The most precious thing your audience can give you is their time. We all only have so much of it to devote on any given day to any particular task, so much attention to give any one topic.

So it’s extremely important that you use the time those people have chosen to devote to you – your company, its message and more – in the most effective way possible.

Take a minute and consider whether it’s a good idea to launch yet another micro-site for a campaign that’s going to last six months or if the same goals can be achieved through using platforms that are already in place such as a corporate blog. It’s a vastly better idea to direct people to a central hub that is updated constantly than to confuse them by creating all sorts of mini-executions that each serve an individual purpose when that one purpose may not be what any particular person is looking for.

Not only do these offshoots often divide the audience’s attention but they also take the focus internally off of that central and long-lasting hub. Instead of concentrating on that core component and building the audience for that – an audience that is broad and which has value today and far down the line – everyone shifts to building and promoting that secondary platform.

When the strategy calls for it it can be valuable to build a second outpost, of course. But such considerations need to be weighed against, again, how much of what’s being proposed can be accomplished on the existing outlets and what value will be lost by dividing the audience’s attention.