The traditional website is becoming de-centralized, as most traditional websites are fragmenting into hundreds of micro-footprints through blogs, social networks, newsgroups and multiple wholly owned properties. 

At the same time, the market at large is calling for online marketing management software to become centralized (see Forrester), so that more cohesive campaigns can be built, and disparate datasets can be merged together for better visibility.

 To quote a great Ottawa personality: Isn’t it ironic.

 I think the answer to this ironic situation is in another quote (and source of online flame wars) – “Web analytics is hard”.

 While it is definitely a legitimate hot-button and market requirement, a centralized online marketing suite is not a silver bullet.  There is no doubt that it is impossible to make decisions about current successes and future plans if you have fifteen sets of reports from fifteen disparate tools. 

 We deal with this on a day to day basis at Sitebrand.  If a customer uses us to personalize messages to a visitor from a particular affiliate with the goal of growing conversions, they now have three reports from three vendors, none of which connect, and all of which have different numbers.  Yikes.

 Given the aggressive adoption (and evangelization) of 2.0 technologies and marketing methods however, no online marketing suite will ever be able to solve problems out of the box.

 In five years from now, it might be effective to push a viral video out through RSS specifically to mobile browsers, with the hope that they click through the video to a Facebook widget created to have friends push coupons to your products to each other, which can be used online or in store.

 And I can promise you, even in five years there won’t be enough Red Bulls and developers in the world to build transparent reporting around that initiative.

 All that is going to happen is that the leading thinkers in the space are going to say “Online Marketing Suites are hard”.  And they will be right.

 Build a plan, work the plan, show the plan worked.  We are still struggling with it as we come to the end of Commerce 1.0, and we will keep struggling with it until we standardize on ‘what should be done’.

 Perhaps this is a job  for the WAA standards committee.  They are doing a great job in standardizing the common terms in analytics so that the industry stays on the same page.

An interesting next step for them might include a practical document standardizing what a team of web practitioners should be doing for procedures, tools usage, documentation etc.  Better yet, including a scoring system so that readers could self-evaluate. Think Gartner maturity model, but for eCommerce. 

 The moral of the story is that there is no piece of software, in present or future,  that will help execute on a plan when no plan has been built.  I think if more web teams knew where they ranked based on holistic best practices, they could take some of the ‘hard’ out of web 1.0, and be prepared to reap more value than hype from the next generation of technologies and practices.

 Cheers,

 Jim