Sometimes teams get caught up with publishing on Instagram, or Linkedin, or in their newlsetter, and they lose sight of publishing on their own website.

This is a big mistake. And it’s common. It can happen for a number of reasons.

Probably the biggest reason is that teams don’t deeply understand the value of web first publishing.¹

Another, more pedestrian, reason is that team members simply find it easier. Some people can write a newsletter, for example, because they more easily visualize talking to the people who have subscribed. Or they make an Instagram video, or a long Linkedin post, because they have a felt sense of who is going to “like” it and share it and comment.

A third reason is that some folks mistakenly believe that all web articles have to be long and book-ready. So they go in the direction of their energy.

Whatever the reasons, those of us advocating for web first are sometimes in the role of simply watching and listening to see what ideas team members are publishing on secondary or tertiary channels, so we can flip it to the website.²

Here at Pink Sheep Media, where we’re doing design and communications with clients who have a wide range of understandings of web first publishing, we find ourselves leaning into three tactics:

1. Encouraging teams to remove barriers to web publishing; posts can be short,
2. Implementing the idea test; “is that idea on the website?”,
3. Finding ways to explain and demonstrate the ROI of web first.

01. Short and sweet

Web publishing can be so simple and so practical. Posts can be so short! Use emojis if you want. Most Instagram captions would work perfectly well as microposts on the open web. Modulate your article length just as you would your sentence length and voice.

02. The idea test

Ask everyone on your team to examine the ideas you’re sharing on other channels. Are those ideas on your website? If not, they need to be flipped. Some teams implement this test in a deeper way to include the underlying ideas, contexts, frames, and meta narratives.

03. Advocate

Not every person who hears about web first publishing will understand its merits. Most people are inundated with messages from advertising companies bragging about their reach or the newest, shiniest thing on the web. So you will have to find innovative ways to cut through the fashion of the day.

1. It’s incumbent on team members that get it to enrol others. Managers and leaders need to know that a web first approach is good ROI. It’s efficient. It avoids siloed content. It allows you to own your content and it limits the risk of channels getting decommissioned, shut down, or lost through entropy or terms of service. Web first publishing makes you less dependent on the companies that own social channels and less impacted by their company interests and values. It respects the open web and it’s good for accessibility. It’s good for institutional memory, and, in the long run, it’s better for your reach and impact.
2. This leads some teams to think of their web first approach more as a web mandatory approach. We think this is a fine methodology if it helps you. Web first and web manadatory are the same thing to us.