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Keeping people buying content

This is the fifth of five posts about saleable content management.

A hand holding an apple

In our previous post, we looked at how content is being produced for sale in multiple formats, but in this post we’re going to look at how people then buy it.

It’s worth noting that many new business models aren’t based on people buying content in the traditional sense of taking it away and owning it. Rather than always having the content, you’re effectively buying access to it for a set period of time. This is true of music over Spotify and its various competitors, the vast majority of newspaper paywalls, satellite and cable TV subscriptions and Kindle lending through Amazon in the US. Effectively we’re leasing content rather than buying it, as we don’t think it really retains its value.

One effect of this leasing is to create something of a distribution oligopoly as a few key providers try to corner the market for selling or leasing content produced by others. This creates a serious problem for content producers: the smaller ones can’t afford to fight back by establishing credible director to consumer channels, while the larger ones often don’t have a strong enough brand to compete. That last point is serious: do you know whether the book you’re reading is part of Hachette, or whether the music you’re listening to or the movie you’ll watch this evening were produced by Time Warner? For music, books and film the brand is based on the product, the author or the star, not the publisher.

I believe that a second effect of this oligopoly is to encourage piracy. If distribution appears limited and pricing controlled – whether by the publisher or distributor – people are going to look elsewhere to get hold of content. And that is compounded by the lack of brand loyalty. Now, I’m not going to comment at all on the SOPA / PIPA issue, as many more knowledgeable people have written about this already and I’m based in the UK anyway. But people who create content for sale really do need to consider a few key issues if they want people to buy it rather than steal it.

One person’s piracy is another person’s viral. Susan Boyle sold over 700,000 copies of her first album in the US largely due to a clip of her on YouTube. It was in breach of copyright but of massive benefit to SYCO music. Content producers need to “stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans”, as Rovio CEO Mikael Hed puts it.

Fundamentally, however, “Companies don’t rise and fall due to piracy, but they do based on the quality of the products they release.”. If you want to sell your content, you need to create good quality content in the first place. This means finding the best creatives, acquiring rights based on all the formats you’re going to deliver to and developing brand loyalty that extends beyond a single title or artist.

Content producers need to convince us that they frequently find music, TV or books that interest and adhere to that fundamental tenet of sales: it’s easier to farm repeat business than hunt for new business. But they also need to keep their content separate from its presentation so we return to buy it in whatever format happens to suit us. That is how to manage saleable content.

Philippe Parker on | 15 February 2012 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Producing multi-presentational content

This is the fourth of five posts about saleable content management.

Guillotine

Our previous post looked at how content can depreciate in value.

If content is king, the guillotine is being sharpened. Those publishers and producers who have failed to embrace the multi-channel model are already in the tumbrils.

One key to this model (and I’m grateful to Edward Smith for the term) is asset liquidity. If you can create your format so that it’s suitable for consumption on multiple devices, you can keep on selling your content even if one delivery stream’s market dries up. That’s where content management comes in. Publishers who are stuck with antiquated production processes are going to struggle to produce multi-format content efficiently and yet this is something that the content management industry has been used to doing for many years. Whether this is providing templates for print, web and mobile, or encoding video, or producing multiple image formats, the technology is established and proven. And yet a number of challenges to the multi-channel approach still remain.

Firstly, there are presentational challenges. While text on a web page and typically on eBook readers is “flowable” – unconstrained by the area it’s displayed in – it’s fixed in print and in some other devices, particularly when you have text presented with images. So a news article could appear on a single long web page or be in a short column on the front page of a newspaper and then continued on a separate page. This creates issues during the production process because editors need to understand where those breaks will appear. Moreover, on reading devices where text size can be changed by each individual user, it’s practically impossible to define where breaks might appear for that device. This is far from limited to text: if you can zoom images, or you want to produce media content for devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, you’ll encounter similar problems of trying to deliver an optimal experience for your entire target audience.

Secondly, publishing to multi-function devices increases this problem of the optimal experience, with the most obvious example being the iPad. Neglecting iPad delivery is tantamount to commercial suicide these days, as lean-back media experiences a resurgence. Unlike a Kindle, the iPad screen is backlit, making extended text reading tiring. While the screen on an iPad is good, it’s not going to be better than watching programmes or movies on a good television screen. And if you don’t want to listen to music through the iPad’s speaker – and why would you? – it’s a lot less portable than most other music players. I realise that there are ways around most of these issues that are available on the market, if not widespread. But for people who want to get through to the iPad market, this also means accepting a degree of compromise in how their content is consumed.

Which brings me to the third challenge: difference in consumption habits and the uncertainty that these cause. People who produce content for sale don’t actually have that much say in the determining which format is the most popular. Book publishers want to be a lot less dependent on the Kindle than they currently are, while newspapers – notably in Italy – are at significant risk of shutting down as people move away from printed paper. We’ve already seen in our previous posts how people simply don’t buy CDs any more and it’s only a matter of time before DVD sales are similarly affected.

If you invest a lot into producing content for multiple formats, you also have to accept that not all those formats will exist forever and you’ll have to take a financial hit if you spread too thin or gamble on the wrong one.

Producers and publishers are going to need to find tools which enable them to automate multi-format production and that are flexible enough to accommodate new formats as they emerge. And it’s not just new formats; it’s new content consumption channels too. The way we choose to buy our content is changing along with the devices that we use, as we’ll consider in the next post.

Philippe Parker on | 14 February 2012 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

The depreciation of saleable content

This is the third in a series of five posts about saleable content management.

Weathered metal shed

Our previous post paints an uncertain picture for traditional media. New delivery channels imply new sales channels and new commercial models.

One of the biggest questions that commercial providers need to consider is whether their content is an asset. And by asset, I absolutely do not mean this in the sense of how the content should be managed. I mean this in the sense of whether that content retains its value or depreciates over time.

Consider reference materials: an encyclopaedia for example. One of the reasons why Wikipedia does so well is because it’s always up to date. You can pretty much guarantee that when a news story breaks, someone will update a relevant Wikipedia page about it that day. I’m not sure when I’m going to publish this post, let alone when you’re actually going to read it, so just try it now. Go to a major news site, find the top personality or place involved in that news and look them up on Wikipedia. Does the entry refer the news story? How can your encyclopaedia at home possibly keep up?

Of course, the massive speed advantage of multi-contributor online reference material has to be weighed against the academic rigour that you get through content that takes longer to publish and which needs to charge for that expertise. That’s the approach the Guardian newspaper is looking to adopt in its fight against more rapid news media. In a recent email the editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger tells subscribers:

But we’re well aware that, increasingly, you tell us that what you want from the printed newspaper changes as you seek out, or absorb, breaking news from the web, mobile, TV and radio. Half of you now read the paper in the evening, by which time you want more pieces that explain events and contextualise them.

News is – as we’ve seen from the figures provided in the previous post – hugely important to people. But currently people don’t need to see it as an asset because the supply seemingly outstrips the demand. (I’m slightly cautious about that supply because we all live in countries where some of the news sources – whether free or paid for – can be less than reliable.) So for saleable content to be an asset and retain its value, it both needs to be hard to get hold of and offer some degree of added value.

Ross Dawson wrote a post that touches on different ways of creating that added value and there are a few examples I wanted to touch on:

  • If you turn the focus away from real-time consumption (as the Guardian intends to), you can extend content’s “use by” date and therefore increase how long it holds its value, as Louis Gray explains.
  • The New York Times is trying to improve engagement with its content, by adding trusted commenting.
  • Faber’s chief executive has a manifesto for change for the book industry.
  • The movie industry (what we in the UK used to call “film” but is clearly a redundant term given this discussion) has developed the UltraViolet licensing system so that customers can “buy once, play anywhere”.
  • Amazon have a similar approach with their Kindle so that digital books can be read on a variety of platforms from a single purchase.

How content producers exploit the multi-channel model is going to be key to their success. That’s what we’re going to look at next.

Philippe Parker on | 13 February 2012 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Selling content on different media

This is the second of five posts about saleable content management.

A kindle and an iPad

Following on from the previous post about the need to separate commercial content from its delivery medium, let’s consider how various industries have been addressing this issue.

The most obvious place to start is with music, where traditional physical media has all but disappeared. Not only are people not buying physical media, they’re not buying what was previously the most saleable format (albums) and sometimes not buying music at all. Putting piracy to one side for the moment, music is effectively leased rather than bought through services like Spotify. This is a feature I’ll return to at a later stage.

Newspapers and magazines are undergoing a similar transformation, but struggling to find appropriate business models. Out of people in the UK who get their news online, fewer than 1 in 25 pay for that service, despite the millions who visit newspaper websites like the Mail (17.2 million unique visitors from Europe in June 2011) and the Guardian (13.5 million) (Ofcom report [pdf, 2.05MB] page 213, section 5.3.7).

Television is changing radically and rapidly. Over a quarter of the UK web population used the internet to watch TV programmes on a weekly basis even though only 7% have a TV that’s actually connected to the internet (Ofcom report, page 7). This has prompted Sky to go beyond its investment in TV programmes to any device (through Sky Go) to TV over the web as well as via satellite, which has until now been its core business. Both Google and Apple meanwhile are preparing their imminent and doubtless disruptive incursions into the television market.

Which brings us to the similarly turbulent world of book publishing. While Amazon posted extraordinary figures (the 1.3 million eReaders bought in the UK over Christmas represents 1 person in 40 receiving one), the printed book industry is suffering: there are now no major bookstore chains in Australia, while major retailers in the UK and US are struggling. Meanwhile Apple is trying to corner the production (and to some extent vet the publication) of iBooks and where Amazon can’t encourage authors to bypass traditional publishers through its self-publishing model it simply acquires the publisher instead.

Every form of saleable media is in a state of flux. If publishers are going to move forward, they’re going to need to address some fundamentals which we’ll consider in our next post.

Philippe Parker on | 10 February 2012 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

How content management failed saleable content

This will be the first in a series of five posts about saleable content management.

A statue of a man clasping his face

This industry has spent years thinking about how to govern content, rather than about how to really make the most of it. We know the function of the content but we don’t know its value. Fundamentally, content – whether text, images, audio or video – would fall into these categories:

  • records, which either need to be retained or deleted;
  • processable content, which typically needs to be scanned or validated automatically;
  • collaborative content, such as co-authored or peer-reviewed internal documents;
  • public information, typically made available on websites but also in print brochures;
  • user-generated content, created by people outside the organisation, whether through facilities made available to them by the organisation (website comments) or through external services (social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter).

These functions carry some implicit value which a business analyst might define on a project-by-project basis. But content often has an explicit value: it’s created for sale.

Now I – and I think much of the content management industry – didn’t think too hard about this saleable content for quite some time. But then again, nor did the industries that own it.

While those of us who work in content management focussed on classification, permissions and workflow, publishers and producers thought instead about TV programmes and albums, hardbacks and newspaper supplements. The fundamental separation of presentation from content was not well understood; as Paul Graham already related in 2009:

Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either… Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.

Perhaps the distinction was too theoretical to be worthwhile. Now, however, it’s essential for anyone who hopes to make money from the content they create: you have to be able to exploit multiple delivery channels, both to reach a broader market and to survive the turbulent changes in how people buy and consume their content today.

We’ll consider these changes in the next post.

Philippe Parker on | 9 February 2012 | Tweet this |

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The marriage of content strategy and online engagement

Wedding cake

Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.

What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:

  • where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
  • where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
  • how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
  • how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
  • can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?

Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.

So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.

Philippe Parker on , | 16 December 2011 | Tweet this |

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How are you managing your reputation?

Gossips by jaci XIII

The recent superinjunctions cases in England have highlighted one particular issue: you may have content that you want people to come to you for, but they can get it in lots of different places on the web.

In this case a number of celebrities have sought to protect their privacy in the face of allegations made about them and have won orders preventing anyone repeating them. But some of these cases have “gone viral” with those allegations being repeated on Twitter and elsewhere, potentially outside the jurisdiction of English courts. This calls into question whether the injunctions can be sustained: given that most people now know the identity of the people involved and the allegations, why prevent the mainstream media from repeating them?

Let’s put to one side the moral and legal questions this raises and instead focus on the commercial issue for publishers: News International researched and developed one of the stories and is now unable to report on it. Not only does the celebrity have no control over the content, but the publisher has lost it too.

This situation can happen to any publisher in less extreme circumstances: you’re trying to lead a discussion on your website, probably about your products and services, but the real discussions are happening outside it, in other areas of the web. Access to content is competitive; and we’re talking way beyond SEO. The competitions is based on three factors:

  1. driving people to your site and maintaining their interaction there;
  2. recognising the debate that happens outside yoru site and interacting with it;
  3. having a content strategy that enables you to do both (1) and (2) in the tone and manner that you want to engage your audience in.

Number 1 is pretty traditional and many organisations have recognised it for a long time, although the methods for attracting visitors to your site are continually evolving. Search engines are probably of diminishing value, with marketing via social media increasing. But affiliate and offline campaigns can also help to attract visitors.

Number 2 is where a lot of organisations fall down. There’s a fairly blinkered view that if content isn’t on your own website, people aren’t talking about it. Out of site, out of mind. Yet most organisations’ products and services are evaluated beyond their own content management processes. Web managers can no longer be managers just for their own site but for the online presence of the organisaiton they represent.

Number 3 then takes on an increasing importance. Do you want to engage in the debate beyond your site? There’s a danger of being sucked into constant rebuttals or distracting side-issues. And how do you want to have those conversations? Do you need a different tone on Facebook or in discussion forums from your main corporate site?

Web content management is changing radically. Where WCMS were supposed to give organisations degrees of control over their online presence, how people use the web to access information is changing. If you don’t recognise that fact, people will get your content from elsewhere and from someone else’s perspective. You can’t expect people to base your reputation on what you tell them.

Philippe Parker on | 23 May 2011 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

My threepence for 2011

I can’t help myself. It’s New Year and that means some kind of retrospective, and indeed preview. I’ve been working a lot less with off-the-shelf CMS and doing a lot more work involving custom-built web applications. I’ve no idea if this is reflective of a wider market trend but I thought I’d share three things that I’ve seen in the past year which I think will become even more important over the next 12 months.

1953 Thrupenny bit

1. Content management applies to off-site content too

It’s all very well thinking about content as the “stuff” people in your organisation create in repositories that you control. But there’s a really big issue. There’s a whole load of content that’s not in your repositories that you need to deal with. From an internal operations perspective, this is the tacit knowledge and the documents that people take outside your office when they leave each day and doesn’t come back until they return. From an external marketing perspective, this is the content that people outside your organisation are creating on platforms you don’t control: Facebook, Twitter, blog posts. Just getting a handle on what’s going on strikes fear into many. But exploiting this off-site content will bring huge benefits to your organisation.

2. The web is a competition

Look at all the online reputation tools out there like Klout and We Follow. Isn’t online participation just a competition where the brands with the biggest reach have the largest social market capitalisation? It used to be about whether you appeared on the first page of Google’s search results, but now we can measure influence and advocacy in other ways too. The web encourages you to ensure that your online presence exceeds those of your competitors. The services that you offer need to tap into that mindset if they’re going to be successful. But you also need to consider what tangible returns you make on raising your web profile. It’s a competition, there are trophies, but is there a cash prize?

3. Designers need to think a lot harder about multi-platform

While people who’re engaged in heavy content entry will continue to use devices with comfortable physical keyboards, we’re obviously going to see even more use of mobile phones and tablets. This means smaller screens, touch screen controls and often, slower performance. Designers who are constantly trying to cram ever richer user experiences onto a page are going to fail their audiences if they don’t consider how people on slow connections can download media, or interact with fiddly HTML buttons. It’s no good expecting the device browsers to be clever enough to handle your designs well. Test-driven interface design is going to be essential.

Philippe Parker on | 5 January 2011 | Tweet this |

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The truth about content management

Daft Punk encore

I am going to make a point about content management and better websites, but bear with me.

The web can be a really annoying place. But I found this tweet from Alain de Botton particularly ill-conceived:

A chief effect of the internet is to boost the already unhelpfully strong sense that the answers are ‘out there’ rather than within.

Why did it annoy me so much?

Firstly, because it confuses the medium with the content. There are lots of answers “out there” and not just on the internet. Does a TCP / IP protocol make ideas less robust than if they appear on a printed page? It’s a completely ridiculous notion. It’s one that those of us who work with the web still need to counter in many organisations where people still see the web as a frivolous fad; a notion that runs absolutely contrary to some of the web’s most successful sites, particularly those providing health information.

Secondly, because there’s a hypocrisy in attempting to broadcast aphorisms over the very medium that you’re criticising. This made me wonder if the tweet was a joke, or some kind of ironic experiment to see if people would retweet something non-sensical. And over a hundred did. Were they doing it in jest too?

Thirdly, because de Botton writes and sells books about philosophy and now he seems to be telling us that other people (like him) don’t have the answer, and that we should focus on introspection. This is probably a reference to the Socratic principle “know thyself” but this shouldn’t be at the expense of trying to discover objective truths. You can know yourself but be ignorant about the world around you: Socrates’ pupil, Plato, was a key figure in European philosophy but still defended slavery.

So what does this mean for content management?

There are many objective truths and certainties, but there are many more that are still to be proven. Establishing those truths is a competitive business. Scientists, explorers, researchers, all compete to establish a truth in a particular domain.

Similarly, your organisation holds truths that are more or less well articulated: terms of business, HR policy, progress reports, invoices.

Getting to these truths is a fundmental issue for content management. As users, we know that your website, or intranet, or digital asset management system should hold the piece of information that will answer my question. If we can’t find the right information, we’ll just invent it. But deep down, we know it’s there somewhere.

So problem 1 is: how do we make sure that our audiences can find the right information? Through better classification, more effective tools and encouraging people to tell their peers that this content is the right content.

Problem 2 is: how do I make sure that people get the right message from the information when they find it? By providing clear content that is constructed in a way that is appropriate to your audience: well written, well-produced, accessible.

The truth should be in your systems. If it isn’t, your audience will go somewhere else, “out there”, to find it.

Philippe Parker on | 10 November 2010 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

The curse of WCM

Salvin's Albatross Diomedea cauta salvini

There are so many large websites which bear the curse of being CMS-driven rather than people-driven. It hangs like an albatross around the neck of visitors.

We know that navigation structures and labels should reflect your audience rather than your organisation. But there’s more to it than that. If you design your website based on content management practices, you’ll condemn your visitors to wander aimlessly through oceans of content rather than make a swift voyage home.

Typically, when you deploy a CMS you do some kind of card sort. You audit your content, group what’s relevant, label the groups and those labels become your putative navigation. If you’ve enough money and sense you’ll test that navigation on some users. This is a pretty straightforward way of coming up with a structure that people understand. But that’s not the same as the navigation that people need. You’ve just prioritised your taxonomy over your visitor’s user journey.

Instead of looking at what you have, ask yourself two questions.

  1. Which tasks do the audience most want to achieve on your website?
  2. Which tasks do you most want them to achieve (for example, because it saves you money compared to offline channels)?

Those should be two primary drivers for defining navigation. Don’t get caught up in what you have. Focus on what’s needed.

Philippe Parker on | 20 September 2010 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

CMS fail: how not to implement a content management system

Envelope stamped with a fail

The attempts of Johnston Press, a publisher of local news in the UK, to implement a new content management system have spectacularly backfired. How can the selection of a CMS lead to a vote of no confidence in the managing director and a ballot on strike action by employees? That’s a pretty colossal project failure by any measure.

Johnston Press selected the Atex content management system. Atex, whose product is based on the acquisition of the Swedish CMS Polopoly, has carved itself a niche in the newspapers vertical and Johnston Press would no doubt have been reassured by their client list. However, the company imposed the choice of CMS on employees at a number of its titles and more importantly, inextricably linked the CMS to changes in working practice. The Guardian provides more background to the dispute.

So where did it all go wrong?

No stakeholder involvement

It’s truly crass management to push through a project without consulting those people who have to live with its consequences.  Johnston Press wanted to cut costs with an integrated cross-channel publishing environment and employees were right to fear that this would put their jobs at risk. So the CMS became an enemy, rather than a product that would help staff to work better and secure the company’s future. There may have been no way to get around job losses, but if there had been consultation about the reasons for the CMS, how it was going to work and the benefits that it would have, there could have been a more constructive dialogue and a greater chance of a decent outcome.

No content strategy

One reason why Johnston Press thought the CMS would bring cost savings was because they thought they could replace the role of sub-editors, getting the journalists who’d researched the stories to also place the stories and create the headlines. This may well have been possible, but it doesn’t look to have been that well thought through. The journalists were interested in gathering stories and information gathering. The sub-editors were interested in promoting the right messages and maintaining editorial standards. These objectives can conflict.

Again, had the management approached the project by identifying a content strategy issue – positioning the kind of tasks they wanted from their readers and establishing relevant journalistic and copy-writing processes to support these tasks – they would have stood a better chance of selling the benefits to their employees and having a successful project.

Lessons learned?

I would hope that your content management project failures haven’t been as extreme as this one, but I wanted to take two highlights from this project.

Firstly, it demonstrates the importance of an inclusive and transparent selection process. You need to involve the people who’ll receive business benefits from the system, the people who’ll support the system and the people who’ll use the system. And you need to communicate the business case to them transparently so that they understand the purpose of the CMS and don’t feel threatened by it once it’s been implemented.

Secondly, you still need people to assure content quality. The CMS can certainly help you build in those processes that assure quality, but you need real writers to write good content and achieve your business goals.

There’s a lesson for the supplier too. This publicity hasn’t been great for Atex. When a project goes so spectacularly wrong, it’s easy to assume that the software is the root cause. But there’s an onus on the supplier to deliver against a clear brief and ensure that the client isn’t being stupid. You may have got your commission, but at what cost?

If you have a more spectacular case of CMS failure than this, I’d love to hear it.

Philippe Parker on , | 9 April 2010 | Tweet this |

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Devolving complexity

Combined harvester

What sort of editorial model do you follow for your web content management? Do you try to get as many as possible hands-on, or do you run everything through a centralised editorial team?

It’s ironic that WCMS which enable you to perform more advanced content management provide tools that you probably won’t want to devolve to part-time editorial teams. Conversely, simpler WCMS are often chosen by by smaller, centralised teams who often feel constrained by the software they use.

Vignette, for example, enables you to assign content to various taxonomies through folders, projects and channels, so that content can be cross-referenced extensively across your site. Put these taxonomies in the hands of people who don’t understand them and you’ll create convoluted user journeys: the exact opposite of your content management objectives.

Alterian’s corporate offering meanwhile — once known as Immediacy — provides pretty basic content management. Most users should be able to get their head around its tools pretty easily. But if you want to create more complex content relationships or have content fragments re-used across your sites, you’re better off with Alterian’s enterprise product, known as Morello. Devolving editorial responsibilities to part-timers who don’t fully understand the consequences of updating content that’s used in lots of places in your websites is decidedly risky, however.

In larger organisations, lots of people will produce content for the web sporadically. These people will change, have variable knowledge of the software and writing style guides, and limited understanding of your website. The last thing they need is a piece of software that allows them to break stuff because they just don’t get it.

So, do you:

  1. select a simple WCM for devolved teams to create pages in predefined templates; or
  2. select a complex WCM that enables you to perform more advanced content management tasks, but centralise the editorial process.

The more you want to cross-reference and re-use content across your sites, the greater your need for an advanced tool and an expert team to manage it. But if you want to devolve authorship, you’ll need to keep content management tasks and software as simple as possible. Don’t try to industrialise content production by providing everyone with more machinery. For broader participation you need to provide hand tools. Leave the combined harvester in the hands of experts.

Philippe Parker on , , , | 8 December 2009 | Tweet this |

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Something rotten in WCM

J. Boye’s 2009 Arhus conference was a learned and often humorous affair. The biggest lesson I brought back from Denmark was just how far away all of us who work in the industry — website managers, technologists, vendors, consultants — are from having good web content management.
Chimpanzee performing Hamlet by King Chimp

Alas, poor clients

How many people could say that they were happy with their implementation? Even those case studies I saw were tinged with regret at missing features or how long the process took. The conference was littered with people who’d wasted budget and wanted to share their hindsight. And these were the enlightened ones.

The industry protests too much, methinks

But while those of us in the industry can easily put errors down to naïvety, I think it’s time we took a long hard look at ourselves. How can we tell users that CMS is like complex machinery which should involve substantial training and even change management? That’s an appalling attitude to user requirements.

Don’t try to make people change… do something that can’t already be done. (Euan Semple)

When every survey shows usability as the top area of dissatisfaction with CMS, what’s preventing vendors from making a friendlier system? As Seth Gottlieb points out, they’re all as bad as each other.

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

Creating and maintaining content should be simple enough for devolved editorial teams to perform with little training. The tricky thing is creating high quality content to suit an audience’s needs. Yet few CMS will ease editors through this process or evaluate their content against style guides. We’re beginning to see a few technologies in this area, but these are just sold as add-ons to an already bloated feature set.

The play’s the thing

It seems the industry has been blind to the truth. Features are specified but never used. Vendors add functionality so that they can score highly in analyst reports and avoid being excluded from shortlists, but all they’re doing is making it more difficult for users to create a compelling web presence.
To be or not to be
WCM was once a breakthrough in enabling less technical users to publish web content relatively quickly. But has it really progressed in the last few years? I don’t think so. We just have more modules piled onto re-skinned interfaces. Can’t we have friendlier tools for delivering a content strategy? Otherwise WCM will see some other application usurp its role and seduces its client base, which would be a tragedy for the industry.

More on #fixwcm

More on #jboye09

Philippe Parker on , | 10 November 2009 | Tweet this |

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The importance of good metadata

There’s been some debate on the role of metadata in content management: is metadata the future of content management, an integral part of the content, or are we making an artificial distinction?

Let’s start by setting aside the technological issues, because these are largely irrelevant. Metadata may be stored in a database separate from a file, or in a distinct table, or marked up differently, but this isn’t the determining thing that makes it different from other data or content held in a system. It can even be an inherent part of a document. What makes metadata different is how it’s used.

Metadata is used for classification. It’s used to relate one piece of content to another and to help people and systems find relevant information. If it’s not serving that purpose then it’s not metadata.

This may lead you to the conclusion that I’m saying everything is metadata. But it’s not. Some content that is marked up as metadata isn’t really metadata at all, or is at best poor metadata. Take a look at the UK’s National DNA Database, for example. This database records ethnicity and skin colour as a way to search for people, but one person’s view of their ethnicity may not be shared by another’s. This disparity has effectively rendered this metadata set useless. The records on ethnicity and skin colour are potentially useful as content, but unreliable as metadata.

So if you’re looking to define metadata types and corresponding taxonomies for your content, you have to consider how those doing the classification will apply the metadata and how other people are going to use that classification. If it’s not useful, it’s not metadata. If it is useful, you’ll be on your way to managing your content.

Philippe Parker on | 18 September 2009 | Tweet this |

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What is enterprise web content management?

I find it hard to believe that there are still CMS vendors telling us that their software manages “enterprise web content”. Does “enterprise” mean just a more expensive way for large organisations to manage web content? Enterprise web content management is missing the point.

Firstly, if you think your organisation’s web presence is only the content generated in your organisation from your processes, you’ve completely misunderstood what the web is about. Your visitors aren’t just going to your site; they’re visiting sites all over the web. If you think they only want your “enterprise” content you’ve buried your head in the sand.

Secondly, if your website has a dedicated editorial team with a content strategy and proper style guides – and it should – they may well be resistant to the idea that anyone can be a web author as long as they use enterprise content management tools and processes.

The website is rarely just an end point or simple publishing channel for the documents your organisation creates. It’s market-driven. It’s meant to provide the information that your audience needs. Whether the website is designed to generate revenue (sell products) or to save money (stop people using more expensive channels like call centres), it needs to be managed so that your visitors can achieve their goals as simply as possible.

It’s because the creation of web content often sits outside enterprise processes that dedicated web content management software exists and stands alone from ECM. A good WCM will simply focus on making it as easy as possible to manage content created solely for publishing to the web, to be read on the web, by a specific audience.

There are of course many organisations who need to relate their website more closely to the rest of their activities. But what’s required isn’t just a piece of software that tacks “web” as a status on the end of a long workflow. You need a process that allows the website to request information from the rest of the organisation so you can deliver your web strategy.

If you view your website as a place where you can publish the “stuff” that your organisation produces, you’ll end up with enterprise web content management, and it will be bad for everyone involved. If you want a good website, make sure it’s a driver in your organisation and not a passenger.

Philippe Parker on 25 August 2009 | Tweet this |

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The future of content management

Julian Wraith has started a discussion about the future of content management. There are a variety of responses to this linked to from the comments section, each with their own focus, but I recommend reading Laurence Hart for a longer-term view.

My own, brief take is that content management has to face a number of challenging questions over the next couple of years.

Will content need to be managed?

Content management currently focuses on providing tools for groups to create, review and retrieve content so that an approved version of that content can be made available to predefined audiences. User-generated content and the broadcast models of social networking challenge that focus.

  1. Anyone can view content: most tweets go to everyone rather than direct to individuals.
  2. Anyone can contribute content in a UGC world.
  3. Distinguishing what’s your organisation’s content and what’s individual is becoming increasingly fraught; just take a look at any blogger’s site for disclaimers even though they’re blogging about their company’s services.

Will content need context?

Even in the least structured repositories (wikis, flickr, twitter) content is still tagged so that it can be retrieved. But the onus is on the user to find the right tag and on a search application to enable this. This is quite different from a CMS, where the software provides contextual models like folders and related documents to guide the user through an information architecture. As search interfaces and technology improves, there will be less need to provide those contextual models. I have my doubts that semantic mark-up will help people create more relevant content, but I do think that improvements to search will mean that content will be “find-able” and “relate-able” anywhere, even if it isn’t in the right taxonomical folder.

Will content need to be deleted?

As volumes of content continues to increase and contextualisation decreases, finding relevant content amid all the dross will become harder. I think that this will be an even bigger business driver than cost of storage for deleting content that’s irrelevant. But because distinguishing “approved” and strategic content will be harder, it will also be hard to identify which content is dross and what might be useful. Socially-driven records management is bound to take a stab at this problem, but whichever content management tool can help people to get rid of useless content is going to be a winner in the long term.

Philippe Parker on 6 August 2009 | Tweet this |

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Your website shall go the ball

Is yours a Cinderella website? Does it have an inner beauty that’s hidden away in some corner of the internet that potential Prince Charmings never visit? Does it suffer at the hands of a step-mother whose only interest is self-aggrandisement rather than nurturing their charge?

Get your website out of the scullery!

Promoting your web presence isn’t about just finding some kind of SEO godmother so you can trend on Twitter or make a splash on Google. You need to have content that’s stimulating, up-to-date and relevant to your target audience. If you simply tart up your presentation and wave it under people’s noses, your website will be about as popular as the ugly sisters.

So how do you get to the ball?

1. Make your content presentable.

Cleanse, freshen, and exfoliate! Remove anything that’s unsightly or redundant, accentuate your positive features by promoting them in your navigation and ensure that your design is focussed on your users’ needs.

2. Get out and network.

Once you have a website you think people will want to visit, you’ll need some kind of vehicle for getting your website in front of them. The channels that you use will depend on your target audience, but clearly SEO, social networking profiles and non-web media are all legitimate ways of getting yourself noticed. Unlike Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, however, there needs to be honesty in the way you promote yourself. Habitat shot themselves in the foot recently by tagging their sales tweets with keywords about the Iranian election. Similarly if people are drawn to your website because it has popular but irrelevant keyword matches, they’re not going to hang around for long.

3. Keep that glass slipper.

Once you’ve got people to visit your site and experience your well-presented content, you need something to keep them coming back. RSS feeds are an obvious way of doing this, but you need to keep publishing good content if you want the party to carry on past midnight.

There’s not much point in having a website that’s an ugly sister – in your face but unattractive – or that’s beautiful but unknown. Every little website can grow up to be a princess if you can just show off its inner beauty.

Some further reading:

As a brief aside, did you know that Cinderella’s name comes from having her behind covered in cinders because she used to sit in the chimney to keep warm? And that her slippers were made from squirrel fur: vair in French, converted to verre (glass) by Charles Perrault to make the story more magical. Honest, guv’nor.

Philippe Parker on , | 26 June 2009 | Tweet this |

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Ditch useless content

Historically, web content management and records management have been at two different ends of the content management spectrum: web was all about time-to-market while records were about defining what you could get away with deleting. As web has increasingly become a channel for storing and sharing business-critical content (both within and beyond the firewall), you need to consider how long you can afford to hold onto your web content for.

Typically, retention policies are based on regulatory requirements, but it’s also a matter of reducing clutter. Most information we have at our disposal is useless: getting rid of it is going to help you get to useful content far more quickly.

So how do you sift wheat from chaff and decide what should stay and what should go? You have a number of options:

1. Stock-take

Spider your website every six months to get the last updated date for every page. Assign someone to go through every page that’s over six months old and decide if it’s valuable. If it is, update its last updated date; if not, remove it.

Pros: simple to implement.

Cons: a time-consuming and pretty blunt instrument.

2. Rolling assessments

Slightly more effective than a six-monthly stock take is a rolling approach, which you can do by setting a workflow status in your CMS to alert you to review each piece of content six months after its been published. The review cycle is therefore becomes business as usual rather than an arduous project.

Pros: spreads the workload, covers content that isn’t spider-able (such as reserved, non-public content).

Cons: still treats all content as equal, irrespective of its real value.

3. Pre-classification

Use either of the above methods in combination with metadata attached to the content. When you first publish your content, classify it as strategic or tactical. You can also add classifications for legal purposes (such as content covered under the data protection act). The different classifications then attract different review cycles: you review strategic content every year but tactical content after 6 weeks. You can add as many classifications as suit your needs and tie them to content types automatically within the CMS; for example, research publications are always strategic while press releases are always tactical. You can also automate the removal of these pieces of content using the CMS workflow.

Pros: flexible, extendable approach to retention; simple to implement with editorial guidance.

Cons: you’ll probably need to do an initial stock take of your existing content in order to perform the initial classification.

You still need to decide how you archive your web content: do you simply delete a page completely, or do you archive off a section of the site to a flat-file copy so that you can refer to it if necessary?

Whether you archive or delete, removal of useless content is an essential activity for all large website owners. Implementing a web content retention policy will bring real benefits to your organisation beyond the world of compliance. Less clutter brings easier content management, simpler information architecture and better access to relevant information for your user base. It’s an essential de-tox, so get deleting!

Key reading:

Philippe Parker on | 2 June 2009 | Tweet this |

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Support your web editorial team

It’s a pretty sure-fire bet that if your website has heavily devolved authorship, or a model where lots of authors make requests direct to a central team, that you’re going to have duplicate content, incorrect content and altogether more content than you actually need.

This is usually because few people know the content really well, while those who do are seldom in a position of sufficient authority to enforce processes and guidelines to make the website a streamlined communications tool. The communications team in charge of the site are put upon by subject experts and non-web marketing managers who insist that they need a new page, often linked to from the homepage, that promotes their unique piece of content.

Unless you have a really tough manager taking charge of the site, this spells trouble. Content is added without an over-riding communication strategy and very little content is taken away. It’s a symptom that you see most often in the public sector, where people’s fear of breaching misunderstood legislation like FOI mean that content purges are rare. Consequently website management becomes unwieldy as more and more superfluous information is piled into the CMS repository. This creates its own content management issues, but the most significant problem is lack of focus on the website.

If this is the case for your website, you need two things:

  1. A clear objective for your site.
  2. A clear process for dealing with duplicate content.

When you find duplicates, or a request is made to add content that resembles content which exists already, you need to ask the following questions:

  1. Does the new content meet the website objective? If it does, process the request. If not, reject it.
  2. Is there evidence that your audience requires the information supplied by the new content. If so, process it. If not, reject it.

If the content exists already and is fulfilling its remit but isn’t being read by your audience, you have an information architecture issue. This is the justification for promoting the content as a feature on the homepage or elsewhere on the site.

These are all basic editorial issues, but if you’re suffering from them it’s probably not because you have bad editors but because your editors have little support. You need to help them develop and communicate this very simple process and ensure that it is enforced. The clarity of your process will translate into clearer content on your website.

Philippe Parker on 21 May 2009 | Tweet this |

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Content type essentials

The concept of content type is so fundamental to CMS that you could argue any system lacking this definition really isn’t a CMS at all: it’s a blogging platform or page builder.

At the most basic level, content types are a classification tool used to distinguish groups of content. Typically, websites will have site sections, news stories, reports, and so on. But this basic classification is handled easily by metadata: just tagging a page as a “news story” and using that tag as a link to other news stories is very straightforward. It’s not really making any use of the content type metaphor.

So what are the benefits of content types?

1. They provide structure.

Larger sites need structure for several reasons: it helps contributors to enter the right kind of information (title, summary, event dates); it helps them to put content into the right areas of the website or intranet; and, it assures consistency in site design across pages that have the same function but different content.

2. They scale the system.

Being able to distinguish between a job, an event and a personal profile is essential if you have a large site with lots of contributors. Content types help with the information architecture of your site for public users and contributors alike; they enable you to introduce navigation that you just would be very difficult achieve without this concept.

3. They enable devolved ownership.

Most websites are “owned” by a marketing or communications team who are keen to ensure house style across the main publication, but who would be happy for other departments to own and maintain their own content that doesn’t require editorial review. If you don’t have content types, it’s a pretty difficult task to set up areas of the site that one department can contribute to without having free reign to change everything, particularly if you want to ensure that public website navigation doesn’t simply reflect your departmental structures. If you have structured content that doesn’t require editorial intervention (press releases, jobs, events, etc.) you can simply assign ownership of these content types to internal teams without compromising the editorial quality of your overall website.

If you’re struggling with findability or devolving ownership of content on your site, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’re lacking the structure to cope with the increasing size and complexity of your site content. Revisiting your defined content types could well be a good place to start.

Philippe Parker on | 21 January 2009 | Tweet this |

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Is taxonomy dead?

An argument about taxonomy has been brewing between two parties who both know what they’re talking about: Theresa Regli at CMS Watch and Patrick Lambe of Organising Knowledge. At the end of last year, CMS Watch proposed that “Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!”. As a taxonomist, Patrick Lambe took great umbrage.

I think that byline was a bit facile, but the article does prompt a serious debate about where taxonomy and more particularly expert taxonomists are heading. When organisations think web 2.0, they think wikis, user-generated content and tagging. They don’t think about well-organised content. Web 2.0 implies the death of expert taxonomy rather than the death of taxonomy itself.

People just don’t want taxonomists; they think they can organise content for themselves. While this may be true, it’s unfortunately also true that they just can’t organise content for anyone else. This creates a particular problem for systems which are dependent on finding very specific information: intranets, for example.

If you need your audience to be able to retrieve information reliably, don’t look to “audience development officers“: recognise that taxonomists do have an expertise that you’ll find useful. However, not all information needs to be structured, so feel free to challenge any taxonomist who tells you otherwise.

Philippe Parker on | 14 January 2009 | Tweet this |

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When search is a good way to navigate

If your site has thousands of pages of content that you’re struggling to organise, it’s pretty tempting to scrap your CMS-driven navigation structures and just provide your visitors with a search-driven interface instead. You can achieve this in two ways.

Firstly, by providing a simple search box. After all, this is the way most people find new information through Google. Secondly, by using a search tool to push similar content to users; for example the right-hand column of this page provides links to pages that are classified under different themes. But before you view search as some kind of panacea for all your information architecture woes, let’s pause to reconsider these two methods.

In the first case, how do you know that the search results presented by Google are the most relevant pages to your query? Google has no real benchmark. Then weigh up how much effort people put into ensuring their content is optimised to appear at the top of the search results and then ask yourself what you’d have to do to ensure that relevant content for every search a user undertakes.

In the second case, consider that actually I’ve already (very loosely) made decisions about navigation by tagging every post. This is almost the same effort as organising the content into folder structures as you would in a CMS. In fact, for sites with lots of content it can be more difficult to tag all the content than to drop it into a folder structure; the folders provide a more complete classification metaphor that’s easier for people with less expert knowledge to implement.
So how do you decide when search is better for navigation than in a CMS? Here are my suggested criteria:

  1. You have the money.
    Implementing faceted search technologies can be significantly more expensive than using standard content management system functionality. Day rates for leading product professional services are often relatively high, there are licence costs and there’s an additional cost of integration, particularly if you need to tie a security model into the search tool.
  2. You have few content types.
    But you have lots of content. Structured navigation from search works well where you have similar kinds of content, with similar structures against which the search engine can execute straightforward queries. A product catalogue is an obvious example. The tool can filter on price, format, location, etc. which have definitive and distinct values.
  3. Your content is distinct.
    Categories need to be unique; semantic tools aren’t really advanced enough yet to tell you that apple is a fruit not an iPhone when displayed with orange unless orange is the network provider. Moreover, your pages need to be called something readily identifiable. If you have ten pages called “Help” or “Contact Us”, how will the search tool know which is the relevant resource for the site visitor?
  4. Linking is obvious.
    If you use search to provide your navigation, you relinquish editorial control, so it must be clear why pages in the navigation are related. On a medical site, for example, you might link to other conditions treated with the same drug. However, as soon as you’re trying to tell people something you can get in trouble if you automate. An example I often use is a page about health advice for eggs: should this link to information about required protein intake (i.e. eggs are good for you) or about cholesterol (i.e. eggs are bad for you)? Or should you exercise some editorial discretion and explain about balanced diets? There are few search engines that could perform the navigation required to achieve the latter example.

Practically, it’s generally simpler to use CMS to navigate, with a search option to help people who are stuck. The advantage of CMS-driven navigation is that the editorial control you can exercise should help you to push visitors to your site along a route you want them to take. However, if you’re happy to let your intrepid visitors explore your content, and you’ve nothing in particular you want to promote to them, then search engines can be a viable means to provide navigation.

My final analogy is that CMS-driven navigation is like a library, while search-driven navigation is more like a bookstore. In a library you’ve preplanned how visitors can find specific information. In a bookstore you’re encouraging them to browse, but they may never find what they came in for.

Philippe Parker on | 15 December 2008 | Tweet this |

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Basics of organising web content

There are a bewildering array of resources available on information architecture, user experience and interface design, so I just wanted to make a very quick post on how to approach the organisation of your web content.

  1. Identify key user types (personas)
  2. Identify key tasks they need to undertake (user journeys)
  3. Develop navigation to enable journeys (site maps)
  4. Develop user interface that will enable users to complete journeys (wire-frames)

Main advantages of doing things this way:

  • You’re not trying to fit in existing content unless it’s actually useful to your users.
  • You can identify content that’s missing easily.

There are more useful IA definitions at iaonesheeters.com

Philippe Parker on , , | 11 December 2008 | Tweet this |

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why would you put FAQs on a website?

To be able to tell people that FAQ content is available on your site.

Who do FAQs help?

Only the person who needs to claim that the content is on the site.

Why don’t FAQs help visitors to your site?

Because visitors to your site don’t care whether their question has been asked by anyone else or not. All they want to do is accomplish a task.

But my FAQs are representative of what all visitors are asking, so don’t they bring value?

Think of it another way. Your site is providing a user manual for your services. By providing FAQs you’re offering them that user manual without a contents page. Is that helpful?

But isn’t it helpful to provide what most people want first?

Of course, but if I don’t want the most obvious answers, I’ll give up and go to another provider: either through a competitor website or I’ll pick up the telephone and harass your call centre. That probably defeats the purpose of your website.

Why is browsing FAQs a flawed argument?

Let’s say you’re describing your arrangements for dealing with business partners. If I want to become a partner, I should follow links to Partners > Becoming our partner. Why would I trawl through a long list of questions in order to find the right one. I want a simple and obvious path to the information I need.

Why can’t visitors just search the FAQs?

They’ll probably do this if you offer no other way to the information. But the success of their searches will depend on how well and how consistently you classify the questions and on having a really good search engine that will pull out relevant information.

Isn’t it easy to manage FAQs?

It might be easy to add an FAQ, but it’s extremely difficult to manage them. You’ll need to check that similar content doesn’t already exist, just framed with a different question. You’ll need to check that you’re removing questions that are obsolete, or simply not being asked any more. And you’ll need to ensure that questions are presented in the right order according to your site visitors’ behaviour.

So is there anything good about FAQs?

Not in their standard format of unsorted lists of questions and short answers.

So what should I do?

Review what people are contacting you about over other channels. This information should probably be on your website. Does it exist already? If it exists, is it being adequately promoted? Undertake some usability studies challenging people to find the information. What do you learn about your site navigation from this? If the content is prominent, is it well-written? Are people finding the content and misunderstanding it?

Isn’t this post just stating the obvious?

Yes, but it’s amazing how many people think their website needs FAQs but they never ask themselves why.

Philippe Parker on | 5 December 2008 | Tweet this |

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Your links need to be quality content too

BBC News is one of the most popular sites on the web. It’s steeped in the high journalistic principles that have driven the corporation for the last 80-odd years or so.

The BBC can struggle to innovate on its website however. Since it has such a large audience and generally well-organised structure, it has become a sort of de facto standard for presentation of content-rich sites. Changing this standard makes visitors nervous. Perhaps more significantly, the corporation’s funding is significantly targeted on producing TV and radio rather than web, despite many of the corporation’s multi-platform aspirations. Innovation in the browser faces stringent public critique.

Nevertheless, there are experiments in improving web delivery. Recently, particularly for viewers in the UK, the site has seen an increase in the use of embedded video delivered via its iPlayer. There’s an obvious attempt to make the website more multimedia, but it does beg the question, will people watch video in a browser at work? People scan the news, particularly on the web. They’re a great deal less likely to sit and watch a video.

Then you have the issue of external links. The web is, after all, about a worldwide information network, so your own information becomes richer as you link to content beyond your site. The problem is that you don’t own that content, which means that it can say things that you disagree with or that might make you look less than impartial (important in the case of the BBC).

Consequently, the BBC has a disclaimer for any external links. But it does beg the question, why have they introduced inline links to Wikipedia?

Clearly Wikipedia is very Web 2.0 for the BBC marketing team, at the heart of the social web. But that brings real problems for a sites whose content is supposed to be reliable. Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, even though it is peer-reviewed in extremis. The BBC has no way of checking that the biographies supplied on the site are accurate, but it treats this as additional reference information and by doing so undermines the its own journalism.

I’m a fan of the BBC News website and I recognise that the corporation struggles to fulfil both its official remit and target new markets, but the quality of your content can be measured not just by what it says and how it is written, but by where it positions itself in the web. If you reference external sites whose authority is questionable, you undermine the value of your own content.

Visitors to BBC news are looking for accurate content. By hopping on the Wikipedia bandwagon, the BBC is undermining its users’ objectives.

Philippe Parker on 27 August 2008 | Tweet this |

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Han Fei, on content management functionality

Confucianism has long been a predominant philosophy in China, but it was opposed by Legalism, which held that individual opinion meant little in the face of the interest of the state.

In the web content management world, it is the public website that commands our exclusive attention. The only relevant question is: Is the site meeting its objectives and delivering required information and services to its visitors?

Adequate governance needs to be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to break what makes the website successful. If you allow people too much flexibility, they’ll make self-interested decisions rather than good decisions.

When a sage governs a state, he does not rely on the people to do good out of their own will. Instead, he sees to it that they are not allowed to do what is not good. If he relies on people to do good out of their own will, within the borders of the state not even ten persons can be counted on.

So, if you’ve accepted that your templates are well-designed, why would you enable people to move content around? Just give them a web-based form to enter content. It’s less glamorous for the content editor, but much more likely to produce the right effect. Similarly, provide people with enforced structures in which to classify content. This will ensure consistency and a better end-user experience. Otherwise, people will simply drop content into new website sections that they think might be more relevant, rather than those that everyone is used to getting the information from. If you decide your food is spicy, don’t give people an option to make it Mexican or Chinese or Indian. It’s spicy.

Clearly, this command-and-control approach may be difficult for some organisations to implement. But remember what Han Fei tells us: “An enlightened ruler holds up facts and discards all that is without practical value.” If your design and approach can be proven, no one in your team should be allowed to break your website by undermining these principles.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 20 August 2008 | Tweet this |

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Content management lessons from China: Sun Tzu

China is in fashion. The Olympics, with its spectacular opening ceremony, has brought the Middle Kingdom and its culture to the fore. So we’re going to hop on the bandwagon by looking at some of the better-known examples of Chinese thought and consider how they might influence on web content management (WCM).

Sun Tzu, on effective management

The Art of War was a favourite text for the Reagan-ite wannabe executive who viewed business as a perpetual battle. Yet effective management is rarely about deceiving others and taking control over their realm, despite what some departmental managers may think. Indeed, Sun Tzu stresses the need for delegation as a means to enjoying more control. Management is about delivering an end product.

There are five main obstacles to success:

  1. recklessness: consider what impact your decisions will have before you enforce them;
  2. cowardice: don’t be afraid to implement what you know is right;
  3. hasty temper: don’t be provoked into arguments with stakeholders or suppliers;
  4. delicacy of honor: you don’t need to appear all-knowing; recognise your weaknesses, be open about them and engage people to help;
  5. over-solicitude for the team: people will be unhappy during the project, but if they see that what you’re doing is right, they’ll buy into the cause.

Successful implementations are about pursuing a common objective without having to appease people along the way. So delegate responsibility to your implementation team and ensure that they enforce your decisions for you.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 18 August 2008 | Tweet this |

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Breaking through to great websites

In the previous post we looked at how Jim Collins’ analysis of companies that made a tangible progression from being good to great put themselves in a position to make those changes possible, and applied this logic to websites. In this post we’re going to look at how to achieve breakthrough in creating great websites once you’ve been through the necessary buildup.

Hedgehog concept

Collins describes at length what he calls a hedgehog, so don’t expect me to plagiarise the concept, just read the book. The main thrust of the concept is that businesses and — I propose — websites must focus on one big thing and be great at it; don’t dip into other peripheral activities. If the core activity is well-founded, this is where you’re going to achieve sustained success, not somewhere else.

How do you define what that one big thing should be? There are three questions you need to ask:

  1. What you can be the best in the world at?
    And conversely, what you cannot be the best in the world at? This is not about a strategy or desire, but about an understanding of where your strengths and opportunities lie.
    I’ve previously criticised clients who declare in their tender documentation that they want to build a world-class website when they don’t have a world-class budget, but I’m reconsidering this position. The web is of course worldwide, so if you’re going to compete, you need to be providing something that your global competitors don’t. Now that may well be a local view: a local commercial service or information specific to a geography. But the salient point is that if the website isn’t attracting its target audience and at least challenging both its online and offline competition, then it’s not doing its job. Moreover, if it isn’t a website you can be proud of, you’re not doing your job.
    The web is still a relatively new economy, with all kinds of business models that are still in their infancy. There’s room for more world-class websites out there and yours should be one of them.
  2. What drives your economic engine?
    In Collins’ world, this question involves a deep understanding of the economic models in your sector. In the web world, it translates to a relatively simple question: What makes your website worth visiting?
    Is it the information you provide, the way you collate information from multiple sources and present in one place, the brand your visitors buy into, a need to participate and engage with like-minded people? You have to be able to identify why the website is important to other people.
  3. What are you deeply passionate about?
    Just as important as ensuring your web presence is important to other people is ensuring that it’s important to you and your organisation. If you’re not interested in producing content for your site, you shouldn’t bother. Just get rid of it. Don’t pad it out.
    Let the website reflect your organisation’s professional integrity. Let it be something where your teams can prove they’re the right people to be setting a vision. Let it reflect the outputs of heated debates you’ve had with your stakeholders about what the website should say about your organisation and how you want to be perceived. Show that you’ve encouraged input and that people believe in what’s on the web. Don’t let your website become straplines and mission statements.

You’ll find the big thing for your website where the answers to these three questions intersect. Put all your effort into this one thing and abandon everything else. Collins suggests having a “stop doing” list.

Culture of discipline

Content management systems were invented to cater for two main problems: providing editors with the means to publish content efficiently without needing to know about web technologies like HTML, and providing a means of controlling the content that is added by those editors, so that it conforms to predefined styles and patterns appropriate to the website.

This rigour is often welcome, allowing you to remain on brand, but you need a degree of entrepreneurship too. What does a site where all the content looks exactly the same say about your organisation? Perhaps that it’s completely process-driven and unlikely to ever dig its way out of a hole…

The system may be able to constrain your editors, but that doesn’t mean that it should. The editorial team should actually understand why those constraints are there: the benefits of consistency, or of an informed approach to information architecture and navigation, of being on-brand. Once they understand and agree with these principles, you won’t need to build systems to enforce standards: the editors will do this for themselves. You’ll be able to de-systematise the constraints as a culture of discipline pervades the way content is produced for the web. If someone then breaks the mould, you’ll know that they’re doing it for a reason, because the mould is too rigid or insufficient for emerging needs.

Just as the project sponsors and stakeholders needed to cast off empire-building and egotism, so the editorial team need to espouse the ideal of a common good. Their professional integrity will translate into a disciplined approach and your website will benefit as a consequence.

Technology accelerators

We haven’t even mentioned technology yet. Cultures rather than systems of discipline may prompt ideas of Enterprise 2.0, wikis and blogs. But Collins tells us that in his team’s analysis of business success, technology was never the primary cause of either success or decline. This is almost certainly true of websites.

So many times you’ll see organisations where the technology tail is wagging the business dog. Someone will tell you that they need a portal, or SOA, or ECM, or the semantic web. Why? What are you trying to achieve? Are you just trying to increase the IT budget?

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these technologies, indeed they may be the best way of supporting the one big thing you’re trying to achieve. But they are absolutely not an end in themselves. Collins found that in businesses, technology could accelerate momentum, but could not create it. Tellingly, he also found that “Those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.”

Only pick technologies that will help you deliver your one big idea. If you don’t need to deliver information in a single place aggregated live from diverse systems, why are you even considering portal technologies? If you don’t need to link documents, email and web content, how will ECM help you achieve your goals?

Conclusion

Good to Great is really based on just two concepts: teamwork and focus. You need to form a team to identify and challenge the problems that your website poses. You then need to focus obsessively on the one thing that is most important for fixing those problems, casting everything else aside. Collins doesn’t tell us that this is easy. But if you can follow his process, you’ll be well on your way to having a really great website.

Philippe Parker on 2 December 2007 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Suitable content for a CMS

One of the biggest challenges for organisations with complex web architectures, particularly those trying to implement SOA, is deciding just what is appropriate for a content management system and what goes into AN Other application. Oscar Berg has had a stab, but I thought I’d try to give a few guidelines.

An indication that a project may be a good fit is if it meets any of these criteria:

  • Written (as opposed to numerical) content to be published within or outside the organisation and administered through a web browser.
  • Documents to be published internally or externally.
  • Digital assets used in conjunction with web or document publishing.
  • Information aggregated from other sources that subsequently needs to be edited by staff before it is published to an internal or external website.

An indication of a poor fit would be a project with the following requirements:

  • Structured numerical databases: this is more appropriate to a bespoke database application.
  • Draft, unpublished information that belongs to an individual, rather than to the organisation: this can be achieved with a file server.
  • Loose, collaboratively-created content, such as blogs, discussion forums and wikis, that don’t require peer review. This content is usually best managed through dedicated collaboration technologies.
  • Aggregated content that can be presented “live” on websites without editorial intervention. This can be achieved through a portal or an application server.
  • Integration of back-end applications to be presented through a common, browser-based interface. This can be achieved through a portal.
  • Archiving records to less expensive data allocations based on frequency of access or age of assets. This is a feature of a more advanced records management system.
  • eCommerce sites requiring automated cross-sell functionality.

There are some grey areas which might combine a CMS with another technology:

  • “Advanced” personalisation, where a website has to remember who you are while you’re on the website and deliver different content to you based on your profile. This is pretty straightforward in a CMS when applied to the homepage using cookies, but anything beyond this requirement is going to be complex to implement, particularly if your CMS is stateless.
  • Streaming media will require an additional dedicated server.
  • Single sign-on functionality would benefit from an identity management tool.
  • Web-based applications such as polls that need to be included on a website but are unlikely to be managed through the CMS.
Philippe Parker on 29 October 2007 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Identifying online and offline workflow

It’s all very well me asking if your workflow is effective, but not much use without a practical example.

In enterprise content management, workflows are often deployed to represent the full content lifecycle, as in the diagram below (click on the image to get a full size version).

Example of a full content lifecycle.

These steps could all be recreated in your content management system and managed in an online environment, with notifications being sent via email to the relevant users at each step in the process. You’d need to ask, however, who would benefit?

This sort of workflow is likely to be less effective to implement in an online environment with comments flying around via email than a bunch of relevant people sitting down together and discussing the subject in question. Yes, there probably needs to be an audit trail with a clear indication of who changed what when, but this is only at certain stage gates. In fact, you could probably constrain almost any workflow to something along the following model:

Author creates draft → Internal review (reject or approve) → External review (reject or approve) → Publish → Archive after 6 months.

All the intermittent issues of who should comment on what kind of detail at what stage are tacitly understood, rather than made explicit online. But the review processes can only be instigated once the previous stage gate is complete, so you still have control over publication and, depending on your CMS, you have a more or less robust audit trail. Why over-complicate matters? Enterprise 1.01 will usually do.

Philippe Parker on | | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Is your workflow effective?

I was recently working for an investment bank trying to flesh out compliance requirements and reconcile these with the needs of the marketing team.

- As someone in marketing publishes a new piece of content, I asked, do you need to check it’s compliant?

- Yes, responded the compliance officer.

- So do you need to be alerted by email when new content is ready to go live?

- No.

- How will you know when the content needs your approval then?

- They’ll come and talk to me.

- This is a large organisation. Do all the marketing people know who you are and how to get hold of you?

- Yes, they’re used to it for print materials.

- And is this how your colleagues prefer to act too?

- Yes.

- So you wouldn’t find any efficiencies in being able to login to the CMS to preview content before it’s published?

- We don’t really mind what format it’s in: a hard copy or transcript, or we’ll sit and watch a video or listen to a podcast. Everyone publishing marketing material knows the basic compliance rules, it just needs us to give the document a quick once-over before it goes out and that’s best resolved by chatting about it.

- The content may be going out in many languages and to many different geographies, should they all operate this way?

- There are slightly different compliance rules in different countries, but generally the compliance officers in each country work in the same way. They’ll just review the translation, ensure it doesn’t breach any special cases and trust the marketing people they work with.

- What about other content contributors, such as researchers? There’s a fair amount of churn in those areas so they’re less likely to know the rules.

- Research gets published to our subscribers only, so doesn’t follow the same compliance rules. We don’t need to review it.

- So as far as you’re concerned, the technology doesn’t need to enforce any workflows other than the reviews specified by the marketing department and their relationship with each operational area.

- No, we’ll just discuss everything face to face.

Increasingly we see CMS implementations focusing on how to translate business process improvement into CMS workflows. Content management systems are particularly adept at providing compliance rules around publishing rights and version management so should be ideally suited to enforcing and improving the publishing process. But wherever I go, I find resistance to enforcement of workflows by the technology. Why is that?

Part of the reason is of course general resistance to change. Another is transparency: everyone needs to know what it takes to push a piece of content live. They need to know that once they’ve made their amendments, whether this means the public can view their content or if someone else needs to approve. Some CMS workflows can obscure this. Another reason is fear of over-engineering: it’s far too easy to create overly complicated and unmanageable workflows that users then try to circumvent.

But the main reason is that many technologists conceive that we should always interact through technology, that IT automatically means efficiency, even where offline processes, however informal, can be even more effective. We don’t always need global collaboration software to publish a web page.

The key for the business analyst is to identify where the CMS can make real process improvements and provide value through its audit trail, rather than forcing authors into activities that hinder when they should be making lives easier.

Philippe Parker on | 25 October 2007 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Devolution, or the origin of pages

You have the software, you have the infrastructure, you have the business process… now where’s the content?

All Creative Commons on flickr: monkey by babasteve, donkey by wollombi, beaver by laszlo-photo, bee by fotodawgThe knowledge chain
Content management depends on a technical knowledge chain rather like the food chain you see in the animal kingdom. The first link in the chain are your drones, doing the bulk of the content harvesting and compiling in your CMS. You then get the eager beavers in your editorial team who control the flow of the content by slowing its course and discarding anything that doesn’t serve the common purpose. There’s also a need for a great deal of donkey work: general tasks like administering users and braying at the drones and beavers who try to buck the system. Finally, you have the code monkeys, the tech geeks who seem to spend their entire time fooling about and gawping, but who still consider themselves primates because they can use a mouse with an opposable thumb.

The problem with this technical knowledge chain is that in many organisations, each layer is of an equal size. This means that there aren’t enough people contributing content and but too many people performing administrative functions, while the technology layer spends time fixing things rather than making enhancements. If you could delegate the simpler daily tasks further down the chain, reserving the few meaty tasks for the more technically skilled species higher up, you could ensure that only the fittest content survives to be published on your website. These CMS animals need to devolve.

The case for devolution
Devolution isn’t just a theory: it’s founded on solid evidence. Many organisations have thought in the past that by spending half a dozen days creating a CMS training programme they can then rest and everything will take care of itself. But the reality of your CMS world is a little different. Over time, the technical team will have adopted a position as alpha male. They dominate the environment to suit them, which means that it may be over-engineered and difficult to change. The authors and editors will have had comparatively little impact on the CMS world around them: they tend to be more dependent on the resources that their environment affords them.

Environmental impact
But if your CMS ecosystem is going to succeed, it needs these authors to break their symbiotic relationship with their super-users so that they can cross-pollinate content and allow the world to flourish. To achieve this, your CMS environment must evolve to meet its inhabitants’ requirements.

People with fewer technical skills outnumber each layer above: contributors, editors, administrators, technical.

The end result is a skills pyramid, where you invest the least effort in the people who contribute the most, because the resources are there for them to prosper. When your contributors are comfortable with the system, this makes it easier for the editorial team to assess content quality. They don’t need to focus on administrative tasks, but can refer these to a dedicated team of first-line support as required. And the technologists aren’t bugged by the mundane concerns of lesser species, but can get on with doing more important things instead.

Intelligent Design
Devolution is supported by intelligent design. Your CMS environment should be technically simple with transparent publishing models and familiar editorial interfaces. If you can focus on adapting the environment to help your users rather than training your users to fit with your software, then the technically meek but editorially able shall inherit the earth.

Philippe Parker on , | 17 October 2007 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Introducing taxonomy

Lots of people talk about taxonomy in content management, but its meaning and importance can be confused, so I’m going to try and provide a more concrete definition.

Taxonomy is about classification. It describes ways of naming, arranging and ordering things within a system. Those things may be books in a library, or plants and animals in biology.

Taxonomies are usually hierarchical and based on restricted terms. In biology, for example, there are a limited number of kingdoms, phyla, and classes. In the Dewey Decimal System, these restricted terms are based on numbers: Phonology (414) is an element of Language (400). These relationships are often described as ontological.

Dewi Decimal taxonomy: 400s as a subset of Language

Some things can belong in more than one place in certain classification systems. For example, a dish on a menu may be available as both a starter and a main course. These ways of looking at the item are often termed “facets”; so a Greek salad is both a type of dish (salad) and a course (starter).

Image showing Greek salad as a side and starter, while Russian is available as a starter only.

The “thing” in question may also have one or more synonyms which form part of a taxonomy. There is some overlap here with the functions of a thesaurus.

A recent innovation brought to the fore by websites like del.icio.us and Flickr is the concept of “folksonomy”. This allows participants to “tag” any page, image, or document according to their own vocabulary. As more people tag pages, these become related by shared terms, building up the classification system. This taxonomy is unrestricted: what one person calls design, another may call art, creativity, or even Photoshop.

How are taxonomy and content management related?
Content management typically addresses a number of key areas:

  • Production: providing the tools to enable people to create content.
  • Authorisation: ensuring that only relevant people are able to view and amend content.
  • Workflow: delivering content to people within the system once it passes through certain stage gates.
  • Storage and retrieval: providing a mechanism to store, find and re-use content held in the system.

Content management systems (CMS) can make use of taxonomy for authorisation and workflow, but they are dependent on taxonomy for storage and retrieval. Each page, document, or other asset held in the CMS is stored according to a predefined classification method.

There are different metaphors for this method. The taxonomy may be represented as types of document (e.g. contract), as departments with their own document silos (e.g. legal, marketing, human resources), as folders that represent some other business function (e.g. project start-up, initiation, execution, closure), or flagged with a value from a predefined list. Most CMS will use a combination of these classification systems so that content can be retrieved more easily.

Taxonomy vs. metadata

Taxonomy is often applied as metadata: that is data about data. Office documents have metadata assigned to them such as author and revision date. (To see this in your Office application choose File >> Properties and click on the summary tab.) Web pages also have metadata. There are a number of ways to view this, but the simplest is to choose View >> Source in your browser menu. Close to the top of the page you’ll see some HTML tags beginning meta name=”". The name attribute is the type of metadata they describe (description, copyright, keywords, author, etc.) while the content attribute holds the metadata itself. Metadata is often assigned from pre-designated classifications, so is an important part of any taxonomy project.

Where can I see taxonomy on the web?

In its simplest form, taxonomy on the web is represented as website navigation. Many of the techniques applied to develop taxonomy are used to develop more user-friendly websites. This includes activities like card sorting.

More complex taxonomies can be found at dmoz.org (a directory of websites) or, for medical research, GoPubMed.

Philippe Parker on , | 9 October 2007 | Tweet this |