De-centralized content

With the ever growing population of Web 2.0 community enabled sites on the internet it dawned on me that the same technology employed by sites like YouTube, FlickR, MySpace and others use to get visitors to their sites can be easily harnessed by other Business to Consumer and Business to Business .com's. Working in the agency world most clients generally believe a sound SEO and SEM tactics are the best way to get people to their sites. However what if you created your new website with the same embed tools (blog this, link this etc) that the experts use to enable you content to be aggregated?

As with any technology there are some concerns when you open up you websites content to be de-centralized, and that is loss of control. The other is making sure your site can handle the increased traffic if an article, picture of video goes viral. I recently read an article about the pitfalls of Microsoft enabling all their website content to be syndicated via RSS. The increased traffic almost brought their website to its knees, resulting in a less aggressive RSS strategy.

However the pay offs including improving awareness, increased visitors and your sites ranking are worth the risk. These days it seems if your embarking on a website redesign or build you should seriously consider a strategy to de-centralize some of your content. Whether it be press releases, imagery, documents or rich media such as video and audio. Creating buzz around your content is what it’s all about!