When talking about the internet, most companies we speak with still draw a picture with their websites in the center of the page, a big solid firewall above it and beyond that, the internet in "the cloud".
A customer, however, doesn't see it this way at all. They go online and experience all companies "in the cloud". A customer doesn't experience firewalls or even distinctions about where the site is being served up when they interact with information about companies and products.
This is just one example of the shift in thinking that companies must go through to fully leverage the customer engagement capabilities of the internet. We describe this shift in thinking as moving from the Siloed Web to the Assembled Web. Our clients that have made this transition are achieving greater returns from their online marketing investments then those still trapped in the diminishing returns of the Siloed Web. To make this more clear, the table below highlights the differences in the world of ecommerce:
| Siloed Web | Assembled Web |
How to engage with prospects? | Use ad networks, email and paid search to drive traffic to company websites. Meaningful interactions can only occur on company controlled sites. | Take brand to where prospects already are and engage directly with them through syndicated content and applications. Meaningful interactions can happen anywhere online. |
Where do online transactions occur? | A company owned, or retailer ecommerce store. | Multiple branded stores and micro-sites, embedded affiliate stores, social shopping on social networks, mobile |
What drives traffic?
| Entice customers to come to 1 store through email, affiliate, and search discount offers. | Rich media content, SEO-driven blogs, social shopping invites from friends, syndicated store applications |
How is functionality added to the site? | Costly and time-consuming custom coding or complete re-platform | Plug-in modules to legacy, outsourced platforms, core services supporting multiple websites |
How are features designed | Product management takes the best guess at new functionality | Multivariate testing to quantitatively determine |
The Assembled Web is about both expanding your brand presence to enage customers across the internet and assembling more agile IT systems to make this easy to execute.
