March 3, 2008...8:14 am
Check Then Check Again Before You Publish
Okay, this is a bit of a case of the pot calling the kettle black, as I often post quickly to this blog and don’t check spellings and grammar as thoroughly as I should. But for me, this blog is an experiment. It’s my blog, it reflects on me and me alone and I take any flack for any mistakes. My approach to client work is of course very different. When dealing with other people’s work you’re responsible for their image and reputation and therefore need to put appropriate checks in place before publishing work.
So anyway, back to the point. I came across a perfect example of a lost opportunity the other day that could have so easily been avoided.
A sports club that is clearly on a recruitment drive, managed to get a busy news web site to publish their press release calling for new members.
“What a coup”, I thought, “They should do well out of that.”
The article caught my eye because I am involved in a charity project to build a web site for a hockey club organising an annual fundraising event. I was pleased to see this article because I had thought that the news web site in question would be a good place for us to publicise our project. The fact they they were happy to carry a similar article gave me hope that we’d be successful success in publicising our fundraising event.
As I read through the article I began thinking that I must send it to the person in charge of publicity for our charity project. When I got to the end of the article there was a link to club’s web site.
Click!
Nothing.
Oh, no, they’d published the link incorrectly. The HTML had hppt:// instead of http:// at the beginning. A simple mistake, but one that might cost them dearly.
Now I don’t know if the error was caused by the news web site publisher or if they’d just copied the link directly from the press release. I hope for the club’s sake that the mistake isn’t in the press release or this mistake will just be replicated all over the web.
On the up side though, the link was written correctly in the text, so I just went back to the article and copied and pasted it into the address bar of my browser.
Don’t Go Until You’re Ready
Ouch!
“Site Under Construction.”
What a waste.
It Gets Worse
Now I thought I’d finished writing this post, but something else happened just as I was about to hit publish. I’d emailed the sports club to let them know about the mistakes.
Bounce!
Their email bounced back. They’d published it incorrectly in the article.
So please, if you publicise something one the web, particularly if you widely distribute a press release, make sure your work isn’t wasted. Follow up one each place that you have been mentioned and click on the contact email address and links to your web site. You probably have quite a short window of opportunity for getting the maximum publicity and mistakes like this inevitably lead to a loss of traffic.
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