Digital presence disconnects

Organizations often have very disconnected digital presences. From a site visitor perspective this leads to many issues, but in this post I wanted to focus on two: 

• Your visitor already providing information (either explictly or implictly) and then you losing that information — this is the "may I have your account number" problem
• Silo'd information not allowing site visitors to be aware of key linkages in the content, causing them to bounce from your site

The "May I have your account number?" problem

Don't lose context for your site visitor

This is a somewhat subtle problems that teams may not be aware of, but it harkens to the situation where you are on the phone with tech support and you have to say or enter your account number multiple times. In a digital presence, this can happen when you do things like the following: 

• For a company selling physical products, requiring someone who starts on your site (for instance from a Google search) on a specific product page to then select the product again when they go to the support page. 
• On a conference site, requiring someone who is on a specific workshop page to select the workshop again when they sign up for the conference from that workshop page.
• Not preselecting that newsletter (if you have multiple newsletters) if someone clicks on a button to sign up for a specific newsletter

Not displaying linkages

Your visitors don't know about other parts of your digital presence if you don't link them together.

In this case, we logically have linkages between parts of the digital presence but we don't display them (also see The anatomy of rewarding near misses and Enemies of rewarding near misses. A couple common examples in digital presences: 

• An extremely common case is where the blog is completely disjointed from the rest of the site (the example above). To make things worse, you may end up trapping people on the blog in topical silos (for instance, if there's a tag "bicycle seats" then if someone clicks on that tag they go to a page solely within the blog about bicycle seats without showing that you have other types of content on that topic). 
• Organization-first, disjointed silos. If you have completely different audiences with no cross-selling then it may make sense to keep silos silo'd, but in general this only traps site visitors. 

For ideas on how to deal with this issue, see my Slideshare: Integrate, consolidate, or silo? Managing website channels for a coherent visitor experience.