By Janus Boye
Angus Edwardson attending a peer group meeting in Brooklyn and hosting a session all about content with the catchy title: What Happens in the Shadows of the CMS.
This is not just any random piece of content you might find on the Web. You probably found it by clicking a link from another site or from an email, but I assure you that I wrote it.
Just to clarify, given the huge rise in content, much of it written by machines, this piece of content is actually written by a human and based on a collaboration led by Angus Edwardson from GatherContent and several of our peer group members who work with content and content creators every day.
As you’ll see, content is not just content and while this specific piece of content might look timeless on your screen (you didn’t print it, did you?), much is changing when it comes to how we work with content and how we consume content.
Content is a product
“Content is not King. Content is a product.”
Angus led with this quote by Noz who together with Rahel Bailie wrote the Content Strategy book in 2012.
The quote plays on the widely used “content is king” quote that Bill Gates also championed in his 1996 essay. In the essay, Bill writes:
“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting”
Since the early days of the Web in the ’90s content has come a long way. With the arrival of popular streaming services like Netflix, we now have websites where their content is truly their product. The same could also be said for newspapers, an entire industry which have been tremendously impacted by the Web, but NY Times and thankfully also others seem to have found a way so that subscribers are also willing to pay for digital content and not just print.
The pandemic also skyrocketed e-commerce and various delivery services further ahead. Those sites sell and deliver almost everything, but use content to drive conversions and tend to have a mindset where content is treated and managed similar to a product.
As they say at GatherContent: Content has never been more important.
Content is also roles and operations
If you have an important product, you probably also have a product manager, but what about your content? Who’s your content manager?
The title ‘Content manager’ does exist, but is far from as widely used as ‘product manager’. Instead, there’s a wide range of other content job titles with somewhat different or overlapping descriptions. Here’s just a few:
Head of Content
Digital Communications Manager
Digital Editor
Director of Content Strategy
Content Operations Manager
Marketing Content Specialist
Content Design Manager
Some of these are newer and based on terms that have emerged in recent years. It seems to me that, when it comes to digital content, we started with Web Editors, moved onto Digital Communications and then Content Strategy arrived about a decade ago and now the buzz is Content Design and Content Operations.
Interestingly and confusingly, the terms are also used quite differently around the world. Let me illustrate it with just one example: Content Design.
in the UK there are more than one thousand content designers working in the various national and local parts of the UK government
in the US, content design is a much more commercial term focused on writing content to drive conversions
Content Operations is also a newer term, just a few years old. As Rachel McConnell said in one of our June peer group meetings:
“Operations sound boring, but it’s important.”
When I first started hearing about Content Operations, it was all about the gap between content strategy and execution. I’ve since seen how organisations use the term differently, but the focus on operations clearly resonates with many on both the customer and vendor sides.
Vendors clearly have a strong voice when it comes to shaping an emerging industry:
“Take control of your content operations” is how Sitecore positions its Content Hub product on their website,
Contentful has a whitepaper on ‘Content operations for editorial teams’.
Kentico Kontent recently did a webinar on ‘Global Content Operations Made Easy’
Enonic has a blog post from May 2020 with the memorable title: Rocketpower your content operations
How about in your organisation? Do you have the right people, in the right seats working on your content?
Content is a workflow and vice versa
Workflow is famously known as the most requested CMS feature that nobody uses.
That’s obviously an exaggeration, but compared to how often workflow as a feature is requested in sales demonstrations or requirements specifications, it is exceedingly rare to find an actual content workflow implemented.
As long-time community member Bernd Burkert said:
“If we need flexible workflows, then workflows should be content, i.e. managed in a no-code environment by business users.”
In my follow-up conversation with Bernd, he described the paradigm change from siloed organisations, with a fixed team and a standard content process, towards a more agile way of working in a mesh-like organisation. That’s why we need content workflows.
Content is also multi-channel storytelling
Storytelling is universal to the human experience and really also the ultimate connector between people. Brands have been telling stories for a long time, since before the advent of the Web, and agencies and software companies support them in doing it in a multi-channel experience.
Content has long been more than just text. We’ve seen a huge rise in different content types, including video, podcasts, high-resolution images delivered to smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices.
In the last couple of years, voice assistants have also become widely used. Some of the informative content that is requested in my households are automatically created like the weather forecast or sports results. In a recent member call, Preston So shared much more on his new book titled ‘Voice Content & Usability. Read more in: Does your content speak for itself?
Perhaps for voice content, we need to differentiate better between different types of content? Different classes if you like. One way to look at it could be these types:
digital assets like podcasts, which may be rendered in a player, not unlike video.
content (text) in a way, that it can be surfaced by both a search engine and rendered by a voice assistant like Alexa.
conversational interfaces and the challenge to design flows in order to understand the intention of a user, and provide the right response. This leads to a new type of content design where you focus on creating flows that engage the users
The key advice from Preston So to make it all work: Focus on single-source content.
Content is not enough anymore
You would think that with everything I’ve covered, you are done, but as illustrated with a memorable quote in the recent news from open source vendor Umbraco:
Content is not enough anymore
This was a part of their press release announcing that a Swedish investor had acquired a majority stake in Umbraco. The paragraph was titled: “Staying relevant” and I would tend to agree with them. To stay relevant you do indeed need to change the way you are doing things, and that also goes for content!