Recently I was watching a detective show where a person of interest was in the police station for questioning. The police were not sure this man was on the up and up about his identity, so they used one of the oldest tricks in the book. They had a twenty-something, attractive policewoman walk into the room and offer the man a glass of water. He took her up on it, clasped the glass in his hand and took a drink. When he set it down, she simply took the glass away and lifted his fingerprints from the sides of the glass. Come to find out, he had a rap sheet as long as your arm and was on the lam for a crime in another state. You cannot run away from your own fingerprints.

I was at a networking meeting with a former FBI agent and the subject came up about tracking down evidence on suspected bad guys. He said that there was a time when an agent would go through the trash to find incriminating evidence. Now, they simply look at text messages, social networking sites, and hack the person’s computer. "If you have ever put anything into cyberspace in any way, we can retrieve it,” he said with a smirk that left everyone around the table knowing he was 100 percent correct in what he was saying. You cannot run away from your online messages.

That brings me to the subject of the old stuff that is cluttering your web site. Too many web sites are filled with information that is added to the site and then forgotten. Every now and then, you should review your site to see if this information is still correct and, more importantly, from a marketing perspective — pertinent. There are problems if you ran a special offer on a product and that campaign ran its course, but you still have it on your site. Likewise, if you communicated online about the merits of an employee that was later fired, that information could be used against you. Business changes and your web site needs to keep pace with the changes surrounding your business. If you have old information, update it. It is a good idea to come up with a policy about the length of time you will keep a news item up on your site. Many companies archive such information, especially if your business is creating quite a bit of news. However, there should be a limit on the date of the historical communications you have available on your site. Don’t be afraid to purge the old stuff.

That brings up another problem that occurs commonly with old web pages. If you have taken off the navigational links on your site so that you cannot access a particular page from your web site any longer, it is inaccessible on the web, correct? No, incorrect. If you have taken down the navigation, but you have not taken the page off of your server, it is still accessible to the public. This is akin to finding a dead rat in your kitchen and putting it in your bedroom. You have not eliminated the rat, you just aren’t finding it in the kitchen. Search engines constantly monitor the content of servers with spiderbots that copy and catalog any data they find. What most people fail to realize is that those pages can still be accessed with a simple Google search. When you take down a web page, make sure the programming for that page is erased by your tech people.

There is one other area you should pay close attention to for effective business online communications. There are a number of online business directories that have gleaned information about your company from various sources, including trade organizations and your web site. Many times this information is old or inaccurate. Some of these sites are legitimate and some are just trying to get you to feed them information about your company. Many of these sites offer you the ability to edit the information. For instance, Google has business solutions that include basic information that is listed on places like Google Maps. Other list generating groups, like Manta, allow you to list your business for free, but you will more than likely find that Manta has already listed your company and you will need to update the information. Still others, like D&B’s Hoovers are fee based groups that supply info such as business addresses and key personnel. Understand that the inaccurate listing can be a gimmick to get you to take a look at their services while you update your information.

 One way to combat the misinformation is to come up with a uniform company description that is used in all online communications. This should be a brief description of the core products or services performed by your company, where you are operational, and what industries you serve. If the same message is used on your web site, in trade organization listings and the like, you stand a better chance of the business directory folks picking up the correct information. If you are going to leave behind your corporate fingerprints on the web, make sure they are all pointing the same direction. This approach might seem a bit overbearing, but it will keep you from adding to the confusion and misinformation that can clutter up corporate online communications.

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Photo illustration by Porcorex