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.
