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By now, most companies have got a pretty good handle on what happens on their website.\u00a0 At the very least, they use a tool like Google Analytics or the simple and easy StatCounter to track total visits, referring URLs, visitor paths and time-spent-on-site.\u00a0 It’s intriguing and fun to see where people are coming from and what they’re doing.\u00a0 It’s also increasingly irrelevant.<\/p>\n
The website as we know it is becoming a relic of the first 15 years of the Internet.\u00a0 Sure, websites will always be important, but the action that takes place around a company, brand or individual is moving into a complex web of stateless conversations.\u00a0 Some of these take place on corporate websites, but many of them don\u2019t.\u00a0 Consider Facebook, whose 200 million members are the world’s largest ready-made audience.\u00a0 Some brands have more active communities of customers on Facebook than they do on their own websites.\u00a0 In fact, their own websites may not even enable community at all.\u00a0 Perception of their brand is defined in a community that they host but can\u2019t control.<\/p>\n
Our personal activities now take place in many locations.\u00a0 Look at Twitter, for example.\u00a0 While there\u2019s a Twitter website, conversations take place in the ether. People who use TweetDeck, Twhirl<\/a>, TwInbox<\/a> or one of the other dedicated Twitter clients may never visit the Twitter website. In fact, the Twitter feed may easily be displayed on any website you like.<\/p>\n Steve Rubel, a public relations social media visionary whom I profiled in New Influencers<\/em>, recently announced that he’s abandoning his blog in favor of a lifestream<\/a>. Steve is at the extreme edge of social media activity, so his experience isn\u2019t typical, but I think his point bears considering.\u00a0 He\u2019s saying that the action now takes place in so many nooks and crannies of the Internet that a website is, at best, a place to pull them all together.\u00a0 Our own activities are too expansive to be confined to one place.<\/p>\n This presents some immediate problems.\u00a0 It seems that just as we’ve succeeded in getting a pretty good handle on what happens on our websites, the action has moved elsewhere.\u00a0 In many cases, we have no insight into what’s happening there. Facebook, for example, offers only rudimentary reporting on activity within its profiles and forims. There is simply no way to determine how many people have seen a message on Twitter. Sites like Flickr, YouTube or SlideShare can tell you how many people have watched your presentation or video but not where they came from or how long they spent there. Our window on online activity around our brand is actually becoming more opaque with time.<\/p>\n Does this mean websites are dead? No, but they are changing. The website\u2019s role will increasingly be to present a persons or organization\u2019s view of things in hopes of enticing conversations back to that controllable and measurable forum.\u00a0 It will be the home base for everything we do online, kind of our own organizational lifestream. But marketers must face the new reality that online success has many faces, even if we can’t measure all of them very well.<\/p>\n This also means that businesses should take a new look at hosting their own communities.\u00a0 Facebook is training wheels for the bigger goal of building branded communities that become the primary destination for customers and business partners.\u00a0 If you can build and measure those, you can gain a lot more insight about what motivates customers.\u00a0 If you can’t, well, try to send people back to your trusty old website for your point of view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now, most companies have got a pretty good handle on what happens on their website.\u00a0 At the very least, they use a tool like Google Analytics or the simple and easy StatCounter to track total visits, referring URLs, visitor … Continue reading Not Dead Yet<\/h3>\n