It is part of the human condition that we think short term. Our lives are short. Our ability to commit to anything beyond ourselves is often even shorter. So it is not surprising I deal with many individuals, business and organisations unable to look at digital initiatives beyond the immediate fortnightly reporting cycle. But the joy of a measure-everything approach is that the aggregated past will often tell a story that forces us to reassess how we judge success and failure.
In web content there is a strong desire for all our content to win the a reddit race. Organisations are often too quick to judge the success of staff resource allocation to web content creation based on big spike style numbers often associated with content going viral. No doubt as Google moves to rank ‘up to date’ (read, new) information above older information, this trend towards ‘freshness’ seems to reinforce that view of success. Continue reading
