What Does Your Legacy Content Say About You?

Remember that timeline you created for the sesquicentennial? Or that page with thumbnail profiles of students engaged in public service? How about the photo gallery of new campus buildings… that happens to be missing the two dorms built last year?

Sometimes, content that we create — whether because a higher-up suggested it, because the idea struck us on a slow summer afternoon or because of a content plan that later goes awry — ends up being abandoned, forgotten or less popular than we hoped. But how many resources are still tied up in the support of that legacy content? How is it impacting user experience? And at what point does it become a brand liability to have it out there?

Last week, Seth Godin blogged about legacy products and services, making the point that the more we have to keep our eye on the rearview, the less we will be able to move forward. Do we have a content strategy in place that can help us avoid these problems in the first place by ensuring worthwhile content is sustained over time and outdated content is appropriately retired?

That’s a very easy way to judge the posture and speed of a brand. If there’s a one-way track–stuff gets added, but it never gets taken away–then the ship is going to get slower and heavier and become much harder to handle until it eventually sinks.

Source: Legacy issues by Seth Godin, May 24, 2011

  • RSS
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
About Georgy Cohen

Georgy Cohen is associate creative director, content strategy, at OHO Interactive in Cambridge, Mass.. Prior to OHO, she worked with a range of higher ed institutions, including stints at Tufts University and Suffolk University and as an independent consultant, on content strategy and digital communication initiatives. Keep going »

What do you think?

*
http://meetcontent.com/blog/what-does-your-legacy-content-say-about-you/
meetcontent.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-50
30366
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TYDCUJBF5GRRMPE5IF4WZ35N2RJECNTZ
<urn:uuid:4f4ea2aa-552f-4164-b103-0f7aa6ae268f>
2016-12-08T11:53:49Z
70.32.89.214
sha1:GDCBU3I4YVXZ5AMXEBKHR5SXVL4RYJZY
<urn:uuid:ee8ec4d5-377f-4a2f-959b-1119452f5903>
http://meetcontent.com/blog/what-does-your-legacy-content-say-about-you/
length
response
<urn:uuid:ebd7666e-e6bd-4a13-85c6-e981ebead5d0>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-31-129-80.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-50
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf