I’m a believer in watching what people or organizations do as opposed to what they say. Words are too easy while actions are often difficult. Words can also distract from actions that belie the message the words are attempting to convey.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
No, that’s not a political statement (although feel free to take it as one). It’s more a response to a couple of things that happened this morning while I’ve been going through my morning email. Like you, I subscribe to quite a few newsletters as a simple way to stay on top of industry news and developments in technology. I also use a newsreader (Feedly, which I highly recommend) to digest dozens of websites in a brief period of time.
I was reading a newsletter from a respected site for digital mavens. It tries to help those of us on the digital side of things to grow our businesses. The lead article in this morning’s newsletter caught my eye. It was about strategy and leadership in data and actually was important enough for this organization to use it as the subject line in today’s email. I read the blurb and clicked on the “read more” button. In response, I got a “404 Not Found” error. The redirect URL was empty. I tried clicking the headline and that did, in fact, get me to the article, but the call to action wasn’t the headline. What happened here was just someone being sloppy.
The same sort of thing happened when I clicked on an article in my RSS feed. The article headline – about some people receiving promotions at a former competitor – got my attention so I clicked through to read the article. Whoever set up the RSS feed for the publication had this link click through to the publication’s homepage, and the article I wanted was nowhere to be found. I’m not sure if this is willful or sloppy but, as in the previous example, it’s a bad user experience and makes me less likely to click through in the future.
Broken links suck. Besides frustrating the reader they carry an SEO penalty. They’re also easy to check – there are several free tools to do so. Misleading links – or headlines/teasers for that matter – are just as bad. While they might not hurt your search ranking they will hurt your reader. Which really leads me full circle to actions speaking louder than words. If you claim to be a leader in digital marketing, you can’t put broken links into your newsletter. If you claim to be serving the advertising and marketing community, you can’t serve us by forcing us to look for the useful information with which you’ve teased us. The same holds true for any business, by the way. Customers see what you do and that makes it easy to discount whatever it is you say. Does that make sense?
Consult Keith 