Let they own their content!

Posted on | avril 27, 2010 | No Comments

I was giving a too short one-day seminar, yesterday, on webcontent usability & editorial strategy. Again, I was pleased to meet a really motivated and talented audience. There are good writers within the teams in charge with web content. And some could be good editors, too. Even really good publishers. If only they owned their contents. If only they were able to take the responsability of what they publish.

Some organizations are still awful at publishing webcontent. They feed their websites & intranets as if they were steam train engine furnaces constantly needing coal to run. They see the interface as a store place, not as a publishing media.

There wouldn’t be so much quality & relevancy loss on intranets & websites if there were real authoring processes,  agreed publishing workflows, and content standards within organizations; with authors & editors having rights, powers & prerogatives, and content owners & ambassadors taking care of what has been agreed as good, relevant, awesome, audience targeted webcontent delivery.

I was giving a workshop yesterday in a large multi-national banking organization, to help them optimze the content usability & editorial strategy on their intranet. The people who assisted the seminar are journalists, communicators, writers. They know how to write well. They did not especially learn to write « for the Web » (even if, as I recently wrote in a FR post, we don’t write for the Web, we write for an audience), but they are really good writers. And after they heard my presentation on usability requirements and content strategy, they were perfectly able to spot what needed optimization and correction. And they were eager to that, of course. As good writers. As communicators.

Editors missing

All day long, there was always the same issue coming back when auditing some pages of the Intranet, or trying to correct the content of a news that had to be on line today. They do not own the content they have to publish, what means that some of the corrections & upgrading we agreed were not applicable because the « client » would not accept it.

First of all their « status » is not clear. Sometimes, they are writers – they have to create a copy on a topic they have been given from the marketing departement, or Sales, or HR. Sometimes, they are « content integrators » – i.e. they receive the gross content from these departements and are pleased to publish it, with no change. They are rarely editors… Proofing, optimizing, and updating the content with a real vision and long term editorial strategy, remaining consistent with design guidelines and (internal) brand image, coordinating the copy production & content calendar, etc.

Their real added value is completely neglected. Web editors are essential in the web content publishing process. Publishing is about quality control, and critical content, and audience-targeted information & communication, and it is also about content ROI. This is, precisely, the job of a web editor.

Mind your own business!

So… let the marketers just do marketing, and HR just do HR. They have their knowledge. Web editors & content strategists have their own knowledge too: it is to put the organization’s knowledge into words, i.e. to communicate the knowledge of the organization : to inform the audiences about it. Let them own their business, let them own their knowledge : content.

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• A short content review checklist
• Content is not enough
• A unified content strategy needs strategy… and tactics!

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