Are Websites a Thing of the Past?

One of my favorite shows growing up was “I Love Lucy.” I’d watch it every day at lunch. In fact, I still watch it almost every day. It’s on early in the morning, and many times I’ll have it on when my kids wake up in the morning.

They’ll come into the living room, ready to watch whatever is on the top of their consciousness (it’s currently anything to do with Star Wars), but when they see what I have on, they run into our bedroom, calling out, “Mommy… Daddy is watching the black-and-white show again.”

One of my favorite episodes is the one where Lucy and Ethel get jobs at the chocolate factory. There is a classic scene where the two of them are trying to wrap chocolates but are unable to keep up with the conveyor belt. Lucy stuffs chocolate wherever she can to keep pace.

Anyone in charge of a company’s online presence must feel the same way these days. Between their own corporate site, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and more, it’s getting harder and harder to keep pace.

Couple that with the strategy employed by many brands to direct people to their Facebook pages instead of their corporate websites, and it has me wondering whether companies, even auto lenders, need a website.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to create a loan application app that can be integrated into other sites, i.e., Facebook, and use those pages to market your products and services?

What is the benefit of a corporate website in today’s social networking world?

If you’re a lender, what can you have on your site that you couldn’t use Facebook or Twitter for? You would need a mechanism for accepting applications (an app or API that could be integrated into a third-party site is ideal) and payments (you’d probably need a secure portal got this). Otherwise, you can leverage the awesome reach of the social networking portals to market your products and services.

The flow of information online is evolving from a search-driven world to a socially driven world. This evolution is part and parcel of why sites like Buzzfeed are becoming so popular.

In many cases, corporate websites are wastes of time and money and resources. Will corporate websites ever be meaningful again? It’s possible, but it’s hard to make a case for that.

Companies that rely on a corporate website to tell their story are going to end up as obsolete as black-and-white television shows.