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Contented Management

Contented Management

A 2011 retrospective

Eyes looking back

When you reach the end of a sprint, you look back and consider what went well, what went badly and what can be improved. There’s a similar process for waterfall projects when you produce a lessons learned report to share with the rest of the PMO. While I’m sure you floccinaucinihilipilificate about this company’s 12-month performance, allow me to highlight three things I’ve noticed come to the fore in the last 12 months.

You need to demonstrate the tangible benefits your project will deliver as quickly as possible.

Of course, this has always been true. But the pressure to be lean and value-driven is greater than ever, driven I think not just by wider economics but also because the technologies we work with are more mature and with that, so are customer expectations.

Many people are in the third or fourth significant implementation of a content management system, whether for web or across the enterprise. Marketers have already made their initial forays into social media. Not seeing returns on information systems or web engagement simply isn’t good enough. So before putting their hands in their pockets, they’re quite rightly asking what they’re going to get back. As an industry, we need to answer that question quickly and credibly.

Events are being stretched.

People are increasingly participating in events from a distance and after they’ve finished. Television has stretched beyond the screen by broadcasting with hashtags which allow an audience – not all of whom are actually watching – to discuss programme content beyond the control of the programme’s producers. Whether this is music or politics, it’s a long way from the controlled comments policies of newspaper discussion forums. Huge numbers of people are using tablets and smart phones to communicate as they watch TV.

This applies to football matches too, whether from the armchair or the stadium; and very much to music, be it at a festival or on Spotify. The discussion extends way beyond the geography and the duration of the event; supported by the fact that the media doesn’t need to be watched there and then either. There’s gold in those hills, I just haven’t figured out how to extract it yet…

We could understand our market a lot better if we just took the time.

Sales people and analysts have been harping on about big data as the next big thing without too much detail around what it is or why it’s useful. But consider this. People now reveal huge amounts of personal information under highly obfuscated terms and conditions. If you could join up Facebook profiles, Flickr, Amazon, loyalty cards, credit ratings, browser history, and online social interactions, you’d have an incredibly complex and potentially frighteningly accurate picture of your market and how to sell to them.

If you’re a D2C organsiation or want to become one, getting that kind of data and being able to process it in a meaningful way is going to make your current online engagement look… well, pretty poor. Start thinking now about how you can get more data legally and how you might exploit it to reveal business information that will give you a competitive advantage. You can be sure that if you don’t, your competitors will.

Philippe Parker on , , | 21 December 2011 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

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 |

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What makes different WCM different?

NMNH beetle specimens by Mr T in DC

I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.

Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:

Editorial interface

How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?

Pages vs. elements

Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.

Content structures

Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.

Technology

Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?

Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.

This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:

My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.

When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.

WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.

WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.

Philippe Parker on , , | 4 March 2010 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

I know why the caged bird sings

Small tropical bird in a cage

Janus Boye recently provoked an indignant response from the Twitterati when he proclaimed that he unfollows anyone with more tweets than followers. You should read the comments to gauge the general feelings about that view. It provoked some reflection on my part — which I guess Janus will say was his aim — and I went back to look at how my use of Twitter has evolved over the last two years. And it went something like this: Bewilderment » Discovery » Catharsis » Promotion » Engagement

Bewilderment

Like most people first dipping their toes into a new service, I came to Twitter slightly perplexed. What do you tweet if you have no followers? The thing that first drew me was trying to find out how micro-blogging might be used in a business collaboration context. I’d already used SharePoint and Ning and I was intrigued by the broadcast nature of theses services. It was so Enterprise 2.0! It reminded me of how J.P. Rangaswami had made his emails public to all employees in the organisations he was working and I wondered what effect that had on an even more public scale.

Discovery

So I kept relatively schtum and decided to follow some people I know: @draml, @izahoor, @mcboof and see what they were saying. And they were talking about web content management and I thought, that’s cool: I can find out some new stuff. It’s quick to scan tweets and I’ll read up on a daily basis.

Then I followed the people they were following — which was easier then because Twitter used to show all replies. And I discovered CMS people well worth following, like @sggottlieb and @piewords, as well as people I knew about already like @irina_guseva and @TonyByrne.

So Twitter effectively became a recommendation engine for blogs, of which I amassed quite a few and continue to add to. That gave me plenty to read to keep me on the bleeding edge of the industry.

Catharsis

But then I realised I was saying nothing myself. Resolutely ignoring the adage that it’s better to stay silent and be thought the fool than to speak and remove all doubt, I started to tweet my frustrations at various projects. It was these tweets that put me in jeopardy of Janus’ Law. I was re-living Joachim du Bellay:

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,
Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,
Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.

That was a mistake. Fortunately I never resorted to telling people I was on public transport or making toast.

Promotion

So I just started retweeting links to useful CMS resources and that got me some followers. And it dawned on me that there was a whole world of business leads out there, so I started searching for key CMS terms and following people who tweeted on the subject, trying to engage with them and see what they were after. It was a bit rough but drew some small successes. So then I just promoting my blogging instead.

Engagement

That was a turning point, because I could engage more with people on Twitter than through my website. And because I was following other people’s blogs, I could engage with them on Twitter more easily and involve other people through broadcast messaging, just like JP Rangaswami! Twitter has become a sounding board for my thoughts: I can test things out on the Twitterati and get feedback before I have to let my ideas loose on clients. I hope that it’s actually improved the quality of my work.

I had one big #unfollowfriday when it all got a bit too much, but I won’t generally unfollow unless you annoy me, and I’ve a pretty passive character. I also find some kind of moral obligation to follow people who’re following me and can’t bring myself to unfollow people I’ve known for a long time in the real world, no matter how much rubbish they spout. Those that I really like to follow are those who know stuff and are funny; although having now met @adriaanbloem I’m convinced he uses some kind of ghost tweeter.

But the best things are seeing people get involved in real conversations. Take a look at @jameshoskins‘ Paxman-esque interrogation of @iantruscott about the Alterian roadmap. Or the discussions around #cmshaiku. Twitter can be fun and informative.

So how do I use Twitter for work? I still haven’t figured out if Twitter has a place in the enterprise, but it does allow me to keep engaged with a continually-evolving industry whose ideas appear online in less than 140 characters.

Philippe Parker on | 15 February 2010 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

‘Bove the contentious waves he kept

Google Wave is a browser-based collaboration tool that combines messaging, document writing and discussions in real time. I participated by proxy in an experiment with the tool last week that involved fellow content management professionals. These are my observations.

Saying is easier than listening.

In many ways the collaboration was too real time. In a spoken conversation, talking across each other isn’t really possible. In the Wave, it’s the norm. Even with half a dozen participants, it seemed everyone was piling in trying to get their thoughts down rather than considering what people were writing elsewhere. There were multiple threads to the document that you couldn’t follow at once It was like being in the middle seat at a party: it seemed like a good place to be but you couldn’t figure out which conversation to jump into. This might say more about the participants than the platform, but it is a serious issue for collaborative working where listening to a conversation, being able to respond to the speaker and draw out more information is crucial to constructive dialogue.

More is easier than less.

Anyone can add to the document, but there are no commenting features and a social reluctance to delete what someone else has written. The effect is that assertions are qualified rather than challenged or deleted, meaning that you end up saying in thirty words what you could have said in ten. The compound effect of this writing style is that you layer meaning on top of meaning to the point that — as Julia Kristeva might have pointed out — as a group you’ve said something different to the individual’s original point. That’s not collaboration.

You get more than you need.

I couldn’t quite figure out what we got from the Wave that we couldn’t get from just a Google document combined with chat or a similar tool. It was less the case of the glass being half full or half empty than the glass being twice as big as we needed. There were too many features. Nearly everyone experienced serious browser issues — except Ian, whose virtual shoulder I was peering over— whose Chrome held out where Firefox faltered. Wave might run in a thin client, but it’s a fat piece of technology.

So was Wave a total washout? No, but I think it will take a lot of adapting to. If only there were some browser-based tool out there that wasn’t reliant on Ajax, that was near real-time but forced you to refresh so that you listened before you spoke and which encouraged you to be as brief as possible when you did speak up.

Where could we find a tool that met those requirements? I’ll have to ask the good people of Twitter.

Read more

Philippe Parker on | 26 October 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

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 |

Contented Management

Promoting social media internally

Why do so many organisations struggle to implement social media effectively for internal use? Is it because they’re seen as too costly, a fad, or a distraction from real work? Why do so many of these platforms – often predominantly designed for business use – thrive on the web but struggle for a foothold within the corporate firewall?

It appears to me that organisations try to introduce too much web 2.0 culture into these projects while continuing to have rigid expections.

The objectives for social media on the web are emergent: they are the result of uncoordinated initiatives, with the benefits only becoming apparent as the site is used. Business change on the other hand is typically vision-led: there’s a clear idea of the business benefits before work starts and these are based on evidence derived from organisational learning. Moreover, on the web, adoption of new tools is viral. Within organisations, adoption is typically enforced.

Many organisational social media projects are sold to the business by middle management, early adopters who use similar tools outside the office. They believe that because a tool is widely used externally, it will be rapidly adopted internally too. This is rarely the case. The web provides a user base that far outstrips any organisation’s and staff have more pressing priorities than trying out a new technology. Moreover, executives need a concrete business case to approve a project. Saying “Twitter’s great” simply doesn’t cut it. The differences in approach are transparent:

Objectives Driving force
Web Emergent Bottom-up
Corporate Clear Top-down

Promoters of social media within organisations must meet pre-agreed objectives and promote the tool from the lower rungs of the management ladder. This guarantees frustration all round: project advocates believe executives are being obstructive, but executives wonder why the project isn’t achieving its business case.

You need to shift the axis. Don’t focus on the problems social technologies will solve. Compel your staff to use them as a communications channel and find out what benefit they bring. You can reduce the risk of failure by constraining your spending, so the tool is less painful to throw away, but you need top-down leadership to drive the programme or people will just focus on their day job.

A few practical steps:

  1. Choose something that’s familiar and frequently used.
    Staff need to grasp the tool’s basics quickly. If it’s overly complicated, your efforts will be invested in training rather than measuring benefits. It’s also got to be something that’s used on a daily basis. If you have a wiki on best practice, for example, it’ll get contributions for a week or two then just become forgotten about.
  2. Make sure it’s throw-away.
    To prove the concept, select something cheap or hosted, with low start-up costs. And make sure that you don’t put content or data in it that’s critical to your business strategy that you then can’t get out again.
  3. Don’t customise it!
    The world is littered with pilot projects that thought they knew better than the software before they’d used it, or tried to integrate it with other tools and turned into never-ending testing. Just run the technology as it is, in the simplest way possible. If it works, then consider how to improve it.
  4. Engage key users.
    Your trial should certainly get the executive to put their mouth where their money is. If they lead others will follow. Your sample group of users — you weren’t going to roll it out to everyone at once were you? — should include different departments so that it’s not seen as anyone else’s “baby” when you finally roll it out.
  5. It’s a trial people must follow.
    Using the new tool is not optional. Ideally, they’ll use it instead of something else, so a wiki instead of a file system, blog instead of broadcast email, micro-blog instead of instant messaging. If you think of how CRM software is typically rolled out in a business, you’ll see how important this kind of enforcement is to making adoption of the software a success.

For social media to be effective in your organisation, you can’t expect it just to be taken up by the user base. You have to drive it through. But you do need to be open-minded about what it will achieve. Hopefully, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Some further reading:

Philippe Parker on 26 May 2009 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Mencius, on collaboration technology

Mencius asserted human nature is naturally good, but that it needs to be nurtured in order to flourish. Your organisation may well have naturally talented staff who are predisposed to helping it succeed, but if they’re not given the tools to do so then you will never make the most of their talent.

Wikis, forums and other collaboration technologies provide the tools for organisations to get the most out of their staff. For public websites, ratings features, comments and social bookmarking enable authors to see which aspects of their content attract positive interest.

If your website ignores its public’s needs, or your systems deny their users the opportunity to add their feedback, they’ll just go somewhere else. If you’re lucky. Mencius also advocated the just overthrow of despots and one of my favourite Chinese stories, Outlaws of the Marsh, also known as the Water Margin very much follows this code.

So the message is clear. You can learn from your audiences and stakeholders, inside or outside your organisation. Provide them with the tools that will enable them to enhance your systems, and you will flourish with them.

Philippe Parker on , | 22 August 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Information in a bear market

Dennis D. McDonald continues to propose interesting thoughts on information management. This one – on the importance of social media in post-merger organisations – struck a particular chord with me.

A previous project I ran was to implement an internal knowledge management portal for a company that had been through several rapid mergers of some pretty small companies into a pretty large one. The company’s success is based on its staff expertise and wealth of project experience, but the full range and depth of this knowledge lay fragmented across a few people from the various entities that constituted the new whole. As a consequence, the sales team didn’t know that they could use staff who’d already engaged with a particular client, or that there were case studies for similar projects including case studies and lessons learned. The wheel was being reinvented. It was obvious that some kind of networking tool that enabled staff to identify expertise in people and projects would lend the business a helping hand and could be implemented with relative ease.

Instead, the directors decided that a search engine that could span all the company’s file servers would be more cost-effective. But how many useful results did the staff get from keyword searches? For all the typical reasons – little classification, poor naming conventions, poor security, inappropriate technology – close to none. The content was there but the information wasn’t.

Just as art only becomes art once you place it in a gallery, content only becomes information when you identify it as useful. The quality of the information, like art, is debatable, but it has no chance of being used if you don’t suggest to people that it’s useful information. Following a merger, staff need to know: these are the kind of people who work here and this is what they know about. To find out more, ask them.

Yet even in the most obvious of cases for implementing simple information management tools, their raison d’être can be by-passed. The company in question didn’t implement a networking tool and nearly two years later still doesn’t know some of its clients, the skills of many of its staff or the scope of most of its past projects. Many staff have left. Yet is the company bothered? Absolutely not.

The directors simply changed the strategy. If the sales team weren’t paying attention to certain clients or types of projects, it’s because they weren’t important enough. The strategy dictated that employees focus on bigger and better in their portfolio, as befitted the newly-merged company status. Who needs the past when you have the future?

It’s a bullish policy in a bullish market, but when things inevitably turn bearish, there’ll be a scramble to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous engagements, find people with relevant knowledge, return to reliable clients who weren’t in the big league. By then, both employees and clients could be long gone, and gleaning information from fragmentary content may well prove impossible.

While your work is easy, information has little value. As soon as your work gets tough, it’s the people and companies with the information who’ll profit.

Updated: Alan Pelz-Sharpe has also written about ECM technologies and recession.

Philippe Parker on 27 March 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

The mirror stage in content management

If you’re considering whether your organisation needs collaborative software or a CMS to fulfil its content management needs, you’re doubtless being confronted by a bewildering range of products that all seem to provide the tools to meet your requirements. So how do you decide if you need a wiki, a portal, or ECM?

It’s down to psychology, not technology.

Psychologist asks PC: So tell me about your relationship with your father.

Let’s refer to the Mirror Stage, a psychoanalytical concept developed by Jacques Lacan during the 1940s. The concept describes how infants imagine themselves to be at one with a mother who satisfies their every need. When a child cries, its mother will feed it, change it, put it to bed, or comfort it. When a child reaches between six and eighteen months old, it starts to realise that its identity is separate to its mother’s. It recognises itself in a mirror, has to learn to feed itself and will be told off by its father. In short, it enters a symbolic order where it now has to conform to social constraints in order to get what it wants. The early imaginary state provides gratification without context, while the symbolic order provides context but imposes boundaries.

Which psychological order do your contributors belong to? Do you want or provide an environment for them to express themselves freely, or do you need to contextualise them and the content they produce?

Collaborative tools assume a shared identity. Just as an infant considers its mother to be an extension of itself that responds to its every whim, users look to collaborative software as a personal tool that instantly fulfils their need for self-expression. In this imaginary order, contributors “write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them“. Compare this to a content management system, where you have both context and boundaries: contributors recognise that their content can only be published if it meets predetermined social criteria.

Some examples:

  • Folskonomy vs. Taxonomy: The most obvious difference between imaginary and symbolic orders in content classification. In folksonomy, users enter terms that help them understand their content and they imagine that other users understand these terms. In taxonomy, these terms are given a context and only predefined terms can be used according to a preordained structure.
  • Intranets: Is your intranet an environment for generating knowledge or enshrining it? If your staff use it to discover what’s going on across multiple locations and projects, they assume that content is representative of the work they do. If the intranet holds authoritative information that employees want to refer to (for example, HR policy), you need a tool that confirms their place in the organisation and that reasserts social context.
  • Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 sites: People who use social networking sites subconsciously assume that what is valid for them is valid for others: that their tags make sense, that their ratings (of YouTube videos for example) are relevant, that people will follow their myspace page. These assumptions may well be right, but context is limited to these assumptions. If I put a photo of Sophie onto Flickr and tag it accordingly, this tells me that there are other photos of people called Sophie on the site, but doesn’t tell me that it’s Sophie Marceau and I’m interested in pictures of French film actresses. It’s not clear of course that this is the information people are looking for, but a content managed system would presume this in its design. So if you go to a report on a football match on the BBC news website, it will provide links to more news about each club involved, league tables, fixtures, weather forecasts for that area and so on. The contributor doesn’t elect to have all this correlated information: the CMS provides the context automatically and imposes an authoritative order.

Of course, collaborative environments aren’t completely without context: any user who logs into the system has a distinct identity within the organisation. But the mirror stage in content management comes when you start to impose structure and workflow. If you need your contributors to put content in a specific place for easier retrieval, or to have their contributions approved before they’re viewed by a wider audience, then you’re imposing a symbolic order.

So when choosing your approach, ask yourself are you a mother or father to your users? Are you coaxing them, encouraging them to express themselves freely, or are you imposing a paternalistic authority?

If your organisation is essentially the same thing as your contributors, then an unstructured wiki is a viable option. This covers social networking sites, or collaborative research intranets. But if your organisation represents something more than the people it comprises, in line with a Gestalt psychology, then you need a content management system that enforces a shared identity rather than assumes it.

Philippe Parker on , | 4 October 2007 | Tweet this |