Directors of content strategy: why corps need to create this post to save us from digital garbage

In the time I’ve worked on corporate sites, now nearly ten years, I’ve learned a lot about the variety of tasks and skills involved: content creation, SEO and PPC, social media,  analytics, corporate (website) politics, metadata strategy, taxonomies, globalization, CMS, and this…

Corporate websites (incl. non-commercial organisation sites) haven’t really progressed beyond the ill defined goals they started with more than a decade ago, and in some cases almost double that: “It’s new. We need it. Do it. Content? Whatever’s available in the brochures will do.”

Analytics for non-transactional sites

I’ve recently had to think about how to set measures and metrics for a corporate web estate that’s about the size of a small country.

Actually it’s not that big. I’ve worked on much larger corporate sites.

Up to now, the metrics the online team have been using are mainly  to do with reach, with a little bit of conversion or task-success thrown in for colour (but not much).

Edelman digital trends series

Edelman’s Steve Rubel is publishing a series of  ‘insights‘ into digital trends.

I’ve read the first one (17 Feb, pdf 2mb) and it’s a pretty good overview.

Back from the brink of extinction: the content strategist

Why do organizational websites become unweildy beasts?

By ‘organization’ I mean both companies and non-commercial entities.

What do I mean by ‘unweildy beasts’?

Everything that makes Jakob Nielsen cry:

Common sense and usability rules

There are a lot of best practices when it comes to online content and usability. Some of them are best, and some of them are merely practices.

Three “practices” that have made it through to corporate marketing and web departments are: making users scroll is bad; opening links in a new window is good; lists (and secondary navigation) of more than 5-7 items are bad.

Scary stories from the front

Social Network Analysis story from Danish newspaper E24 (Nov 20, 2007)

So, I discovered recently (belatedly) that journalism students do courses in … computer assisted reporting. Well, that’s not so surprising is it? What is surprising is that with a little bit of brains, some experience and a tiny amount of ducking and diving, journalists can generate some quite juicy stories from company websites and other ‘computer generated’ stuff.

For example?

Well, how about the time that a very famous news agency got a story before it was due to be released by the company simply by changing a digit in the company URL to reveal documents that were on the server awaiting publication but not yet published (in the ‘dark’ as it were). The company was miffed, and despite the fact that URL hacking is a no-no, the news agency broke the story first.

Is there a future for corporate websites?

No.

Well, not as we currently know them.

Site sections devoted to company information such as About Us, Our Business/What we do, Our company, Corporate social responsibility, and so on have no future. The information they do contain that has any use will be pared down (and probably end up as a pdf).

What will remain is recruitment, media and investor information sitting behind product information, such as in the newly relaunched Panasonic dotcom/UK website or at IBM dotcom/UK.

The general model now is that the companyname.com URL (or doteu, dot -fr-uk-de, etc) is the corporate/brand website offering investor, media, regulatory, CSR, governance information, etc.

The dotcom is not a gateway to company products and marketing information.

That model is losing companies money by frustrating consumers and failing to direct them to marketing and product websites.

Can’t get the staff?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes…no, often…companies put out adverts or job specs for a web editorial role that is, more or less, a request for a whole department in one package, rather than just one individual with a specialism?

Here are two corkers.

This job ad (enlarge image) is for a “Web Designer/Editor”. It says:

Web 2.0, social networking, and the rest … not the point

In his Prospect review of Against the Matchine by Lee Siegel, We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen says:

“If this debate between Shirky, Leadbeater and Siegel about the relationship between community and technology sounds familiar that’s because it is. It’s at least version 5.0 of a conversation about industrial society begun by Rousseau and Marx and then, as the Web 2.0 crowd likes to put it, “remixed” by everyone…”*

He ends the article by drawing the focus out a little wider:

Press releases, templates, activity over passivity

Todd Defren, Shift Communications, has posted the company’s updated social media press release.

Helping companies structure their online content is always a good thing. It’s quite generous of Shift to offer the template for free.

One of the template’s strengths is it’s using the medium’s innovative structuring potential and moving beyond the metaphor of the *page* (avoiding using the web as a kind of backlit book).