Welcome To Ghost Town

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Created on Tuesday, 17 January 2012 06:09

By Jens Thomsen, Impact Brussels

I recently spent time visiting some of the world's many ghost towns. Not in the physical world that is, but in cyber space. Homepage after homepage showing all signs of having been abandoned by their owners.

These dusty cyber communication habitats had all the signs of previous occupation by enthusiastic organisations with world class intentions. Now they represent a growing number of cyber ghost towns that appear to a visitor as a graveyard of good intentions abandoned by another fad or simply forgotten.

Twitter feeds that dried out in October last year and news sections with very old news, or no news at all. Ghost sites in other words – cyber graveyards.

Or so it seemed, but often a closer look would reveal that very small signs of life could still be detected. Amazingly, behind quite a few of these dusty out of date web facades their organisations were still alive and working. Though it took some effort to detect these signs of life, they were there. Tidbits of relatively new information reflecting an organisation that was still actively engaged.

The signal they conveyed to the outside world via their website, however, was that apparently no activity was taking place - the equivalent of putting a sign on your office door saying “Gone fishing, for good”.

Unfortunate signal

Now, that's an unfortunate signal for any organisation to send to the outside world, and especially if your organisation's main activity is lobbying, as most of the organisations were in this case. They were all small organisations so there may be many reasons why their communications were in tatters.

What's certain, however, is that they initiated activities, but failed to follow through on them. Perhaps they didn't have a clear strategy for their communications activities when they set out, or they just didn't take into account that communications are an ongoing activity that is only effective if you're consistent and persistent.

If you don't have consistent and persistent communications activities you will not achieve communications impact. Likewise, if you advertise your aborted communications activities to the world on your website you risk loosing credibility and impact.

Visitors to your website may conclude that your lobbying effort is as ineffective as your communications, and they will discount your organisation.

Or take the communications nightmare scenario: A journalist working on a piece of news covering your sector or specialty visits your site looking for information and people to contact.Her deadline is only a couple of hours away and guess what: The very moment she sees your dead Twitter feed and no-news section she knows that she has arrived at a dead end.

If you're more lucky than you deserve she may look around for a moment to find a contact person. But when she only finds your organisation's main phone number and an anonymous email contact form she's gone. Possibly forever. So much for your reputation with that potential good source.

No reporter on a tight deadline would spend time writing an email to a communications graveyard or calling an anonymous phone number – unless your organisation's position is indispensable to the news story. And that doesn't happen often to small organisations.

Clean up loose ends

If your organisation's communications activities fail, for whatever reason, don't let it show on your website. Find out what went wrong and correct it, revise your communications strategy if necessary, so you reach your audience, and make sure that your communications activities are being carried out as planned.

Clean up any loose ends. If an approach does not work as effectively as you wanted, determine the cause, fix it and move on. Don’t just leave it out there as an abandoned fad. If you and your colleagues are overwhelmed by work, then keep your communications simple but effective, and only add new activities when you know you can handle them.

Of course, if your website is a ghost town, you'll never know how many calls from journalists you missed. As their phones remain silent some people might even think communications are not worth the effort.

This could easily be self fulfilling because when visitors come to their organisation's apparent graveyard, there is a real risk they would take it at face value.