“You have to move on from the term ‘content’ because it’s coming to an end,” chief commercial officer at Dazed Group Will Hayward, said at this morning’s Social Media Week opening session. He said the bubble supporting the ginormous amounts of content being foisted upon the public is about to pop. What communicators should be doing, he says, is create something that “Makes a difference, don’t just jump on the latest bandwagon.”

Following his insights on the development of content was a case in which branded content and owned media have converged in a unique way. Nescafé announced that its brand website is now run on the Tumblr platform.

“We wanted to move away from a static website,” says Michael Chrisment, head of global integrated marketing, digital and media for Nescafé. The brand wanted to be able to adapt its website, make it more responsive and appeal to young people. Thus, the coffee purveyor began working with Tumblr to create a new kind of website.

Tumblr works with brands already in a business context, though most create custom Tumblr sites for specific campaigns or to reach specific audiences. Nescafé’s new website is the brand’s sole online portal and will be launched in 60 markets. Pete Blackshaw, global head of digital and social media for Nescafé parent company Nestlé, says, “Websites are not dead.” He says the company has viewed the reimagined site as a way to distribute content and to engage with offline consumers. It’s no longer just a destination.

Search has made most homepages irrelevant, but ensuring that a website and its content is fully optimised for search is not an easy task. The integration with Tumblr makes it relatively easy, Armand Khatri, brand strategist for the platform, says. All of the social engagements generated through the site are also indexed by search engines. As Tumblr is owned by Yahoo, SEO is at the forefront of its approach to brand websites. This partnership also means an older audience is finding its way to Tumblr. In 2013, half of Tumblr users were under 25, that has risen to 35. Khatri says, “Think of Tumblr not just as a social network but as an architecture on which to build.”

Blackshaw points out that 90% of Nescafé’s audience uses mobile and the brand is shifting to appeal to a younger audience, in general. Tumblr also ranks coffee as one of the top five topics in food and drink on the platform and Chrisment says Nescafé wants its site to be the destination for conversations about coffee. It also wants to ensure its content is not only seen, but shared across all social platforms. By building social media directly into the fabric of the brand’s website, it is enabling a much easier user journey from consuming content to engaging with it. The only problem with that, Chrisment says, is, “You need to feed the beast.” Content must be continuously updated. Tumblr’s flexibility will only help with that.

It will be interesting to see what Tumblr’s future is as a web development platform open for use by brands. Nescafe.com will make for an interesting test into its functionality for use by a large, global organisation. It requires, as Blackshaw says, a bit more than an “Add water and stir” approach, but the social brand website may be the start of something new.