Cleve Gibbon

The Rise and Rise of Content Junk

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The amount content we produced in 2011 alone exceeded the content created in all previous years combined. ALL previous years combined! We more than doubled the size of our digital content universe.

That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if all that content could get everywhere it needed to be today.  It can’t. Instead, it’s trapped in the applications (CMS, DAM,Word) and/or channels (e.g. Web, Email) that created it.  This is not a sustainable business model for many companies that create and publish content to better engage with their customers.

It’s stupid, costly and uncompetitive to create great content and not invest the time and effort to make it structured and meaningful. To make it future friendly. And yet the rate of growth for digital content continues to rise exponentially, more than doubling every couple of years.  It’s time to stop creating more content (junk) and start making content work more.

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Taxonomy, Metadata and Search at Confab 2012

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Notes on Seth Earley’s Confab 2012 Workshop on Taxonomy, Metadata and Search: Put Your Content to Work: It’s okay to have more than one taxonomy. Taxonomy is NOT the same as navigation. You want to create multiple navigation structures from a taxonomy and prevent people from creating multiple taxonomies for navigational purposes. Taxonomies are the … Read more

Simple Site for Authors

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An on-going challenge for CMS build projects is that they are pre-dominantly design led with the primary focus set on publishing content. With less attention paid to users in content producing roles, editorial needs are rarely catered.  The new solution goes live and “The CMS” quickly becomes a dirty word because it has not been deployed to effectively create, understand and manage content.  Sound familiar?

Content producers do a lot of things – Create content, Find content, Re-use content, Value content, Review content, Tag content. The CMS also pulls its weight with content: storing, indexing, auto tagging, displaying, recommending, publishing and workflow. This requires us to think really hard about how we intelligently structure content. And that’s where the battle is waged today for both time and effort to do editorial thinking on CMS build projects.

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CMS Build Project Paths

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The importance of digital content to an organisation is growing year on year. At all levels, we’re hearing people asking for better ways to manage their content. Not as fast as we hoped, but this has led to advances in the way content management projects are run. The reality is that the success of content management projects depends heavily upon a company’s digital and content maturity, and the degree to which they are amenable to organisational change within that project’s timeframe. As an expert, consultant and/or supplier brought in to help deliver a content management project, the chosen build path is somewhat pre-determined.

This post is the first in a series short posts that looks at some of the common build paths content management projects take when delivering web sites. Not every project is the same but they do tend to follow a set of common delivery patterns. Let’s start at the beginning with the simple site.

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Back Home

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So, after a couple of years of writing for other blogs, which I will continue to do in earnest here and here, I’m coming back home.  No major changes. It will continue to be about the stuff I feel most passionate about:  digital content, technology and productivity. Why? Because I love writing.  I’m not great at it and I’m okay … Read more

What happened in 2011?

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This year has been a little bit crazy. It’s mid November and I’ve called time on 2011. I need to slow down on the conference and seminar scene and try to digest some of the amazing things I’ve learnt listening, reading and watching great people in action.

It’s amazing to see different schools of thoughts appearing in content strategy, clients figuring out what mobile means for them, brand managers trying centralise and re-use digital assets, content producers proactively seeking better authoring experiences to make campaign management low(er) effort, and companies becoming more like publishers online. Times are definitely changing.

However, the real 2011 eye opener for me is that fact that consumers are digitally smarter than the companies trying to engage with them. I mean way ahead.

Meet Tom. He’s a 6th grade mobile app developer. He’s smarter than you and I, and his TED talk video has gone viral. So when trying to engage with folks like Tom online, the digital savvy consumer, to convince him we’re worthy of his time and (soon to be countless) digital dollars, companies are continually being caught with their pants down. Failing to understand social media. Delivering sub-standard customer experiences. Creating disconnected and impersonal user journeys. Exhibiting poor listening skills. The fact is you can’t hide from these digital disasters online. But when the likes of Dell, Burberry and John Lewis, to name a few, demonstrate that they are stepping up to the challenge, 2012 can’t come fast enough.

Consumers have definitely raised the experience bar and they expect all companies they do business with to get with the programme.

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technology and content folks are still disconnected

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csforum11-badgeLast week at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London I gave a presentation on The Strategist and the Executioner. It was my first outing at a content strategy conference. I met some very smart people and got some great “in the corridor” insights from seasoned content strategists. I learnt lots.

I also found that content folks (strategists) and technologists (executioners) are still somewhat disconnected. The resulting gap has seemingly become an acceptable place to commit car crash content projects with all the usual excuses/finger pointing from both camps. We’re in a bit of a mess. However, my newcorridor content friends were acutely aware of these problem(s) and were full of ideas on how we can clean up the mess. However, as a group we seem to be failing to effectively execute on even the basic ideas. And so the CMS remains the problem of executioners and content the problem of strategists. We need to fix this!

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What do content strategists do?

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It’s a question being asked a lot these days.  By clients, the industry, fellow colleagues, creatives, technologists; the list goes on. So in June I attended an EConsultancy course on Digital Content Strategy delivered by Catherine Toole, CEO of Sticky Content to find out from a seasoned content strategist.  It was a great one-day overview that provoked a lot of lively discussion.  Then I got the slide that listed just some of the things a content strategist does.  Take a look:

brand strategy
messaging strategy
competitor content audit
format development
tone of voice
content style guide
copy deck
idea generation
editorial calendar
editorial strategy
SEO/PPC strategy
language guidelines
message map
content production schedule
terms of use
page tables
content licensing
sitemap		 style guide
taxonomy
content approval workflow
migration strategy
content analysis
content audit
content inventory
content assessment
content gap analysis
content model
editorial workflow
content types
quality assurance tools
metadata strategy
cms architecture
content migration plan
metadata framework

 

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Online CXM Solutions – CMS In The Middle

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A recently published Forrester Wave report on Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of some of the leading WCM vendors, observing that: The WCM market is growing rapidly to accommodate Customer Experience Management needs (CXM). The most effective way to do this is for WCM to integrate with a large array of CXM technologies. What … Read more

Low Effort increases Customer Loyalty

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Back in July 2010, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) told businesses to Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. HBR challenged conventional marketing wisdom and declared that satisfied customers are NOT loyal customers.

Delighting customers does not build loyalty. However, reducing the amount of effort required to get things done – does.  From a survey of more than 75,000 service-based personnel, HBR found that to really win customer loyalty forget the bells and whistles and just solve their problems.

Make it easy for your Internal Customers

These findings talk directly to the challenges faced by those managing content across multiple channels today. For example, below is a list of common problems internal customers encounter when trying to create and publish content:

  • The copywriter who struggles to edit an article.
  • The compliance officer who cannot preview content before it goes live.
  • The system administrator who cannot police the infrastructure.
  • The product manager who cannot change prices in real-time.
  • The brand manager who needs tighter control over digital assets.
  • The optimisation specialist trying to figure out cart abandonment issues.

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