Set your content strategy foundation to support innovation
Innovation doesn’t just come in the form of generative AI. Organizations have been innovating with content well before AI came along. How do we ensure that content supports the organizational goals? Keep reading…
Caveat: Your organization must assess the risks of AI before starting projects or unleashing an AI-driven product into the world. Issues include privacy, gender and racial bias, hallucinations (inaccurate, nonsensical, or factually incorrect information), security, and harm to people and the environment. You must insure that your AI product best serves your users and employees.
What do I mean when I say “innovate with content”?
Surprisingly (or not?), organizations have really given content and content teams the short end of the stick. Content teams are under-funded, under-staffed, lack training and appropriate tools to do their work. When we look at everything content can support, we see that we should take content more seriously and treat it as the business asset it is.
To reduce calls to the call centre, you’ll need good online help, a good knowledge base, and good content structure
To create customized or personalized experiences, you’ll need metadata and taxonomy applied to your content
To satisfy user goals, you’ll need content that answers their questions
To sell your product, you need content that is targeted, on-brand, and accurate
To do enterprise-level reporting, you’ll need metadata and taxonomy to help you compare apples to apples (instead of apples to… spaceships!)
To help users find content, you’ll need a good browse and search experience for your content
To create content with generative AI, you’ll need a rock solid content structure along with accurate content
That’s a lot of work to set up your company for success and innovation. (I’m sorry to tell you that there are no short cuts.) We’ll explore below what it takes to achieve your goals and ambitions.
Audit your content
Start by doing a content inventory and audit.
What is the scope of your content?
Where is your content stored?
What is the site structure and page structure like? Is it standardized?
Is your metadata and taxonomy complete?
What scope can you tackle now vs saving for later?
What kinds of component based content to you have?
Does your content target specific users?
Establish personas and user journeys
You’ll have internal business use cases, but your users will have their tasks too.
Are you aware of what your users want to do with your product or service?
Do you have the content to support their journey and their questions?
What gaps are missing in your research?
What user complaints does the call centre get?
Clarify your use cases
Internally you need to identify what you want to do with content.
What innovations have you heard of, and what content do you need for them?
Do you want better reporting, standardized data, personalization, evidence-driven decision making? Remember, these things are still innovation. Few companies do these effectively!
Do you want AI to help generate marketing copy, product descriptions, internal FAQs, or help call centre agents to more quickly answer questions?
Assess Your Data Quality
I once saw a client test a generative AI tool on all their website content. Great idea, except some of the content was obsolete and out-of-date. It was accurate when it was written, but had been superceded by other content. They put all this content into their AI tool. Your outputs are only as good as your inputs. “Garbage in, garbage out” as they say.
At best, outdated, inconsistent, or unstructured content will limit effectiveness. At worse, this kind of content can cause legal liability, injury, and even death.
I can’t stress enough the ethical and legally responsibility companies have to keep their content up-to-date, especially when it will be consumed and regurgitated by generative AI. Remember that genAI will re-write and simplify the content, so you really do need to make sure that what goes in is accurate.
Establish content governance and guardrails
If you have all your content accurate, well structured with metadata and taxonomy, how will you keep it up to date? You’ll need content governance, taxonomy governance, and interdepartmental working groups to ensure the decisions are being made and cascaded company-wide.
Plus, you’ll want to answer:
How will privacy and security be protected with personalization, data reporting, and generative AI?
When will you do content testing with users and how will you integrate content improvements?
How do content changes affect downstream reporting and generative AI output?
How do you maintain ethical innovation, transparency, and legal compliance?
If you are the regulator, how will you show those whom you regulate that you are being responsible? And how they can be responsible?
At the moment, one way to be innovative is to implement these tools with a strong evaluation of the ethics of the tool.
Choose the right tools
Make sure you have the right tools for your content. These tools include content management systems, taxonomy and knowledge graph management tools, document and digital asset management. Tools around managing content workflow and content governance are also essential.
Start small then scale
The above is all a lot of work! To see progress, I recommend starting with a discreet project, doing the above work, and implementing it. Then pick off another chunk and iterate, iterate, iterate. You can continue to measure the effectiveness of these changes as you go along.
There are no shortcuts to innovation. One step leads to another. One failure exposes opportunities. You can leverage a good content foundation to create more useful products and services.
Speaking of no shortcuts to innovation, Marian Croak has worked in VoIP for 30 years, holds 200 patents, and is one of two black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Take yourself down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and learn more about her.