Website | Marketing Begins At Home

A while back I opined on the influence of location based services on hyperlocal blogs and web sites. The weak link in the chain to making mobile location-based services like Radar or Yelp! useful is the piss-poor ways in which local governments, school districts, news outlets and related institutions organize information on their websites. This lack of any rational information organization also makes for useless (and very expensive) web sites that fail in their mission to inform the users and create less work (not more) for the staff.

Take, for example, the website for the Bedford Central Schools, which my daughters attend. It’s very pretty and all but it’s not actually very useful. Where can I sign up for email alerts? Where are the RSS feeds? Where can I find an email address?

This site is actually built off of a template sold to the district by School World, a company that has a chokehold on the school district web site market. The site is designed to look pretty and throw a lot of content at parents but not really say much of anything.

When the site was in its planning stages, a note went out to all the parents in the district directing us to a web site with three or four sample designs and asking us which one we liked best. No one ever asked what we would actually want from a web site. Like maybe all the forms we might need for our children linked right on the main page. Or an online system for us to report absences so we don’t clog up the school’s phone and take up the office staff’s time in the morning. Or a direct link to the school principals’ email addresses so we don’t have to dig through four different pages to find it.

And because the site is based on a template that the district paid (handsomely, I’m sure) for, there’s no way for the district to add functionality or otherwise customize the site down the road. I’m sure they sold the district on things like ‘your staff won’t have to learn complicated HTML.’ I’m also sure it’s based on proprietary technology. The site itself doesn’t use doctypes and buries the content in a nest of tables and other noodley code. Honestly, the district is lucky there isn’t anyone else around here with any Google juice.

O’Reilly’s Vannessa Fox has a list of practical tips for local government web sites that make a lot of sense. Things like crawlability and extensive use of alt tags would help. Unfortunately, as long as companies like School World are selling crappy web sites to local school districts, her advice will probably fall on deaf ears.

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Increasingly the discussions around marketing and social media move towards which team should “own” the social media toolkit. On the one hand, advertising with its huge budgets and teams of designers and code-monkeys seem to be the right home for online communications. But increasingly there is a call for social media to fall under the relm of the public relations team.

Kristin Maverick has a good post laying out the rational for this point of view, and cautioning (correctly):

But, as social media has changed the way we think, the traditional PR agency will also need to adapt to the new ways of handling these social media requests. While PR may be the right man for the job right now, it’s also important for PR to include others to help get it done. From partnerships with other specialists to new technologies and advancements emerging everyday, the acceptance of all things changing will only help create successful outcomes and ensure social media success.

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I’m inclined to agree, both with the notion that social media is part of public relations, and that traditional PR agencies will have to grow and change their ways of doing business to get the job done. I suppose this is one of those challenges for 2009.

Aside from just “getting it,” whatever your definition of “it” might be, PR agencies are going to have to be a lot smarter on the nuts and bolts of how the Web and social media work. For one thing, to look at many agency web sites, one would be excused for believing the industry is trapped in the late 1990s. Too many agencies have flash intros or sites built entirely on Flash. Too many agencies tout their social media starts but don’t have blogs, or even RSS feeds for their client news. And too many agencies are treating social media now like they treated online communications in the 1990s – as something separate from the “real work” of media relations.

Most of all, PR agencies have to drop the habit of viewing each new social media tool as a means to shout their clients’ messages to as many people as they can grab.

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