You don’t have budget for this! Should you?
In the world of content, there are many technological advancements that have attracted the attention of senior management. The decreased cost of adoption and ease-of-use of modern publishing technology provides the capabilities for businesses to manage and leverage content in new and exciting ways. This is pretty important in today’s “customer experience” world where the modern consumers is researching and grading companies through the content you publish online! According to a study from Detecon, 78% of consumers polled embrace online self-service. While 60% of respondents use customer self service as a criterion with which to judge a brand. This new era has marketing groups excited about what’s possible.
Dollars for data-bytes
This might be a generalization, but IT departments get budget. Enterprise budgets are being allocated to new content projects which include technology components such as XML Editor(s), Component Content Management systems (CCMS), and Publishing systems. Lots of dollars here for technology! However, very few, if any of these initiatives, have assigned budget for an evaluation of the content itself. The perception is that you can take your exiting content and move it to a new technology platform and voila … content reuse, multi-channel publishing, and translation management, right?
Looking at the content itself
So what do I mean by “the content itself”? Well content has typically been written in a sequential fashion: “Once upon a time….happily ever after”. Chapters, sections, subsections, etc, have produced a flow whereby each section requires an understanding of what’s come before. With modern technology, the objective is to write Topics that can stand alone. This requires a different writing method, and sadly, budget is missing for this.
What’s your budget for content strategy?
Any successful content project requires a content strategy focusing on the content itself. For example, we typically start with a content audit and find duplication, conflicting terminology, different writing styles, verbose explanations, and walls-of-words that is difficult for audiences to consume and use effectively. This is a very good time to consider the proper transformation of your content to fit the technology and the human brain.
Precision Content™ framework
Consider your content strategy carefully. Does it account for all aspects of the content life-cycle? If not, you could be missing a critical part of the picture. The Precision Content™ framework includes three main components: utility, maintainability, and usability. Get the details of each component on our website.
You don’t have budget for this! Should you?
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