Communication departments have often been measured in the past by the volume of material that they create, write and publish. But the web has changed all that.
With the web – there are no publication boundaries, websites can be infinitely large. No longer restricted by, say, 24 pages a month editors can publish what they want and when they want. Surely this must be an editor’s paradise?
But something is very wrong!
Since web visitors have an aversion to onscreen reading – now the first questions that need to be asked are – ‘Just how important is this material?’ and ‘Does it merit being published on screen’ If the answers are ‘No’ then it should be omitted!
If you are writing for an intranet audience – you could be wasting valuable company time as inconsequential material is dutifully consumed by the majority.
paper 10x cheaper than web!
I regularly quote the case of a company with 5000 staff that decided to publish its news material onto its intranet and cease publishing a 16 page house magazine. But the cost of staff time alone in accessing the material onscreen at their desks during company time cost one million pounds in staff time a year.
That’s ten times more expensive than the printed publication it replaced! What’s more, this calculation does not take into account the unquantifiable lost company business that was not attended to in this distracted time.
Will the material be a positive benefit for the company or staff?
Today the editor must put every intranet article to the following test – ‘Will the material be a positive benefit for the company or staff?’
The same applies for an Internet site. Would you prefer readers to be learning about your products or services or be wasting their time reading less important information?
Commercial radio stations know precisely how popular particular artists and tunes are – their play lists are programmed with statistical thoroughness. If they play the wrong record people will switch off in their thousands, and the station’s advertisers lose revenue as a result.
So too, web writers need to recognise that second rate material on a website can have a detrimental effect.
Many communicators need to carefully reconsider their websites and intranets and take a close look at content, focus on the site’s strategic objectives and make some tough decisions.