Design Crux

Information, Captology, Desirability in Design

Content Management Strategy, How To Develop The Other CMS

Content management isn’t a software problem at all. It’s a process problem. By solving process problems, you often find you don’t even need software. Many companies buy software thinking that it will fix their process problems. But that’s like buying Microsoft Word hoping that it will make you a better writer.
— Making Your Content Management System Work for You: An Interview with Jeffrey Veen By Christine Perfetti

Peter Drucker has said that we’ve spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and that we’ll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I. Data managers focus on the T. It’s all about data warehousing and databases. Web content management needs to take a totally different approach.
— Gerry McGovern

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place
— George Bernard Shaw

The word content holds absolutely zero expectation for outcome. Promising exactly nothing, content need not perform to a level of quality or effectiveness. All content need do is fill a container. Perfect if you don’t want to take attention off the technology making up the container. A serious problem if you ever expect to connect technology to business objectives. Consider…

— Knowledge management consultant James Robertson on losing sight of the content “Without content creators, there would be no need for a CMS. Yet surprisingly, this user group is often the worst served by a new content management system.”

— A MarketingSherpa report: “The problem is, most white papers suck. The topics are uninteresting, titles blah, and content far too salesy or just plain dull.”

— Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman writes “…to communicate visually one must first have something to communicate about. Or maybe too many design schools are teaching students how to imitate successful styles instead of how to communicate visually. ”

— Taking on a complementary theme is A List Apart “The text is as much a part of the UI as the colors, the pixels, the stuff that designers are usually concerned with. Perhaps more. …And if your designer says, “I’m not a writer,” it may be time to find one who is.”

— Usability guru Jakob Nielsen describing the state of business website design circa 2006 “Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users.”

— A Digital Web article: “But the more I talk to companies, the more I feel that their real business problems concern content — their content sucks, or there’s too much of it, or too little or whatever.”

content tree user interface

News.com Big Picture connects
current article to related content

To manage content the interface has to empower the user to “connect the dots.” News.com’s Big Picture feature connects the article you’re reading to related articles, companies and topics. By connecting literature to use, Hewlett Packard reduced the twenty–two pieces of literature for a product line down to the four which actually produced sales. Information workers need to connect past information to current activity to keep from repeating past mistakes. Tag clouds, heat maps and categories are only a partial answer to giving content management a working long term memory. Current CMS software has yet to connect use with production. Archives separated from work activity reduces the system to little more than a filing cabinet.

Content Storage Is Not Information Management

Web content management and data/document management require very different approaches. Data management is about storage; web content management is about using content to make the sale, deliver the service, and build the brand.
— Web content management is not data management

In the article Web content management is not data management, Gerry McGovern provides the missing context; “The classic IT view comes from a data management perspective. It sees content as a commodity that needs to be cost effectively stored and distributed. Show a data manager a headline and they see 60 characters.” Content is data. Reaching an objective like customer retention or improving the conversion rate of a white paper is information work.

A genuine content management system would build in features like A/B split–run testing as well as other content tests. You can’t manage what you don’t measure and never test. Whether the technology empowers management or not, analytics are a key feature of content strategy. Without the informed improvement feedback provides, content production becomes data processing.

Plogging is a breath of fresh air in the project-management software field, which always seemed stuffy and stifling to me. The problem I had with traditional project-management software was that the care and feeding of the project-management data often seemed to divert time and energy from actually working on the project.

—Plogging Toward Completion

Program management blogs, called “plogs,” turn a file editor and archiver into an active tool of human performance management. In the article The Project Postmortem: An Essential Tool for the Savvy Developer, Mike Gunderloy writes “Without postmortems, developers are more likely to invent techniques as they go along, without much regard for what may or may not have worked in the past – and more likely to be surprised when something fails for the second (or third, or tenth) time.” Project postmortems get to the crux of content strategy: better decisions.

Decision Superiority …Job Security for Information Workers

Time and again you see sites which do not position their offerings against competition. Sites developed without a niche. Forums without a plan for getting to the critical mass of content needed to survive and grow. Sales pages without a clear connection to a specific customer, or why they should buy. And on the company intranet, pockets of data for each silo grow deeper, oblivious to the state of collaborative interaction.

With not only structure separated from presentation, but every single element separated from everything else, the strategy is clear.

“Throw it at the wall and see what sticks” becomes the default strategy when you don’t develop a content strategy. In contrast McDonald’s has a more coherent strategy; using brand journalists to manage brand content.

The magazine is the best analogy, according to Light, because it’s discretionary. Consumers may feel they need to read a newspaper and may be exposed to television whether they want it or not, but each consumer decides when and where she wants to experience a brand — exactly like a reader picking up a magazine.
—Big Mac lovin’ it, but chief in search of editors

Information workers need the content which will produce a better decision. Customers have to decide to purchase from your company and not a competitor. Managers have to decide which computer activity produces what business result. Job security for developers depends on providing job security for users. Content strategy is the design crux.

Contact Design Crux to assist you in designing a content strategy to achieve your objectives today.

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