OK, quick: How many different websites does your organization own and operate?
Ever counted? For a lot of you, I’ll bet the reality is more than you’re thinking! Be sure to include independent sites created by or for professional schools and colleges, alumni associations, foundations, athletics, research centers, bookstores, business development agencies and incubators, and student organizations. Lots of possibilities!
We used to think in terms of managing a single institutional website, but today’s environment demands a family of interlinked sites. The practice can be exceptionally rewarding for your marketing program…as long as all of the sites in your brand family are strategically coordinated, managed, and cross-linked.
Oh, but that’s not always the case. I’ve seen more websites than I can count that have become “orphans” – alone more by accident than design. Here’s one example: www.unk.edu. You’d think that for, the sake of the consumer, the University of Nebraska at Kearney would want to provide convenient links from its website to the System and to sister NU campuses, right? Wrong!
Visitors can get to UNK from the Lincoln and Omaha webs, and from the University of Nebraska System site, too. Yet on the UNK page there is no mention of related campuses or websites – Kearney is an island unto itself. I don’t want to pick on NU, because this kind of flub is not terribly uncommon in higher education. You might find one or more of these website orphans within your own brand family!
A bigger issue, one that you’ll find everywhere, is the “virtual orphan.” These are sites or virtual sites that, while they may be “officially” linked to the brand, it is by the most tenuous of threads – a tiny word-link at the very bottom of the page, for example. Bookstores and athletics programs are frequent suspects. Visit http://bookstore.ucdavis.edu/ for example, or http://fightingillini.com/. Both of these sites really want to be stand-alone sites. They grudgingly provide an association to the parent brand – as an afterthought, it seems – through an unobtrusive, out-of-the-way link.
The issue is often blamed on politics rather than strategy. The leader of a unit or a center or a campus or a division decides (unilaterally) that he or she would rather not be closely associated with either parent or siblings in the web family. But hold on, because the real culprit is the absence of brand leadership and brand authority.
Brand managers too often allow the wrong people to ask the wrong questions. The question should NOT be: Does the unit director want to position his/her unit website as an independent entity? Instead, brand managers must ask themselves: Is it better for the core brand if this or that entity is positioned closely to us, or should it be given more distance?
Sometimes the answer is to strategically allow a website to position itself as an “orphan.” But sometimes the answer should clearly be to hold a website as close as a brother. It is a question for the CEO and the brand manager, not for each unit on their own.
Posted by Bob 
Posted by Bob 
