“Too much of anything is too much for me.”
– Pete Townshend
Glub, glub, glub
It’s time to turn off the fire hoses, folks.
While it’s true that content matters, too much of anything is just plain too much. And Web sites overflowing with useless information streams, trivial data, redundant details and outdated resources are not only annoying to visit (though you be certain they won’t be visited again), they are also detrimental to health and reputations of their owners.
This article from Fast Company highlights the growing importance of smart, strategic content management, especially for consumer-facing organizations.
As public relations strategists, we’ve focused for years on the need to boil our clients’ information down to digestible morsels. Successful communications require that messages contain only the information that’s needed by the audience and little else. This need to focus on the audience’s needs and preferences is critically important in online communications. In short, if everything’s important, then nothing’s important.
The movement towards adopting comprehensive content strategies for organizations’ digital presence is most welcome and long overdue. Marketing and public relations professionals who want to serve their clients and organizations successfully would do well to learn about and incorporate such knowledge into their work.
As Kristin Halvorson writes in Content Strategy for the Web, “Treat content like a critical business asset. It is one.”