Imagine you are outside on a moonlit night, maybe near an old farmhouse, or a favorite camping spot. There is no one around but you. The moonlight and the quiet create a vast sense of space. All you hear is the open, empty sounds of the night. The main sound you hear all around you, creating this sense of emptiness, of aloneness, is the chirping of crickets.
If you have ever been lucky enough to experience a moment like that, outdoors on a moonlit night, then the sound of chirping crickets can probably manufacture for you that empty, alone feeling—just you and the crickets. Crickets, however, are something you never want to hear chirping around your website or collaboration portal. If you can hear the crickets chirping, then clearly there is not much going on.
An empty, alone feeling is the last thing we want to invoke in the mind of a website visitor or portal user. Your site should communicate that your organization or project is a going concern, things are happening, the outlook is positive. At the very least, your site should avoid raising a concern that maybe things are not so good.
Why Crickets Are Deadly
When a person arrives at your website and hears crickets, that person’s reaction is going to be a shrug of the shoulders (if that) and click of the Back button. This is failure #1: a missed opportunity to engage a visitor/user. Failure #2 is even worse: that person is likely to go away with a negative association with your organization, project, or brand.
Let’s say you are looking for a good summer camp for your child to attend next summer. You search the web and click on the top search result comes up. The site looks fine, with a couple nice photos of kids enjoying the camp. But you hear crickets chirping: the upper right corner of the page has an events calendar with nothing in it. Under that is a list of announcements that has not had a new announcement in 18 months. One of the pages is a list of links to supporters of the camp, but only a few links are listed, and one of them is a broken link. There is a page for potential camp counselors to find out about open positions, but the postings are all from before the previous summer.
Crickets usually come around and start chirping because we’ve invoked them by creating empty spaces for them to fill. For each element we are thinking about adding to our website or portal (particularly our home page), we should ask whether we will be in danger of invoking crickets. Often this requires sincere reflection:
- Are we really going to be updating that home page calendar on a regular basis?
- Are you really going to be holding someone accountable to the task of keeping the “News & Announcements” list up to date?
- Are we really sure that the project teams using our portal team sites will make full use of a threaded discussion list, an issues list, a task list, a blog, and a wiki?
If we’re not sure about decisions like these, the best approach might be to hold off on implementing them until we are sure. It might safer to wait until later to add that calendar to the home page. We might want to start out with a more pared-down team site template for the portal until people have learned to embrace the new tools. On the other hand, we might decide that these things are important enough that we will take additional measures to follow through and avoid those chirping crickets.
Avoiding Crickets
What could the summer camp in our example have done better? We have mentioned two approaches: the defense-based approach and the offense-based approach.
The defense-based approach is to be conservative when evaluating the informational, collaborative, and other functional elements we decide to include in our website or portal. If we don’t have confidence it will be utilized to proper effect, or if we know we are not in a position to commit resources to making that happen, then holding off might be the best decision.
The offense-based approach is to charge ahead. The smart offense-based approach is to charge ahead with knowledge of the dangers and a plan to address them. If we add a “News & Announcements” list, we’ll also add keeping up with it to someone’s official list of job duties. If we decide to go for a more ambitious team site template for our portal, we’ll also add it to the regular agenda of the strategic governance committee to evaluate.
Fear of Crickets
Depending on your situation, the fear of crickets can be just as deadly to your website or portal initiative as the crickets themselves. Fearing crickets, we may do nothing. On a website for a summer camp, maybe that defensive approach works out OK: put up some nice photos, a map to the camp, and the phone number. Done. A defensive approach can avoid the crickets, and maybe it helps the summer camp to be realistic about the limited resources it has to keep up with its website. Visitors a year from now won’t be turned off by an empty calendar and old news.
However, sometimes we have to take a risk. We have to risk building it anyway, even though people might not come. This is especially true for collaborative/interactive websites, such as intranet portals or community-based websites. In these situations, we are trying to engage people, to make them take a step towards us, to participate and contribute.
Our goals to engage people, or to create a space for them to collaborate, should overrule our fear of crickets. As we take that risk, our knowledge of the danger of crickets should allow us to be smart and vigilant, increasing our chances of success. Knowing the dangers, we can apply a more comprehensive strategy to achieve our goals. We can be ready to adjust and adapt. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. This old saying definitely applies to portals and community-based websites.
