Forgotten roses: lost content
An effective PR strategy requires leveraging social media to
drive visits to richer content: blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc. Create great content, and you give a human identity to an otherwise faceless
business or organization.
But, the content must be rich and active. And, if you once used Alta
Vista for online search, you know that, like early roses, nothing online is forever.
Recently I revisited my list of links to blogs and other
websites that carry content I’d created. To be certain the URLs were accurate, I
clicked each link. More than a few articles – mostly posts I’d written
for company blogs – had been vaporized.
Broken links? Worse. After digging, I discovered the hosting service that managed
the blogs had folded. The client company (the one with their name on the
website) hadn’t restored its missing content, or explained where it had gone. With
the hosting service’s servers inoperative, a large chunk of their blog content –
the “real people” stories that gave the organization a human identity – was indefinitely
marooned, somewhere in cyberspace.
Is this a tragedy? Blogs and podcasts aren’t the
raison-d’être of most websites. But, your Tweets and Facebook posts live on and on, guiding them to the payoff: your content. When followers reach a dead-headed page
that doesn’t deliver promised content, their opinion of the company quickly
sours. They go elsewhere.
