The title you see above could be categorized as “irony,” given the lack of frequency in my own posts here.
What can I say, I have been busy. Very busy, and busy in ways that actually use the very same tools that bring you Occam’s Razr, and my church website, and a host of others.
I still work in media relations, and dabble in many other realms of communication, and as such get concerned where I see companies that aren’t making the necessary transformations for survival. Which is why this caught my attention.
I found a great story online featuring my company. It was fantastic, on point, educational, and just plain fun. I really wanted to embed it on our company news site, but there was no embed option. I can understand why some would not have that feature enabled, and I respect that when there has been a strategic direction involved. But something tells me that there hasn’t been a lot of thought put into online sharing for quite some time.
Five things, actually.
Sharing Means Caring
As I mentioned, there was no “Embed Code” option, which left me with these:
Now, let’s look at those icons a little more closely. Can you identify all eight of them without looking them up? Congratulations, you just passed the Old School Social Media Weasel test, with flying colors. If you didn’t, don’t worry. We can walk you through them.
Top row:
- MySpace
- Windows Live Spaces
Bottom row:
- Bebo
- Digg
- Orkut
- StumbleUpon
I don’t know how long it has been since these sharing icons were updated, but I can put a minimum on it.
2.75 Years of Inattention
The icons marked with Blue indicate out-of-date branding for both MySpace and Digg, each of which has undergone a radical change in focus, community, direction and audience.
The Orkut icon is highlighted in Orange, because Orkut is a really big deal. In Brazil. Orkut was owned by Google many years before Google+ existed. Or Google Buzz. Orkut turns 10 years old in a little more than a month, and has a whopping 33-million active users. 93% of Orkut lives in Brazil, India and Japan… countries that do not likely make up the audience for an American TV station’s website.
The Red X’s for Bebo and Windows Live Spaces indicate death. As in doornails. While Digg and MySpace have not been confused for the phoenix rising from the ashes, at least they have risen. Bebo went into bankruptcy in May, and the creators bought back the site only to shut it down in August. It is in semi-permanent hibernation, and there is no timetable for its relaunch.
Windows Live Spaces was actually a pretty cool blogging platform. It integrated pretty well, but at the time there was even more anti-Microsoft prejudice than exists today, and despite gathering an audience the company decided to shut it down. Microsoft cut a deal with Auotmattic, and all of the blogs on Windows Live Spaces were migrated to WordPress.com.
In 2010.
As of this writing, it has been exactly 33 months since you could access and read any content on the URL. There is no plan to bring it back, whatsoever.
Ignorance Is the Bliss of Death
I cannot speak for the priorities or discussions regarding another company’s communication strategy. But I can observe external results, and something tells me that no one at that station’s ownership group has put a lot of thought into external sharing for quite some time.
Yes, there are an awful lot of things that change in the online world.
Yes, the pace can be frustrating.
Yes, keeping up with everything is a fool’s errand, and a losing proposition.
But there is little excuse for not using your own website every so often, just to see if everything works like it should. You might be happier for not knowing, but what you don’t know might hobble your efforts online.
Taking my own medicine
Did you know that my own sharing buttons were broken? JQuery was messed up.
It is fixed now, because not fixing it while posting the above would have involved a level of meta-irony I just would not enjoy processing.
So by all means… click one of them below and spread the word about how words get best spread.
OMG! You found me. I found you and I don’t know how it happened. Oh yes, that photo of Salma Hayek. Beautiful classy lady with something important to hear. You could have nailed that picture to the grocery store bulletin board or even a telephone poll, and people would find it. Hmmm. Not a bad idea.
Love seeing your face, where ever you show up Ike. Be well. Stay well. Someday, I’ll get a cuppa tea with you IRL. (does anyone still use that?).
I do, IRL.
And the first round is on me.
A television station once tried to hire me upon the pre-re-launch of their online property. The news director said two interesting things to me. The first was “I don’t mind if you occasionally break a small piece of news on the site.” The second was “We aren’t trying to re-invent the wheel.”
Which was how I knew they weren’t serious about their effort.
And you know what? When they rolled that out, he was right.
So now — each time I see a station’s site doing some odd, quirky, nonsensical or just backward thing — I remember that line.
“We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel.”
See also: The Pony Express didn’t try to reinvent delivery.