More Kinds of Long Tails
They say that everything you do online will exist forever. Somewhere somehow someone is recording everything you do online and there is an omniscient cache that scales the history of time on all Internet activity. Of course, this doesn’t explain how I’ve lost two complete sites to server crashes but, nonetheless, the myth persists.
Seth Godin touches on this today in his “Time has a Long Tail Too” post, which reminds marketers that many of their campaigns will live much longer than they were originally scheduled for. He uses Reebok’s Terry Tate campaign as an example of an effort that was creative enough to live beyond the normal cycle of the campaign. The problem is that the commercial concludes with a Web link that is now dead.
Dead links suggest dead brands.
Something similar happened with one of our automotive clients earlier this year. We were brought on late to the project by an ad agency and when we explored the site, which acted as an extension of the traditional media campaign, we found that no one had updated the blog in months. What’s worse is that the company that wrote the blog was sending new entries all the time but the ad agency had already moved on from the campaign and wasn’t posting them. The brand went on to launch one of the best blogger engagement programs that I’ve ever been a part of and, sure enough, most of those bloggers linked back to the site with the dead content.
This makes me wonder if there is a role for a Web continuity manager (try explaining that job to your grandma) at large companies that have more campaigns running than a single interactive marketing manager can keep track of. As the Larry Tate commercial nears 1 million views on YouTube, how many prospects will be sent to a dead page instead of finding new ways to engage with the brand?
