Sometimes (but not often) people ask me: What’s the difference between a digital team and a communications or marketing team?
(Sometimes people also confuse digital teams with IT, but let’s not open that box right now…)
It’s true that both digital teams and comms or marketing teams create content or produce information – in some cases out of very little raw material.
But where a digital team differs is in its bird’s-eye view of the wider digital estate of an organisation – both owned (website) and “rented” (social media, other portals, etc).
In taking this view, it notices something profound about humans: we tend to favour action over inaction.
Introducing action bias
Action bias, as it’s called by some academics and experts, is a psychological instinct to “do something” rather than “do nothing”. It’s natural and it happens all the time in most walks of life – even when there’s no evidence to suggest that action is the best course to take.
Action bias pervades decision-making in many organisations. It favours the creation of new information, deluging our audiences and drowning out the important stuff that users need to see, read or do in their lives.
In the world of communications and marketing, it is the essence of the profession. But for digital content teams, this bias towards action can be debilitating. It means the constant creation of more noise, marketing messages, news, guides, explainers, FAQs, policies and other “resources”.
For any big website, such as those run by universities or public authorities, prioritising creation over maintenance or deletion only leads to one outcome: a terrible user experience.
How to stop action bias
How do you stop people having action bias?
That’s such a great question and thank you for asking.
I’ve been asking myself the same questions over the past few years: How can we, as a team, avoid this from happening? How can we persuade others in our organisation to interogate the problems before jumping to the creative stage?
Let’s talk about it – looking ahead to ContentEd
It was playing on my mind so much that I pitched a talk about it to ContentEd, a conference for content professionals in the education sector.
It must’ve touched a nerve because they offered me a slot at ContentEd 2024 in Liverpool this October.
My talk is for you if you’ve ever despaired of the ideas of others or the volume of information on the internet – whether you’re a creator, commissioner or manager of content, or a leader of people.
There’ll be loads of other great speakers as well.
See you there?
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