Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology states that in an ecosystem, everything is connected to everything else. The same can be said for the Internet and its role in communications. Your website is part of an overall communications ecosystem.
Visitors to your site have been conditioned by eBay, their online bank, Google, Amazon, and many other sites they visit regularly. When they get to yours, they expect to easily click through it, use the “search” feature to find the things they want, and painlessly sign up and make a purchase. Does your site live up to their expectations?
All communications are very much a part of this ecosystem. Your website is connected to a multitude of other communications produced by various organizations. Your constituents receive thousands of marketing messages daily, whether they want to or not.
So how do your communications stand up to the competition? Do your catalog, newsletters, magazines, advertisements, direct mail, business cards, campaign video, and recruiting poster look like they belong together? Does your website look like it fits in this ecosystem?
Your goal should be to create a series of impressions that are reinforced through all of your communications with strong visuals and content (the words, images, multimedia you use). But because people’s attention spans are so fragmented, they may miss a lot. So repetition and reinforcement are key.
Finally, just as your marketing communications should be connected to each other, they are also connected to the physical reality of your institution. The goal of many college and university communications is to entice people to visit campus, because as admissions counselors know, that’s where the sale is made. So in addition to being easy-to-use, friendly, and accessible, your website should communicate the kind of experience visitors will have when they come to your campus. But if you have run-down buildings, dingy classrooms, unfriendly staff members, and a bursar who insults students as they try to pay their bills, you’ve got some work to do.
Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?