Anyway, where was I…uh, yes, so I was about to try and create an analogy between poker and marketing. I’ve heard some poker stars say that, ‘Anyone can learn poker, but it takes a lifetime to master’. The same goes for online marketing. Anyone can jump in this space quite easily. They can become a marketing manager and direct a design, hire a team to build an application or even be an ‘SEO Consultant’. But the ultimate question is whether they are driving revenue?

Though I’ve only dabbled in poker myself, there are a few things that stick out in my mind about the good players.

• They are good with numbers
• They know the game inside and out
• They’re very attuned to patterns within the game
• They have good instinct (and understand human behavior)
• They’ve got a serious amount of hours logged on a table

With the web, it is very similar. Those who are really good in the online space:

• Know the (online) game inside and out
• They have intimate knowledge of how people use the web
• Very atuned to patterns & trends
• They understand the importance of analytics (numbers)
• They have an obscene amount of hours spent online.

In the end, good poker players end up blending their instinct and ability to read people with their grasp of statistics. Some lean towards the ‘feel’ side while others lean towards the ‘numbers’ side. Whether they realy on their intellect or perception, they’ll move towards their stregnth. But the point is that ALL of them have these two primary pieces in common.

The same goes for the web, but online this comes in the form of analytics, and a variety of metrics, whereas with cards it boils down to statistics & probability.

If you are a marketer that isn’t embracing analytics there is a problem. Sure there are a lucky few who have launched a great product at the right time, spent no time measuring anything and become a zillionaire. But if you are an Ad agency, creative design shop or Interactive group you’ll have to embrace the numbers to make a difference.

Note of caution: As with anything else, too much of something can be bad. Be careful not to get lost in the numbers. This can lead to paralysis by analysis.

While many of us have had great ideas over the years, we have also lost a lot of opportunities for improvement by not paying enough attention to user behavior. Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics and HaveaMint just happen to provide us with these tools free of charge. Despite the fact that analytics is a deep & dark tunnel and has the capability to consume an enormous amount of hours, there is some very valuable information within.

In the end though the equation is simple. You need to get your website visitors to do what you want them to. If you do this on a consistent basis, you will never lack of clients.

The key is to effectively blend your intuition with data.

Years later, now older, wiser…better looking, many now come to me and ask for my team to provide the very services that I explained ad-nauseam for 10+ years on my soap box.

Make no mistake.  I bask in this warm glory.

The evolution of communication, websites, applications and online marketing is staggering, and the pace of this evolution has been unbelievably fast—the understanding of these changes on the other hand has not. Many businesses in the mid- to late 90′s paid mind-boggling amounts of money to have their websites built to good salesmen at web companies mass producing websites.  Those days, like the idea of a brochure-ware website, are finally being laid to rest.

Despite being able to say things today like, “I told you so,” events like these are nothing more than ego-boosters, small victories that simply become personal mementos of countless hours of work. And while everything that I thought would happen (hoped for) has come true – there is something that is nagging me – something that begs my attention.

• What is the future of the corporate website?
• Will it die?
• Will it morph into something else now that businesses are finally on board?

Let me first state that this is not a new topic. Others have written about this and I’m starting to climb aboard this thought process. A website, for many businesses, is still quite critical right now and will continue to be for some time. In fact, most good online marketing strategies still benefit from having the website site at the center of all their marketing efforts.  The landscape that supports this idea however is shifting as I write this.

For the time being, websites will remain incredibly important for businesses, campaigns and selling products and services. What I question is how long this will last.  Here are some factors that may start digging the hole for corporate websites as we know them:

• Facebook (slowly but surely, FB is becoming a juggernaut – and me thinks they will try to replace the Corporate website for small biz)
• Social media (new sites will creep up & some current ones will grow bigger)
• Mobile devices make it easier to get  info while away from the desktop
• Lack of consumer trust in anything ‘corporate’
• Consumer’s increasing reliance on alternate channels (ie. social media)
• Less of a need to sell products from the ‘corporate’ site and more of a need to sell easily via different channels via their social business accounts
• Google Local Business
• Automated or Super-simple website building (ala WordPress or Business Catalyst)
• Did I say Mobile phones or computers?
• Less centralized marketing efforts & the decentralizing nature of the web
• Future entity (FB, Google, other) that reduce reliance on traditional sources of information
• Virtual environments – some  kind of virtual world will catch on in a game-changing way, or has it already?
• Smaller processing and ability to project a screen anywhere, e-paper..etc

One of the bigger forces that stands out to me is the decentralization that is taking place with the Internet.  For the last seven years, the core of a businesses’ online marketing program consisted of the following three pieces:

• a website
• the customer database
• an email marketing program.

This still remains the de-facto plan for many businesses. Yet, this plan is not only waning in the shadow of newer forms of communication, it is quickly becoming an antiquated model of thinking. Why though? Because it still is one-way communication. Businesses that aren’t able to create ‘conversations’ via the Internet will be at a major disadvantage.

Spewing forth mindless marketing and sales babble is just not enough any more.

In the end, a change is taking place and the old model of placing a ton of useless data on a website is coming to an end. The factors that surround this topic is enormous and this blog post is already too long, but an online marketing strategy has become much more important that designing a website. The traditional corporate website is dying – or perhaps in some kind of cocoon that will materialize as something else in just a few short years.

Don’t blink.