I was in a meeting last week where the client’s Director of Marketing expressed exasperation at her inability to keep the organizational website current.  “There’s just too much going on,” she fumed, “and people expect me to list and promote all the events happening here.  It’s just impossible.”  And if she had to be the only one to input all the data every day, I certainly agreed with her.

Fortunately, we live in a Web 2.0 world, where many people can contribute to our websites to keep them vital and alive.  By setting up a content management system or blog and giving a variety of people the ability to provide content or feedback (e.g. direct input, comments, RSS feeds) we can keep our sites alive, make many stakeholders feel empowered, and take the pressure off ourselves.  If you’re nervous that your contributers will make errors and put in inappropriate content, you can always moderate the input before it goes live.  Or you can simply let designated participants take full responsibility for their content’s accuracy and appropriateness.

By allowing more people to participate and removing ourselves as the bottleneck, we can eliminate much of the fingerpointing that occurs when some stakeholders feel marginalized or not heard.  It also takes a lot of pressure off one individual for keeping everything up to date.   It certainly is a different way of thinking (more collaborative and less controlling), but the benefits are significant.

Photo courtesy fitness360