October 09, 2000 New Thinking:
Promoting content

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• To find content quickly. In a newspaper it might be the day’s TV schedule. On a website it might be a telephone number for the organization
• To be presented with an opinion, a view of what they should be reading today

If you visited the Microsoft homepage on October 5th, you would have seen the following lead article: Microsoft Introduces .NET Enterprise Servers. This is what Microsoft feels is the “story of the day”.

Promoting key content is a central function of the homepage. There’s so much content out there and so little time. A reader who comes to your website expects that you will give them some editorial guidance as to what’s the important stuff that they should be reading.

There are other ways by which you can promote content within your website. They include the following:

• Internal banner advertising
• Email newsletter advertising
• Email signatures
• Breaking news box
• Search engine registration
• Offline promotion

Flip a banner advertising system on its head and you can turn it into a device by which you promote important stories or sections within your website. For example, let’s say you have an intranet and you want to promote JAVA training programs. A banner ad can inform and remind staff of these courses.

Any website that’s worth its salt should have at least one email newsletter. But remember when you’re sending out your newsletter to promote what’s important on your website.

That signature at the bottom of your email can become an effective way to promote important content on your website. If you have 1,000 staff and they send 10 email per day, that's a lot of potential promotion. Remember, to keep your email signatures short (5 lines or so).

In exceptional circumstances you may want to want to inform as many people as quickly as possible of some essential breaking news. Sure, you’ll use phone, email and fax. However, a facility on your website whereby a box can appear on every page on your website with that essential information can help spread the message.

With regard to search engine registration I’m not talking about simply registering your URL. It’s about defining what you really have great content on, using keywords to define this and keeping a regular process going of updating search engines. If you move into a new area of content or change your content focus, make sure you update the search engines with your changes.

By offline promotion I don’t mean taking out ads in newspapers. Let’s look at an intranet example again. Very many intranets have huge quantities of content that staff don’t know about. Creating simple posters or flyers informing staff of new or interesting content and placing them in hallways, canteens, etc., can prove to be a useful way of promoting that content.

As information overload bites deeper, as people’s time become more scarce, and their attention span gets shorter, the need to promote content effectively will become even more critical. It’s not enough to create content anymore – you’ve got to get out there and promote it.


Gerry McGovern


 

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