Via Gerry McGovern
On the Web, nothing is more damaging to your organization’s reputation and brand than out of date content.
On Monday September 8, 2008, a story about a UAL bankruptcy began circulating on the Web. (UAL is the parent company of United Airlines.) Within hours of the story’s being released, UAL’s shares had dropped by 76 percent.
The story was 6 years old.
For some reason, the story had been added to the “Most Viewed” link section on the homepage of a Florida newspaper. From there, Google News picked it up, and the rest, as they say, is hysteria.
It’s easy to put content up on a public website or intranet. In fact, the content management software industry has made distributed publishing a key selling point. Basically, the more published, the merrier.
This is a totally unprofessional approach to website management. But the unmanaged distributed publishing model is attractive to organizations that do not value content. Such organizations want to find the cheapest and fastest possible way to deal with content. The cheapest way is to buy some software, give people basic training in how to use it, and then let them at it.
The easiest decision of all is to publish everything you have. Take all that print stuff and just PDF it. Take anything that’s digital and put it up on that great big website. It’s a “have gigabytes must fill” mentality. If you publish everything, nobody can blame you for leaving something out. It’s just that nobody can find anything.
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