Managing UP the food chain

I’ve just done a series of workshops with some corporates and government clients.  The workshops were on writing for the web and we looked at web management BEYOND the usual web writing stuff.  One part of my workshops which gets the most response is the approval side of things.  No-one really talks about it.

One thing has been very clear as I’ve spoken to various web editors about their web sites and their organisations – most managers just don’t get the web.  Particularly if you’re in government, your manager will more than likely look at the web site and place a big fat tick in the ‘to do’ list if the web site is live.  In other words, if they can physically see it on screen, they can go to bed at night knowing their web site is just fine and dandy … which is insane.

You can easily tell the value your organisation places on your web site by the buy-in you get from management.  If they don’t sign material off, provide you with fresh content, give you enough time or resources to adequately manage the web or simply say ‘just upload the whole brochure to the web site’, then you’ve got a very clear picture that your organisation doesn’t value it’s web site.

I often say in my workshops that I’m staggered at the level of nit-picking detail an organisation will put into a corporate profile or annual report that has a print run of 1000, but doesn’t care about a web site which is on show to potentially four billion people.

Is this you?  If so, let me know by posting a comment – I’ll be writing a follow-up post shortly about how you can address this and I’m also developing an eBook on how to deal with it as well.

Look forward to hearing from you.

 

~ by davidrawlings on November 22, 2009.