WOMMA : Reskinning an old problem
click to view
Blog links replace news headlines but a familiar content issue remains unchanged.
The Site
WOMMA, the US-based Word of Mouth Marketing Association, has replaced news headlines and releases with blog links on its home page but some underlying management issues haven’t altered.
The right-hand half of WOMMA’s home page is dominated by a panel of headlines and summaries under the title From The WOMMA Word Blog. Directly beneath the heading are two tabs: WOMMA Daily Five and Recent Posts. The former is the normal default setting when the page opens and is highlighted in red, matching the heading. Clicking through to the full entries reveals the five on display as of the start of the US business day on 15 November to be one week old.
Two other elements on the page, advertising panels running adjacent to the blog links, have gone beyond their ‘sell by’ date. Both promote registration for WOMMA events – a research symposium on 13 November and a summit on 14/15 November – with all forms still live. Reports from the first day of the summit filled the menu for the Recent Posts tab in the Word Blog overnight, and this became the default tab around 8am eastern time.
The Takeaway
Although the timing of WOMMA’s switch of default tabs was more than a little off for anyone in Europe or points further east it does show a necessary degree of flexibility in the management of the home page that is notably lacking in relation to other content. In this, the innovative substitution of blogs for press releases in the reporting of news is undone by a failure to address an issue that underlies the use of time-sensitive features whatever form they take: how to maintain their freshness or extend their shelf-life.
It’s clear that WOMMA does not update the Daily Five every day – at the moment not even every week. In this it mirrors the bad habit of many a conventional media release-based news panel. The basic problem is simply one of wording: if the resources or the supply of content can’t sustain a daily makeover then, rather than create an expectation that will be disappointed more often than not, change the heading to manage the expectation. Not dropping the expired registration panels – or updating them at the least – is just poor content management, be it human or technological. Does WOMMA really want to give the impression that news travels so much more slowly by word of mouth?
http://www.womma.org/First published on 15 November, 2007