Factual Content IS the Message

If substance is yin, then style is yang.
Accurate and substantive self-presentation is better than slick advertising hype or parochial cyber-babble.

As more and more image-aware enterprises join the ranks of Web-based publishers, and as the more proficient among them add depth to the materials they make available over the Web, look for innovative and far-reaching influences on both the Web's presentational style and the range of content elements it can efficiently manage.

The potential depth of Web-based hypermedia offers a clear advantage here: organizations can load their servers with content, relying on their self-selecting audiences to explore it to the depth they choose --an audience buy-in that more than likely will hinge on the content's accuracy and utility, as well as how efficiently it's arranged and mapped.

That's an important dimension of this revolutionary invitational publishing mode, and the quality criteria that it implies are all-important. If an enterprise's Web-based content is tedious or badly organized --or if it's written, imaged, or narrated amateurishly-- discriminating professional audiences will take a pass on it.

The audio sidebars we have prepared for this discussion themselves exemplify this point. They're here to point up the potential utility of audio on an institutional Web-server. The evident distortions originate in the way we encoded the sound. To minimize the size of the audio files, we employed a low sampling rate (a sub-Nyquist value) that distorts the "s" sounds in our commentary. A more realistic sound quality is easily achievable with a higher sampling rate, but the resulting files would be unreasonably large. So -- until improving bandwidth makes realistic audio practical -- don't try this at home.

What "Core" Content Communicates the Right Message?

For an institution built on intellectual capital, elemental Web server content is usually right at hand, although not necessarily ready-to-use in its existing format. It makes sense to utilize the creative potential of HTML as much as possible in organizing the interface architecture and selecting content "objects". At the most immediate and obvious level, this means a significant segmentation and reshuffling of textual elements as they appear in existing print materials. The next stage is equally self-evident: preparing and adding non-text components like graphics, digitized photos, and audio segments as appropriate.

The corporate annual report is an appropriate metaphor for the top-level interface in the presentational hierarchy we're outlining here --and a useful starting point for discussion. In print form this relatively standard publication incorporates the key organizing elements, and approximates the important jump points, for an institutional home page structure: corporate organization, leadership messages, performance numbers and graphics, operational divisions and business units, mission descriptions, and so on. A given annual report may not map precisely into an institution-specific HTML schema, but the metaphor is suggestive enough to establish our premise here.

At deeper levels of the hierarchy, the challenges to conventional presentational thinking --for both the print-oriented professional and the technologically-oriented "Webmaster"-- become increasingly thorny. Ideally, building an effective home page presentation structure for an enterprise of any size should draw on a expansive range of skills, among them competencies conventionally associated with management consulting, public relations, publishing, and journalism. But that's not to neglect the creative skills integral to the enabling technologies associated with the Web and Mosaic: computer- and network-related, interface design, audio and video production, etc.

Deeper Content Elements

Our listing of possible content elements is meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive, and admittedly it's also colored by a print-consciousness far too pervasive for a mode as media-rich as the Web. Where we miss potential textual, (photo)graphic, and audio content elements, for instance, you might map in your own ideas for media-rich content. We also leave many hierarchical and cross-mapping considerations to your imagination. The wealth of possible permutations speaks volumes about the potential utility of the Web as a corporate communications resource.

As you drop deeper into the server hierarchy, the content opportunities are intriguing. Among the possible inclusions: management and divisional profiles, plus summaries of important initiatives, product development efforts, research or client projects, or even key industry alliances. Corporate culture and the people-oriented aspects of the organization are equally important areas for coverage, even with opinion leaders as the target audience. An organization's internal publications, notably its employee newsletter, may provide a starting point for media adaptation and/or the creation of new media-rich content. By the same token, the organization's external publications, even its advertising materials (provided they are substantive), deserve inclusion within appropriate framing. Other possibilities: PR materials like "backgrounders" and news releases, if they impart objectively meaningful information (a cursory reading will tell you this quite clearly).
[208k] Ads and releases: reuse or not?

A Few Mixed-Media Suggestions...

The foregoing elements don't take us all that far beyond business-as-usual approaches to corporate communications in pre-WWW settings. There are, however, less widely distributed content elements that may deserve inclusion in an organization's Web hierarchy as well: for example, speech texts (with audio clips?) by key figures in the organization, or even imaged versions (subject to copyright restrictions) of any print coverage the organization may have earned. In the same vein, published articles by corporate staff members can play a role here too: in imaged form, or in hypermedia translations, or in textual format available for download. At American Management Systems (AMS), for instance, we are experimenting with Web-based approaches to presenting and adapting these intellectual capital elements for external access, including some prototype work on searchable data base indexes of these materials.

This cook's tour of suggestive possibilities obviously can go much deeper, but it should be clear that this topic has legs of its own, and you don't need much guidance from us to take it a good deal further -- into realms that include amply illustrated case studies, client or customer profiles and interviews, and so on. Another avenue to consider as you think this through: how could you utilize jumps to other organizations' home pages in this approach?

Video content is the next frontier.
[QuickTime, with audio, 1.6M] or [MPEG, captioned, 754k]

Contemporary Parallels in Trade Advertising

Admittedly, translating this wealth of possibilities into a real-world Web-based information utility is a tall order. Even so, some of the basic approaches that we have mentioned are already familiar tools in integrated communications and "image advertising". Many organizations, in fact, have been marshaling analogous techniques in their print-based communications for years.

An instructive example: high-tech firms' share-of-mind advertising in trade and business magazines. A quick scan of these publications will illustrate our point. Scores of computer equipment and software vendors, as well as technology consulting firms, are humming much the same share-of-mind tune in splashy ad-channel products: bind-in "infomercial" supplements; full-page and full-spread project case studies; and tag-line offers of free "white papers", video and audio tapes, and independent consulting studies for the asking.
[172k] Sponsored journalism is no oxymoron.

A few prominent practitioners of the technique: IBM, DEC, Oracle, Sybase, Symantec, Lotus, and EDS. If you consider the ubiquitous and functionally similar customer endorsement advertising pitch, you find not just the firms above, but a raft of other big-time technology and telecommunications players too: Bell Atlantic and Sprint are prominent examples.

Our point is this: if you need more tangible collateral examples of the kinds of content we envisage as anchoring corporate and institutional home pages down the road, take a look at share-of-mind advertising in the commercial technology realm. Then do a thought experiment: consider for a moment how you would transpose these common trade magazine approaches and examples into media-rich hypertext/HTML form for your enterprise's Web server. You're likely to find that this speculative exercise opens a helpful and suggestive window on the future of Web-based invitational publishing.