With the Internet Week New York in full swing the highlights of its Digital Archaeology exhibit led to the inevitable talk of the demise of the website.

The argument that websites are ‘old hat’ with a fast approaching sell-by date, coincide, almost exactly, with the rise in popularity of social media. Coca Cola’s Director of Digital Communications, Adam Brown, kick-started the conversation when in January 2010 unveiled his company’s social strategy with the catchphrase “at Coca Cola we fish where the fish are”.

His words helped focus thousands of internet marketers around the world in social media marketing and kicked-off, in turn, a revolution of sorts which then spawned an industry immersed in creating ‘engagement’, ‘interaction’ and ‘brand-driving activity’.  Social media marketing is, at its core, all about the individual. No matter how clever your message, interactive your approach or just plain cutting-edge your platform is, if you fail to find rapport within your target group, you are sunk.

The development of the web in the 21st century and the explosion of web enabled devices have unchained the individual from their desk and put data at his fingertips almost anywhere. When balanced against the practicalities of website design and content which make archiving almost impossible, content hard to produce and once it is produced; in need of marketing, social media seems infinitely more attractive. Attractive, however, usually means convenient and convenient, rarely makes good business sense.

The process of creating content for a website is laborious. First you need to map out your content and its impact. Then you need to create it. Place it on the web and market it to search engines. Then you need to publicise it to end users and finally you hope that all these efforts are sufficient to produce more traffic and greater sales.

Compare this to the almost instant nature of a Tweet or a Facebook post and it’s easy to see why the temptation to think websites are soon going to be dead is hard to resist. Unfortunately this kind of wishful thinking is not just ‘bad’, it is wrong. While websites may be expensive to set up and maintain and difficult to promote they are also controlled by you, the webmaster. Social Media is based on public websites which belong to someone else who allows you to use them. When it comes to business the smart money is always on retaining as much control as you can. Imagine for instance that Facebook, for some reason, simply disappeared. Suddenly not only would your marketing strategy collapse but all those fans you have so cleverly built rapport with will evaporate faster than you can spell ‘marketing disaster’.

This does not mean that social media should not be used nor that it will go away any time soon. Quite the contrary actually, the increased interaction offered by the real-time web will only see an expansion of social media marketing. Social media, however, is like shifting sands, and when it comes to building anything upon it you’d better have the back-up insurance created by a strong web presence, and this means your website.

The challenge to successful social media marketing lies in finding ways to turn the social media interaction into a funnel which leads to conversions and captured leads on your own website, which itself, should offer some real-time interaction. While the Internet Week New York exhibition, by providing perspective, showed a trend where the balance of power shifted from the webmaster to the end-user, it is now up to the former to find ways to capture the attention of the latter without sacrificing their website.