Being married to a talented and beautiful anthropologist, I
have found myself seeing the world through her lens more over the years. Recently, I noticed that I’ve been paying
lots of attention to how the language we use to describe our experience shapes
our perceptions about things. This
affects how we see ourselves, interact with others, and solve problems.
Stop Talking About Your
“Web Site”
I talk with a lot of people about how they plan to use online
tools to support their organization’s mission and goals. When I listen to the language we use to describe
what we’re doing, their language tends to focus on our “web site.” As in, “we need to reach more people with our web site” or “our web site needs to be bigger.”
When an executive director pushes us to focus on a project
around our “web site” to increase donations or signups or whatever, it’s not
enough. It’s too narrow a definition of what, how and where we engage our
constituents online.
Think about it.
Our web site exists within the much larger landscape that
includes a sea of email, the mountain range called social networking, and search
outposts dotting the hills. If we don’t
consider these things (and only focus on the web site) we’ve limited our
ability to reach new audiences, drive more traffic, encourage donations, and engage more activists.
Start Talking About
Your “Web Presence”
What I’m suggesting is that we need new language to describe
what we’re doing for our organizations online.
So let’s consider thinking out side the web site and start thinking
about our “web presence.”
Let your web presence
include thing like your:
- Organizational
or corporate web site
- Micro (or
program oriented) sites
- Editorial
calendars for email and web content
- Presence
on social networking sites like Facebook
- Social
media sites like Flickr
- Marketing
through search engines
Even if your organization doesn’t want to have a blog or twitter strategy today, it’s important to consider those things outside of your site if
even to put them on the shelf for a while.
If we start by talking about our web site, we’ve already shut the door
to many things that will make us successful. So please, call it your web presence. You'll be glad you did.
