Online Content Lives On

Your content can live forever in the online world. This presents occasional headaches – and potential opportunities.

Gerry McGovern captured this fundamental difference between web and print:

The Web is about permanence. Over time, most print content degrades, dissolves, disappears. Try finding that brochure you published in print in 2003. But if you put it up on your website, it’s still there. This is the great blind spot of web teams. Review and remove.

Without ongoing maintenance, your site can collect digital dust. Perhaps your organization has discovered an old product page, expired offer or inaccurate executive bio. Search engines may still display pages you thought you’d removed. The legal or compliance team may find content that doesn’t pass today’s standards.

And your old sites never really go away. Anyone can visit the WayBack Machine at archive.org to review your site’s earlier days. (That redesign in 1997 seemed so awesome at the time.)

This permanence can be a positive, however.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported on popular advertising campaigns that continue to live (and even thrive) online. As the story notes, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken and CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-mail still receive traffic years after their formal campaigns ended.  Here at Sundog, our past Chins creations (holiday and summer versions) still receive seasonal traffic.

Know the lifecycle of your content. Establish a plan to regularly review it. And check out the Subservient Chicken or Sundog Chins one more time.