Do you remember plasma globes? Mainly used back in school as a fun thing in physics and also known for the tricks that can be performed on them by users moving their hands around them.
To Nicole France, content is similar to that old invention by Nikola Tesla when he was experimenting with high-frequency electric currents in a glass vacuum tube. Content also has tremendous energy and it can go in all kinds of directions. It’s something everybody think they can play with and certainly have an opinion about, but it takes quite some work to make something useful out of it.
Nicole has a background as an analyst with both Gartner and Constellation Research, she’s also been almost 6 years with Fujitsu, worked in both the US and Europe and now she’s Evangelist, Director of Content at Contentful.
She’s also our expert of the month.
Read moreThis 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.
Read more“Let the content folks do their job”
In my conversation with Ottawa-based Mark Demeny from Optimizely, the conversation quickly turned to how we can best empower content creators and site builders. There’s still too much thinking required according to Mark and that’s from someone who’s spent his working life since the late ’90s on web systems and digital platforms.
On February 1st, less than 2 months ago, Mark left Contentful and joined Episerver on Feb 1. Just one week later, Episerver renamed to Optimizely and Mark’s responsibility as Director, Product Management turned from Episerver CMS to what is now called the Optimizely Content Cloud.
At Optimizely he is collaborating with many of his former colleagues from his 8 years at Sitecore and on his to-do-list for the coming months is updating the product architecture and integration to the rest of the Optimizely suite. Mark is our expert of the month.
Read moreIt seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.
However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.
In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.
Read moreWhat can we do to ensure that no persona gets left behind in content management, especially as we begin to discuss requirements surrounding digital experience management?
In a recent member conference call, Preston So from Oracle looked to fields as diverse as geology and motivational psychology and expanded our sights to dimensions beyond the static web to forge a new grand compromise between content editors and marketers and their engineering counterparts to foster a bright future for the CMS — and how we can create and contribute to initiatives to support it.
Read moreImproving your digital content, understanding what parts of your digital marketing actually works and also what content you might be missing, have so far been mostly manual labour, tricky to solve and often low on the list of priorities.
New projects seem to always get the attention, and while there’s much talk about quality over quantity, it’s fair to say that many corporate websites remain bloated and with plenty of room to improve the experience.
With the acquisition of Idio in late 2019, Episerver now wants to take on content diagnostics to quickly perform content audits, improve content marketing, and understand which keywords and content topics perform best. Sounds great right? Let’s take a closer look to better understand the problem and the solution that Epi is offering.
Read moreLife as a content professional is so much more than writing. It’s moved way beyond the words.
The words will always be a large part of what I do, whether that’s writing, editing, or reviewing. But increasingly, much more now needs to happen before the words are published, and again after.
Read moreToo often, content models are developed with no consideration of the system in which they have to operate. This leads to a horrible editorial experience, which is one of the overlooked topics in today’s digital workplace.
In Real World Content Modelling, the new book by Deane Barker, he examines how content actually gets modeled inside a content management system.
Read moreI suspect we might be reaching an inflection point in the evolution of content technology. We might be reaching the point where vendors stop pretending that servicing large web properties from a single CMS is a good idea, and instead they begin to embrace and even celebrate the idea of orchestrating content from multiple providers.
Read moreDuring the past years, many digital projects have focused on trimming websites by making them leaner, cleaner and more effective in solving the key tasks of their customers.
Many websites suffer from so-called redundant, outdated and trivial (ROT) pages and it makes much sense to continuously address this problem from spiraling out of control.
Still if you want to take a customer-first approach, you need to add radically more pages to your site.
To understand why, let’s first take a step back.
Read moreSearch engine optimisation (SEO) is widely known as a tactical discipline focused on optimising for Google and ensuring that at least some of your content gets found.
At recent J. Boye group meetings, I’ve noticed that SEO has become a much more strategic topic and even a driving force when it comes to content strategy. In other words, SEO informs content creation and curation including the decisions on what goes on the website.
Read moreCloud computing is far from a new phenomenon and it has seen a wave of vendors changing the game in their respective industries, such as Salesforce.com disrupting CRM and Zendesk doing the same to customer service.
Read more