If you’re reading this post, you’ve been hearing about — or have at least heard of — a component content management system, or CCMS.
You’re probably dealing with increasing amounts of customer-facing content and localization requirements, and you’re wondering if a CCMS could help. Almost all of our projects involve CCMSs and scaling content operations to address these challenges.
When you start looking at your content lifecycle and the content systems needed to support it, you’re going to end up with a decision between buying a suite of products from a single supplier or piecing together your environment with individual components.
That made me think about baking a cake. Perhaps this merits further explanation.
In episode 137 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Larry Swanson talk about the fragmentation of content over the past 30 years, from the delivery of books to UX writing.
“What are the changes that this fragmentation has introduced from a business or an economic point of view? One is the notion that we’re all publishers now. This is where the whole field of content marketing comes from — this notion that it’s a better way to promote yourself if you demonstrate expertise around what you’re doing.”
In episode 136 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle unveils horror stories of content ops gone horribly wrong.
There is interest and excitement building around the potential of knowledge graphs (“interlinked descriptions of entities [that] also encod[e] the semantics”) to drive content operations. I believe that knowledge graphs and content management systems (CMSs) that sit on top of knowledge graphs have a critical part to play, but I also have some concerns.
The holidays are quickly approaching, and true to form, Scriptorium is all about the food! From time to time we use food analogies to explain various facets of content strategy. I have collected a few for you to enjoy.
Check out the latest post with new insights from our team here.
Setting up an efficient factory requires planning. Where do you put the building? How will you bring in raw materials? How does work flow along the assembly line and how can you optimize the work? Given that my expertise in actual factory operations is limited to Factorio, it’s probably best to set that analogy aside and refocus on a digital equivalent—the systems that make up your content operations.
Content modeling may be the least understood part of structured content—which is saying something. Content modeling is the process of mapping your information’s implicit organization onto an explicit definition.
In episode 124 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kevin Nichols of AvenueCX discuss omnichannel publishing.
“Omnichannel involves looking at whatever channels are necessary within the context of your customer’s experience, how your customers engage with your brand, and then figuring out how to deliver a seamless interaction.”
– Kevin Nichols
Content as a Service (CaaS) changes publishing from a “push” model to an on-demand model. If you’re looking to pull content from multiple sources and incorporate more flexibility into your content operations, it may be time to consider CaaS. Here are some resources to help you get started:
A Content as a Service (CaaS) model lets you provide on-demand content that integrates information from various sources to enable richer, customized user experiences.
You’ve finished putting together your content strategy and have approval to move forward. It’s time to build out content operations. What does this mean? And how do you ensure success?
Content as a Service (CaaS) means that you make information available on request. The traditional publishing model is to package and format information into print, PDF, or websites, and make those collections available to the consumer. But with CaaS, consumers decide what information they want and in what format they want it.
Our internal Slack workspace has channels for projects, events, and other work-related items, but of course our most popular channel is #thefoodchannel, where we share recipes, restaurant recommendations, and general foodie discussions.
Content governance is a formal system of checks and balances that regulates your content development. Project success depends on clearly defined roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the content development process. So how do you get buy-in? And what’s involved in putting a content governance plan together?
Getting started with a content strategy project can be intimidating. There are a lot of unknowns and changes that will take place. How do you ensure the changes you are making address your company’s needs and requirements?
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.
Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.
Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.
As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.
Content operations (content ops or ContentOps ) refers to the system your organization uses to develop, deploy, and deliver customer-facing information. Rahel Bailie refers to it as the way that your organization operationalizes your content strategy.
Over at easyDITA, there’s a more aspirational definition, which includes the purpose of good content ops:
Content Operations — ContentOps — is the infrastructure that maximizes your content creators’ efforts and guards against procedural errors by automating as much of the content development process as possible.
You’ve started developing a content strategy and are getting a better grasp on the content lifecycle. But what do you do about older content? It’s not as relevant as your most recent content, but there are still times when it proves useful. Your archiving approach is an important part of your content strategy and is often overlooked.
If you are moving from one content environment to another, you only want to convert what’s necessary. Archiving and organizing your content will help you decide what legacy content you want to convert. Here are some things to keep in mind when putting a plan in place for archiving content.
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
As 2020 comes to an interesting close, let’s take a look at some of our most popular posts and podcasts from the year.
