Everything on the Web today is becoming more distributed. Sales applications, human resource applications, even marketing applications. This works well for us, because it’s easier to implement functionally important applications without knocking on the CIO’s door to ask permission. And it’s great news for these aps from a speed and timing perspective.

But it opens up a whole new set of challenges. If Marketing has become, or is in the midst of becoming, more distributed, then we must prepare to become more distributed in areas like content and measurement.

Marketing needs to be ready to start measuring outside of its platform (i.e., its own website and sub domains). And the only way to do that is to have a very solid base of measurement to draw from.

By that, I don’t mean Google AdSense + WebTrends + email database history + various event attendance = measurement. I mean it needs to all be on one platform. Something like an Eloqua, Aprimo, Unica, Firstwave or Market2Lead. These are distributed apps that have a platform you can use to knock down the silos of data in your marketing organization.

Once you have that in place, it becomes much easier to measure activities off your website and in areas that you perhaps control, like a blog or a wiki.

Why even do that, you ask? Well, I believe we’re being bigheaded if we think we can keep content on a site and expect people to come get it. Publishers are getting this point, big time, by syndicating out their content as much as they can. As marketers, we also need to think bigger about syndicating our content.

Take widgets, for example. They will go on different social networks via opensocial or Facebook, and the very application will be distributed.

Where’s the Buzz? Marketers need to prepare for the content and measurement distribution systems of tomorrow, because tomorrow may be coming sooner than you think!