From stored to strategic: use content more effectively in your organization
Often, clients have a lot of good content. They’ve invested hundreds or thousands of hours from subject matter experts, writers, editors, or publishers. Content is posted and it's the industry-standard. But clients still receive complaints from users that the content is out of date, contradictory, hard to read and interpret, or that they just can’t find the content.
On the backend, writers and editors have a hard time keeping track of content revisions. Subject matter experts (SMEs) ignore their emails to ensure that content is still accurate, or the SMEs have moved on to other roles or organizations and no one is assigned to validate the content.
Your content goes from industry-standard to an albatross, a constant weight on your mind and you don’t know where to start.
Why did this happen?
On the projects I’ve worked on over the years, there are numerous reasons that content is created then forgotten. I pare down the reasons to these general categories:
A technology purchase leads the project. A new content management system (CMS) is purchased because the old CMS is really out of date and possibly no longer supported. An organization needs to move off the old platform and doesn’t know how to examine the content it has. They shouldn’t just do a “lift and shift” because the new technology is so different, but they don’t have time to “do it right” so they just copy and paste from one platform to another.
The organization doesn’t have content governance. Governance of any kind takes time and thought to set up, implement, and keep going. Grassroots efforts at governance work at first, but as soon as the main champion moves on to greener pastures, governance is forgotten. Content isn’t reviewed for accuracy, editorial style, or structure.
A poor structure underpins the content. Out of the box CMS metadata needs to be adjusted to meet business and user needs, but often they’re implemented as is. Suddenly organizations can’t promote and repurpose content while users can’t find, search, filter, or browse content. Organizations don’t use taxonomy and metadata appropriately and can’t optimize their analytics or reports on content performance.
The right hand doesn’t talk to the left. In an organization, different teams create different content. Marketing tries to sell products and services. The Learning team creates learning and training materials. The Support team creates knowledge base articles. The technical communicators create Help manuals. These teams can use different metadata, taxonomy, different tones and voice, different user types, and no one coordinates to ensure cohesion.
Why change?
Content strategy is about governing content to meet user needs and business goals. Companies who view content as an asset that promotes its goals while meeting user needs will be the companies who succeed with content.
There are a lot of reasons to change to a strategic approach to content.
Simply put: you can’t do what you want to do with your content
Users are complaining, moving to other companies, or disengaging from your organization
You want to start personalizing content, but you can’t because your metadata and taxonomy isn’t well built
You want to report on how well your content is doing, but you can’t because everyone is using different fields and taxonomies in their different systems.
You want to start experimenting with generative AI, but you can’t because your content is out of date or contradictory and you have no way to review it
Where change starts
At an organizational level, having a shared model of the domain you’re working in, having metadata to support that model, and having the governance to create and maintain the content are essential to your organization achieving its vision.
Working on a domain model that reflects the reality of your organization and your users is a fundamental building block for organizational agreement. This model is built to reflect the needs of your organization and users and not “the world in general.” It’s not meant to represent everything about the domain, but about the things you and your users care about.
We can take an example of a website for adopting pets. This first model looks at the world from an organization-only perspective.
Shows a domain model where the company is the centre of the model and everything else is on the outside
This model looks odd, because you’d think that an organization that adopts pets would have the animal as the heart of the model. Often organizations profess to be focused on something (like animals), but when I model their content, they’re actually quite inwardly focused. I can tell this given the content they have, how they write, and the metadata and taxonomy they store. In this model, the organization is the intercessor and controls all the interactions. It doesn’t show how the other things in the diagram interact with each other.
When I’ve worked on domain models, I’ve seen huge shifts in agreement between different groups in an organization. Typically I start with one section of the organization at a time. If modeled correctly, we can then move out to other groups to see how they view their part of the organization and add it into our domain model.
Once you model your domain (in the way that is relevant to your organization and users), then you can make the shift to solving the problems outlined above.
The first step to take is to audit your content and metadata and figure out what’s important to your organization (as identified in the content). You can then build a domain model and start reviewing it with the organization.
This shift is possible, even in complex environments. In my experience, making the shift to a domain model that’s agreed upon by the organization at large is a huge step forward in creating an effective solution that works across teams and content areas.
You don’t have to overhaul everything. Just start with a domain model.
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