Imagine sending out a press kit containing nothing but blank pages because the photocopier stopped working after the first three or four copies.
Or distributing a VNR that contains 10 minutes of baseball because somebody taped over the original video. No doubt there have been glitches in PR tactics, but most practitioners work hard to make sure the material they’re sending out to target audiences meets professional standards.
Evidently, you can’t say the same thing about online campaigns. Seventy-five percent of online campaigns suffer from website failures, and in 14% of the cases, the failures are so bad they keep the campaign from meeting its objectives.
That’s the result of a study titled Internet Campaign Effectiveness Study, released by SciViscum, a web testing agency. The key problem is that the campaigns are being implemented by people with a limited knowledge of the technology they’re using. Some 66% of marketing professionals didn’t even know their sites’ capacities for user transactions. Another problem: an ongoing “communication chasm” between the marketers and the IT staff. Twenty-five percent of companies with marketing campaigns underwent server overloads and crashes directly resulting from the failure of the two departments to communicate with one another. Amazingly, 26% of marketing departments don’t even inform IT that a new campaign is coming and 52% rarely or never work with IT before a new online campaign starts.
Imagine failing to notify your printer that a new publication is on its way. The IT department is, for all practical purposes, the printer of the digital age. The only time it makes sense to circumvent IT is when you’re employing outside expertise to develop a campaign that does not use company resources-but even then, your contract with outside consultants simply shifts the IT role from internal to external experts.
I had thought the IT/communications rift was over, a remnant of the struggle for control of the web that erupted in the mid-1990s. If the SciViscum report is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt its validity), the battle continues-at the expense of effectiveness and even reputation.
As a communicator, how do you work with your IT staff?
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
