Dating and pricing: Being transparent matters

There are two issues that I want to discuss today both of which affect your online Web presence value and reputation and they are both about transparency.

The first concerns dating. No, not who you date but whether you put a date on your content. If someone searches for whatever it is your content is about and they wind up reading your stuff then they deserve to know when it was written.

If the content is "perishable", that is, over time it becomes out of date (this applies to news, press releases, comments on news, product information, etc.) and you don't make the creation and or update date obvious then there's a good chance that you will give the wrong impression or mislead people. At best, your content will be irrelevant while at worst you will appear to be behind the times.

For example, say you're a vendor and in a blog posting you talk about your product meeting standard X. You haven't dated the entry and then someone researching the market you're in finds your posting a few months or even years later and there's no way for them to know when you posted. "Wow" they think, "these guys are way behind the curve, they're banging on about standard X when I know vendors A, B, and C have moved to standard Y."

Now, eventually this person may discover that they were looking at something past its sell-by date but even so, they will still have experienced negative feelings about what you do. For just the tiny effort of including dates, you've made yourself look less than you are.

My second point is about openness. While I have frequently railed about the need to have open architectures and APIs if you're going to be a player in future markets what I am thinking about here is about being open about your pricing.

I'm pitched many products that online have no obvious pricing offered and that's ridiculous because there are only two conclusions you can come to in this situation: Either the company is embarrassed by their pricing being really high and they want to massage the relationship first to soften you up, or they are looking to gouge as much out of the deal as possible and their pricing is therefore variable. Either way, it looks less than clean and professional.

If you are offering a product then to make potential customers comfortable you have to be honest about its attributes and pricing and at the very least give them guidelines as to what they might have to spend.

Now we all know that some products are hard to price. They might need consulting services, customization, or integration work to deploy them but even when your product is undeniably compelling to your potential customers without at least a ballpark pricing they won't be able to see you in your market context.

While these two transparency issues -- when was the content created and updated and what does your product cost -- are usually not deal breaking issues, they are important elements in creating and maintaining your image and branding. Ignore these issues and life won't end. You just won't look quite as shiny as you could.

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