Viper Marketing & Communications Group

Your Online Content Is Immortal

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

There's a huge upside in publishing digital content. From a humble email to interesting blog, from social media chat to a customer case study every time you publish content online you are allowing your messages to pass far and wide, around the globe and back again, touching customers and prospects on the way.

What better way to communicate and market yourself.

It is said that a key benefit of digital media over printed is that if you make a mistake then rather than have to scrap that pile of 10,000 printed brochures you can simply make your correction on your computer screen and click the 'update' button. Well that's partially true but you should not take this for granted and here are some reasons why.

Look at Twitter. As soon as you have tweeted a message to your followers, even if you then instantly click 'delete' your original post will likely have been picked up by content aggregators, websites taking your content feed and even a search engine or two that happened to be looking in your direction at that moment. The delete button may give the appearance that your content is gone but it's not, it's still out there.

Think about email and e-newsletters. You send out your monthly newsletter containing a quote that your customer then decides they'd rather not see in public so you press recall, or attempt to edit the central copy on your content management system. But it's already too late. Your e-newsletter has been stored locally in folders on recipients' computers or perhaps printed out. Worse still it's already been forwarded on to colleagues and friends, compounding the problem.

Imagine your website, the whole thing, not just a page or two. In years to come your competitors, customers and prospects will be able to see what your did, said and offered back in the day. You think you have moved on with a beautiful sparkly new site taking in your expensive new branding and company logo. But do a search and look beyond page one and you'll see all sorts of 'cached' content taking you back years and years. Is what you see what you'd like people to remember you by? You really have no choice unless you start planning today what people are going to see tomorrow.

I tried this with a website I launched back in 1994. It was called Surfsystem. The domain name now points at a holding page that bears no relationship to the website service we ran back then and the new owners have done very little with it. But if I delve deeper into the search engines there's a whole host of information, old pages, links, things I said, interviews, images and customer comments. It's all still there and no matter what I'd like to do with it, it's there forever and a day.

So when you are chatting to colleagues online, posting a quick and innocuous blog article or thinking about making a contentious comment about something someone else has written, do remember that even if you decide to come back and try to delete it in the future, once published, your online content is immortal.

- Posted on Monday 29 Nov 2010 at 15:22 by Neil Wilkins

Tags: content (1), social media (34), website (35)