Marketing and the distributed web

Paul Dunay’s recent post, Marketing Needs to Prepare for the Distributed Web, succinctly heralds the sea change from silos of online marketing technology and content to a far more open model. He gives examples of wikis, blogs, widgets, social networks, and other syndicated content that now live beyond the borders of a company’s primary web site.

“If Marketing has become, or is in the midst of becoming, more distributed, then we must prepare to become more distributed in areas like content and measurement. Marketing needs to be ready to start measuring outside of its platform (i.e., its own web site and subdomains).”

This idea is near and dear to my heart, as my company’s focus on post-click marketing has been rallying for marketers to think beyond the web site for several years now. We’ve witnessed a tremendous surge in energy from marketers in this direction over the past six months.

I’d add that the growing drumbeat of the semantic web may very well be the final catalyst for an explosion of rich online marketing that is intentionally designed to take wings beyond the borders of the circa-1990s corporate web site.

Managing, tracking, and optimizing it all is going to be one of the great challenges for marketing technology vendors and professionals over the years ahead. And as Dunay points out, that’s going to require a little more than Google + WebTrends + email databases.