#2 Don't think of a website as just a website

What is website content really? What does it take to qualify as a key message, a feature, a customer benefit or a story on a corporate website for a global company? Think about it. What does it really take for any significant content to finally end up as public website data.

Anyone who ever work for, or with, a larger international company will understand this. What finally ends up on the website are super refined versions of all decisions taken in core processes and strategic projects. Strategic decisions taken by the Executive team, Finance, Legal, Human Resources, R&D, Marketing and sales and of course Corporate communications.

Each department communicating their perspective to support the over-arching long-term corporate strategy. Countless of hours are directly, or indirectly, invested in finding the right message to describe how the company creates value for customers, employees and other stakeholders. In the best of worlds the crafting of these messages are also done with the strategic brand perspective in mind - how to the company creates value in an intentionally different way.

Yes, in the end there is usually a smaller group of content creators crafting the final stories and messages, but the point is that what ever the content creators finally publish can be back-tracked to a much longer chain of decisions. The value of only the hours put in this much longer process is worth thinking about.

Anything with great value needs to be managed. In this case the branding and communication that a large corporation does to build an attractive brand identity through its vast ecosystem of website data.

But you can’t manage what you can’t see. It has been impossible to analyze large amount of website data from a strategic branding and communication perspective. The good news is that now you can. With Brand XRAI® you can. You can analyze your own company website data as well as your competitors.

Tony Leidenkrantz