the whole web as your canvas requires, primarily, a shift in the way you think about your web presence. Control will need to shift away from the IT and marketing departments, and into the hands of the people within your organisation who have been hired for specific product or service roles based upon their experience, knowledge and creativity. You trust them to do the work behind your brand so it's not that big a leap of faith to help them step out and start representing it.

But all this takes careful planning, training and support. Before going out on the web and participating, it's important to learn where to find the relevant audiences and understand the social norms and expectations of users. Your participation will need to be open, honest and authentic - which aren't things everyone will instinctively know how to do, so training and guidance will be required. You'll also need to monitor and react, where appropriate, to the conversations your organisation tries to become a part of.

Demote your corporate website and make it's primary role that of aggregating your organisation's distributed web presence - something to link your efforts on third party websites and services back to once you've captured their attention. Your corporate website may be less relevant - even invisible to many - but your target audience, but if you're able to spread your message more widely around the web, your organisation can thrive.

And the next step, moving forward? Harnessing the collective intelligence of your audience by getting them involved in the co-creation of your offering. Get in touch to learn more about how Headshift is helping a number of clients do exactly that.