It’s said that you get only one chance to make a (good) first impression. One might think that no one would understand this more than a public relations agency.
Earlier today, I was browsing the web sites of a dozen Canadian public relations agencies. Eleven of these web sites not only failed to make a good first impression but they also failed to practice what these agencies preach to their own clients.
• Only three sites had pictures of their key employees. The portraits on one of these sites were amateurishly done: it’s painfully obvious that each person used whatever picture they had handy of themselves from snapshot to computer screenshot to out-of-focus cell phone photo.
• Several of the web sites were just awful to look at: dead links, dead Flash, missing images, tiny unreadable fonts, four-level deep navigation menus.
• One agency’s site opens with a cliché Flash intro showing 20 seconds of colour blobs swirling around the screen. Didn’t this die out last decade?
• Ten of the twelve sites showed a poor understanding of photography. Several used meaningless, cheap, stock pictures. Some sites had no photos whatsoever.
• One agency claims that it specializes in social media. Yet its own site has no blogs, no Facebook links, no Twitter links.
All of these agencies use phrases like “crisis management”, “event management”, “social media management”, “reputation management”, “brand management” and “investor relationship management”. Yet most of these agencies fail at the most important type of management: managing the first impression of their own company.
Take a look at your business web site. How may potential customers does it push away due to neglected impression management?
