The increasing divergence between an online strategy and having a website…

I spend a fair amount of my time tracking general Internet trends and theorizing how those trends will play out in healthcare.   And as I prepared an upcoming talk, I’m struck by how quickly the concept of a website as a destination will fundamentally change.

This blog is a great example: what started off as an experiment to see how we could influence our search ranking with little effort and zero dollars has turned into a new strategic tool to help our clients.  It seems the future of web content is considerably more fractured, customized, diffuse, and effective that the current “drive them to our homepage” model.

At MedTouch, we’re beginning to develop an online communication strategy for our own company, which includes blogs such as this but also ways of leveraging social media and search biases to our advantage.  And as we’ve run several campaign-based search marketing programs for clients, the fun and interesting challenge is putting together a cohesive, logical plan. 

I’m thinking these plans will matter more than one’s website — in fact, our next website probably won’t be a classic site at all.  It would rather be a series of blog postings, press releases, webinars we’ve given (via blip.tv), and a portfolio for visitors to sort and peruse based on their interests.  Throw in a virtual demo and I’m not sure we’d need much else.

My point is that much of this content might actually exist on other people’s websites and that fact alone would improve our search traffic, which shows the difference strategy can make.