Save $1 Billion with Web Content Management!
I am fascinated by a story that has played out this week between United Airlines and Google. If you haven’t heard, late last Saturday night the Tribune-owned Florida newspaper Sun-Sentinel inadvertently posted a 6-year old article (with no dateline) on it’s website with the headline “UAL Files For Bankruptcy.”
Who knows why this happened - but it does demonstrate the importance of a well thought out and executed web content management system. To continue the story and I quote from the Tribune, “Tribune Co. said the story had received a single visit about 1 a.m. Eastern time Sunday but because traffic was so light to the states business section at that hour, one click constituted “most viewed” status. Consequently, a new link was placed in the list of “most viewed” stories on the business page and the Google search crawler picked it up.” The next day a sloppy securities analyst from Bloomberg summarized the article and UAL stock dropped 75%, losing over one Billion dollars before trading was halted.
The article should have had a dateline. A simple rule enforcing a dateline in their web content management system would have alleviated the problem, even if the old article was inadvertently published. New tools to manage web content are available for a fraction of the cost five years ago. Don’t make a billion dollar mistake, consider your own web content management vulnerabilities, and engage a professional to manage your risks.
Update: The New York Times wrote a great analysis of this in, “How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United” September 15.
Great post - love the web content take on a news story. Do you really think Google has no blame here at all for not having smarter automation - and I’m not sure which tool really thought that one visit at 1 am constitutes most viewed status?
Seems like you could set up rules to prevent that.
It’s as if you could pit the CMS tools vs the search engine tools vs the content distribution tools in a cage fight and all would get beat up pretty badly.
The human interaction of analzying (but not really analyzing well, obviously) and summarizing the article could take the most blame. If there was a contest for the most money lost based on a content mistake, that analyst would win.
I guess I put the blame with the Sun-Sentinel. It could be for such a simple thing as not creating a rule requiring a date when posting a story, but of course it is not that simple. The fact that the global network is such that anything put on the net is not only instantly available to all but is also “unerasable” is a fact - not the cause of the problems. Of course, we depend on the good sense of involved people to correct those things that “slip through the cracks” which obviously didn’t work this time causing undue heartache for many, I’m sure.
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