Is the Corporate Website Obsolete?

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Here's the problem: As a result of changing online behavior, most corporate Websites today are becoming increasingly irrelevant, if not completely obsolete. Through the use of search and social media, buyers are doing more research and self-education online, sometimes without even visiting the corporate Website. Instead of being the "authoritative voice" of the company, the corporate site is now simply one of many sources of information -- and it is often viewed as the least credible source on a company's products, services, and reputation.

Here are three reasons why your corporate Website may be obsolete and the role of IT leaders in charting a course for the future. Evaluate your corporate Web strategy based the following three parameters, and you'll get a much better indication of where your company stands.

1. Informational versus conversational sites. When corporate Websites first emerged almost 20 years ago, they were patterned after an informational model: The company publishes information, and the visitor consumes information. Although many corporate sites have been written and rewritten several times, in many cases this conceptual pattern has changed little or not at all.

The best corporate Websites progress along an engagement continuum, moving from informational to transactional to conversational. In this new, emerging, social Web, visitors are not simply seeking information, they are looking to converse and interact. An effective corporate Web presence must allow them to do so.

2. Centralized versus distributed Web presence. If your company's Web presence is centered around the corporate Website with some social media activity thrown in, you might still consider it in grave danger of obsolescence. As the Web interaction model moves from informational to conversational, a "heavy" centralized Web presence like a corporate Website becomes increasingly irrelevant. Unstructured conversations about your company are instead taking place in diverse, socially networked destinations such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube.

The answer is not to fight this move to a decentralized, distributed Web presence. Instead, build a Web presence that leverages integrated social objects. Your corporate Web presence will become an integrated mashup of socially networked videos, photos, articles, and other relevant content. It's lightweight, flexible, and interactive, and above all it's consistently relevant and informative.

3. Static, generalized content versus dynamic, personalized content. First-generation corporate sites offered static content because static HTML was the state of the art in the 1990s. Since then, many have added the use of DHTML, Flash, and Ajax to create a more compelling user experience. However, this still falls short of the modern version of an engaging visitor experience.

Unfortunately, the idea of delivering dynamic, personalized content for each visitor is still a missing component on many sites -- despite the availability of enabling technology to make it happen. Personalized content means greater relevancy, higher levels of engagement, and ultimately more revenue for companies. It's a latent opportunity, and it's too important to overlook.

So, this is a marketing problem, right? Wrong -- smart, forward-thinking CIOs can't afford simply to dump this problem on their marketing departments' doorsteps. Instead, they are taking charge of the corporate Web presence as a strategic IT asset and bringing their expertise in tools, technology, and processes into play.

In my experience, I find that most marketing executives know that the game is changing, but they need help in understanding how to respond. Not only can experienced enterprise IT executives help, they can and should lead the way in revolutionizing their companies' Web strategies.