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Think Outside the Site |
Posted by Peter Genuardi at Apr 16, 2008 01:29 PM CDT Categories: Content Management , Nonprofit Trends , Technology |
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.
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Misty, awesome story!
URL: http://www.connectioncafe.com
Four years ago, my (then six-year-old) nephew asked me if I worked on websites. When I said yes, pleased that he had a grasp on what I do, he asked, "Can you help me make a blog?" Stunned, I asked, "A blog? What are you planning to blog about?" After thinking a bit, he responded, "Yeah, you're right. I don't need a blog...what I really need is a web presence." A web presence?, I marveled. "Why do you need a web presence - for school or something?" Eye roll. Head shaking. "Because, Aunt Misty, EVERYBODY has a web presence." He was right then, and he has only gotten right-er over the years. Thanks, Peter, for pushing us to take a more integrated view of our online initiatives. Some other language that has been proposed, along the lines of "web presence", by various industry folks: - online experience - online ecologies / user ecologies - online organizational communities (perhaps a bit misleading, as "community" is such an over-determined word and tends to refer to gaming, discussion-based groups, or virtual reality)
URL: http://www.flickr.com/people/rectal-thermometer/
Interesting and very true. I would suggest that even individuals consider everything you do online as affecting( or is it effecting) your web presence. I wish I had done this prior to establishing my Flickr account which was the result of an early online experimental blog which was a humorous personal blog.