This Facebook page was obviously created without much thought given to maintenance.

I was browsing through Facebook the other day and came across the page of a local motorcycle dealership. I knew things were slow in the industry, but if the activity on this dealer’s page was any measure, you’d think it was flatlined.

I’m sure you see this all time time. A blog with two entries, two months apart, then nothing. A company website with news from 2005 on the front page, labeled “Hot.” A YouTube “channel” with one video. Talk about repetitive programming.

I wasn’t at all surprised then, when I came across this article from the New York Times, stating that fully 95% of all blogs are abandoned after six months. I’ll be the one year attrition rate is 98%.

We’ve lowered the content publishing bar to the ground, but the amount of effort it takes to create content, especially engaging content, hasn’t changed. If anything, the bar has been raised higher by the sheer volume of blogfodder.

The lesson here is simple. If your company plans to engage the online world through any means, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever, make a simple plan to publish content on a consistent basis; a publishing calendar.

Whatever you do, don’t make it complicated, at least, not to start.  It just takes four ingredients: contributors, content, channels, and dates.  Here’s a sample for Wee Bee Rings, Inc., a premium manufacturer of shower curtain rings.

This is a simple matrix that anyone can create in minutes. I’ll bet a creative team of just two or three people could brainstorm enough simple posts to fill this calendar for a quarter’s worth of content in a half hour’s time.

The benefit is that this matrix gives you a instant management tool to help you visualize gaps in your content development or promotion strategies.  It also helps ensure that you are spreading the load around so that no one person has to manage all the content for all the channels. Unless, of course, your company is big enough to hire someone to do that for you. Lucky you.

If you look carefully at the dates and the channels, you’ll notice that some channels, like Facebook, are better served if they’re updated daily while other channels like your corporate blog, are fine if they are updated less often.

This matrix does not capture the positive impact of cross-channel posting. For example, if your blog is linked to Facebook and to your industry forum, a notice about Bob’s 1/25 entry into the corporate blog will propagate to the other two channels, multiplying the visibility of your content manyfold.  There’s also no reason why that white paper can’t be posted to your blog and thus, to Facebook, too.

A simple tool like this will help you whether you use it to develop a schedule of consistently update channels, or whether it causes your company to realize that web publishing, like anything else of value, doesn’t happen solely at the push of a button.

What do you do to promote the consistent creation, publication and promotion of content in your organization?  Share your thoughts!