The concept of the “site-less web” has become a popular topic of late. From a business standpoint, what the advocates say is that your website/blog is no longer as important as it used to be and that information no longer needs a specific source to gain wide distribution. People can and will be able to find you in many places, most of which you will not own.

I buy large portions of that logic and have experienced some of the benefit of that thinking myself. And I also believe this concept may work better for large organizations than it does for personal brands, at least for the near future. For example, as I look around the web at REALTORS© who are and have been successful in the social media space, they have one thing is common. They may have strong positions in numerous social media sites, but they have one or a small number of hubs around which all of their social media efforts revolve. It might look something like this.

Typically the hub is their blog, though some are moving their focus to Facebook Fan pages. And the tools they choose to use all work to support their hub-focused approach. A tool like Posterous, for example, is a form of a blog/social media site, but it also gives the user the ability to skin their Posterous blog with their own branding and “park” it at a subdomain of their main site, like blog.miamism.com. This appears to the viewer as just a section of the main Miamism site, and in effect it is, even though it’s hosted on a different service/server. The benefit of a site like Posterous is that when you create mobile content using the tools Posterous provides, and set up the automatic distribution options, it leads the viewers at the various distribution points, Twitter, Facebook, etc., directly back to your hub. SEO value, links, eyeballs, they’re all focused back on the hub.

Some tools don’t provide this opportunity. We’ll take a closer look in Part 2.

(This post is part of a presentation experiment at HAR Digital Media Spring Training for rookies.)

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