Archive for March, 2010

Content Strategy Is About Publishing

In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be on a panel called “New Publishing and Web Content” at SXSW Interactive, and I’ve been thinking even more than usual about publishing and the anxieties surrounding its supposed demise.

When people talk about the imminent death of publishing, they’re usually talking about something narrow, specific, and tied to ways of working that predate the internet: the publication of books, magazines, newspapers, and all kinds of printed legal and business data, along with the economic, logistical, and aesthetic structures that have made that process possible. And that kind of publishing is indeed getting whipped around like a very small cowboy on a very large bull.

Why? Because the internet is made of publishing, and its new and often anarchic publishing models are messing with older models in all kinds of ways.

A lot of smart people are talking about what will happen to traditional organizations and methods and how they’ll be changed by the forces of New Publishing. This is a great conversation, but for a lot of content people, it’s obscuring a more important point.

The really useful part of this conversation—for content people and the people who hire us—is that we are all now enmeshed in a publishing process that predates the internet by several hundred years.

Where We Go From Here

Last week, Kristina Halvorson published a great post about the thing that content strategy is becoming. And down toward the end is this little depth charge:

…once we’ve witnessed content strategy’s effectiveness at the project level, it’s time to take several steps back and examine our organizations. Because content strategy can’t be truly effective over the long term without an internal editorial infrastructure to support it. And that means widespread organizational change.

If that doesn’t make your ears ring, take a few deep breaths and read it again. (Kristina’s from Minnesota, which is presumably why that statement isn’t splashed across the Brain Traffic website in 72-point black text.)

She’s saying something that anyone who’s done much content strategy work already knows, but has until now despaired of telling their clients: Content strategy engagements are the very beginning of a much larger process. And if you don’t commit to the much larger process, you will not keep up in the new world for much longer. It’s not a new idea—AOL’s Steve Case was talking about it ten years ago and it’s the assumption behind the recent surge in attention to editorial strategy—but it’s one that the business world may finally be ready to hear.

To restate the basics:

  1. The internet made it possible for everyone to become a publisher.
  2. The internet plus the market made it mandatory for organizations to become publishers if they want to compete for the attention of their constituents.

The recent increase in client enthusiasm for content strategy is the sound of a significant minority of organizations slowly beginning to realize the above.

Old Think(ing) for New Publishers

So let’s talk about what this means. Publishing online requires a known set of skills: creative leadership, design, editing, production, quality control, and ongoing planning and management. It also takes a few new skills, like community management, curation, and semantic wrangling, most of which are borrowed from other disciplines. But it’s largely made up of new applications for old skills.

When we talk about content strategy, we’re mostly explaining to our clients that if you want to be part of an online conversation, you must become a publisher. And because we’ve been publishing books, magazines, newspapers, catalogs, pamphlets, and fanzines in various forms since the 1450s, we know a few things about that.

We know, for example, that publishing is a genuinely complex task that requires vast quantities of invisible labor. We also know that the things we’ve learned to do as publishers of books and especially of magazines and newspapers can help our clients do a much better job of communicating with their readers. Things like:

  • building a solid editorial workflow, including clear approval processes and thorough quality checks,
  • using editorial calendars and planning content campaigns and themes—explicit or otherwise—well in advance,
  • tuning content for specific channels and audiences (if you think this is a new idea, consider the challenges of putting out regional editions of newspapers and magazines in print, on the same day, all over the world), and perhaps most importantly,
  • regularly publishing smart, original content that readers can use, which means hiring people who can listen to internal experts and write, edit, and curate content that extends well beyond white papers, executive bios, and the annual report.

We (by which I mean you) are doing a great job of talking about this stuff amongst ourselves. Next, we need to do a better job of communicating it to our clients. In particular, we need to help our clients focus on this core challenge—publishing—in the face of constant distraction in the form of new tools and trends.

Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut

From about 1999 onward, the peripatetic experts of the leading-edge online trend of the moment have generated a standing wave of hype about tools disguised as paradigm shifts—just poke Twitter to see how many social media “gurus” are lined up to take your money. This is what happens on frontiers, and the snake oil salesmen aren’t going anywhere until the rate of change slows down. In the meantime, it’s our job as content and editorial strategists to help our clients focus on the central challenges and opportunities of online communication.

Right now, these are the trees: Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, YouTube channels, tagging, SEO (still), user-generated content. Publishing is the forest.

Help your clients and bosses come to grips with the publishing process, and the rest of your content strategy will sell itself.

Further Reading

Publish date:
March 3rd, 2010
Discussion:
10 Comments
Posted in:
Content Strategy
Publishing

In Defense of the CMS

A couple of weeks ago, an article on The CMS Myth called “Stop Letting People Use Your CMS” made the rounds on Twitter and content-related blogs. The author’s frustration clearly resonated with a lot of people who wrangle content, and some of his points are great:

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen organizations buy a CMS, take their same content structure, and simply distribute authoring ownership to every far flung corner of the organization. And let’s not entirely blame the organizations. It’s how CMS is sold.

Yup, that’s a problem.

And another:

You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.

Indeed. (Though the “rarely needs to be updated anyway” part describes less and less content as more organizations begin to take content publishing seriously.)

But then we hit the proposed solution to these problems:

Stop letting people use your CMS unless they are an integrated part of your web and editorial team and need to be in it on a regular basis. Even then, they may not need to be in the tool.

Seriously, don’t let them in. Even if they beg.

I admire its cheekiness and empathize with the central content publishing problem it’s intended to fix, but this is a misguided recommendation.

If you’re considering banning everyone but your editorial/IT staff from using your CMS, you almost certainly have one of two problems. Neither is that too many people can log in to your CMS.

Problem A: Broken Workflow

If people in your organization are publishing bad content or aren’t publishing enough content or are publishing too much content, it’s probably because your editorial processes are broken.

A good editorial workflow

  • gives everyone a clear update schedule or editorial calendar,
  • helps content creators write efficiently by giving them useful guidelines and templates,
  • makes everyone aware of what happens at each step of the publication process and how long each step should take, and
  • ensures that nothing goes live without appropriate editorial review and approval.

If your editorial workflow doesn’t do those things, it’s failing you.

Start from scratch and get outside help, if necessary, but develop an editorial workflow that does the job. Teach everyone who works on content what it is, why it matters, and how to use it. Make sure the lines of authority are clear and that your editorial and brand guidelines are practical and widely read. And ensure that someone is paid or otherwise compensated for the work of editorial review and content revision, because done properly, it’s a lot of work.

Expecting a CMS to replace a sturdy editorial workflow is like buying a backhoe and calling it a construction foreman. Don’t blame the backhoe when the crew builds an expressionist birdhouse instead of condominiums.

Problem B: Bad CMS Implementation

The CMS Myth article acknowledges that publishing trouble often springs from badly organized content management systems:

They typically expose all the functionality you need to build pages and sites, but they are not organized around supporting task-based content entry.

This is indeed a problem, but again, the answer isn’t to wall off your CMS. If you have a great editorial workflow established and people are using it and you’re still hitting obstacles, you may need to work on your CMS as well. (This is a common problem when a CMS is expected to replace editorial processes, rather than supporting them.)

A good CMS is a valuable tool that can help you save time and produce better content by

  • helping content creators understand what to submit and how it will look,
  • getting raw content to your editorial team with less hassle, and
  • providing a framework (including version control) that supports editorial review, multiple rounds of revision, and your approval process.

If your CMS doesn’t do those things, either refine it or replace it with one that does.

Don’t Stop Believing

So: Review your editorial strategy and processes. Create a workflow that works for your organization. Make sure your CMS supports that workflow.

And remember, we started using content management systems because the old way sucked. No one wants to go back to the bad old days of 4,000 Word docs, manual “version control,” and nightmarish email-based approval processes. Get your editorial processes right and your CMS working correctly, and you won’t have to.

Publish date:
March 1st, 2010
Discussion:
4 Comments
Posted in:
Editorial Strategy
Publishing
Workflow
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