What will tomorrow’s online content look like, and how will we go about managing it? Angus Edwardson explores three key strategies
By the end of the decade there will be 10 times as many connected, content-serving devices on earth as there are humans. This puts a lot of pressure on those of us in the business of serving content. How do we make sure the stuff we’re putting out there actually means something to our users?
This article outlines three areas we’re struggling to keep up with when it comes to content management:
● Design: With ‘content’ work requiring more design thinking, the way we organise sites is changing
● Production: It can be tricky to get traditional content teams to produce semantically marked-up content
● Maintenance: How do we actually maintain today’s omni-channel, adaptive creations?
By highlighting some successful experiments in each of these areas, we can suggest best practices for spending our time and money on managing ‘future content’.
DESIGN
The UK government now employs 15 content designers: people that have been specifically trained to think of content in terms of meeting users’ needs. Meanwhile conferences dedicated to ‘design and content’ are popping up, as are resources about how designers and content people can create better digital experiences together.
This blurring of responsibilities can be hard for agencies, which have to adapt to selling frameworks for content production, rather than simple websites. It can be even harder for larger organisations to establish crossdisciplinary teams with the spectrum of skills required.
One possible solution is illustrated by the charity Cancer Research UK, which exploits user journeys to get everyone involved in prototyping with content. This is a great example of a cross-organisational design process that puts content first. Real nurses draft content for each touchpoint in the journey, then real editors review it, after which it is pushed into a hosted HTML prototype.
Benefits to this process include:
● By tying everything back to a user journey, we have a clear focus, and a measure of success and failure
● There’s no Lorem Ipsum. Because real content is used, we can go beyond checking whether users can navigate a layout and test whether people understand what is being communicated; to see if their questions are being answered, and their needs met
● At the end, we have a skeleton of the technical infrastructure needed, including content production tools, the CMS and a visual style guide
● It is a prototype of the building process. This makes it valuable when it comes to estimating the time required to scale up to thousands of user journeys. It’s easy to underestimate how long approval will take
This final point leads us on to one of the biggest challenges we face when it comes to content …
PRODUCTION
Since our devices are increasingly aware of their context, location, and the person they are serving information to, there are huge opportunities for personalised experiences. To make this happen, we need some level of ‘intelligent content’. Over the past four years, Adobe and Sitecore have seen 106 per cent and 35 per cent year-on-year growth in their respective content-personalisation CMSs. But is everyone ready for these tools?
The story goes:
●Marketing manager sees a conference talk about the wonders of personalisation
● “That looks cool. Let’s get one of those”
● Agency builds it
● What now? We have a beast we can’t control
● Firm uses about 2 per cent of a very expensive CMS
One solution to this problem is exemplified by British conservation body the National Trust, which is currently testing advanced personalisation in Adobe Experience Manager. Its aims go as far as customising emails and landing pages to reference specific objects, in specific sites, based on a user’s previous visit.
Let’s consider this in the scale of their organisation. The National Trust owns over 200 properties, each of which is managed by a separate team. Each team has its own marketing manager, who has their own digital content to manage.
To find a solution that worked for all of these content creators, the organisation hired a team of specialists, including three information architects, two content strategists, a data scientist, four UX designers and two product managers. It started by breaking the National Trust’s area of operations into smaller regions and performed tests in each one to establish the best way of creating content on an ongoing basis. It then came up with a training plan to educate everyone involved. But what happens if you don’t have the resources to hire a ‘SWAT team’ of specialists like this? In the next section, we’ll explore an alternate strategy.
MAINTENANCE
The final major challenge of modern content management is keeping it up to date. With models that separate producers from publishers and consumers, it can be very hard to close the loop.
Tourism Australia takes a different approach to adapting its organisation to the creation of structured content: one that also makes that content easy to update. It has abstracted the publishing tools away from the submission of content, giving contributors plain text forms to fill in with forced validation for images and assets. This isn’t as robotic as it sounds, as the fields in the form are surrounded by tone of voice guidelines and examples of how to write well for the medium.
The result is a database of content that is totally devoid of form and can be pushed out and published anywhere. Create once, publish everywhere. This model also works well when you don’t have the resources for training and education.
ANY OTHER BUSINESS?
Now is an exciting time to be working with content. It’s being invested in at an incredible rate, and is expanding into some incredible areas.
For a start, we hear rumours that 90 per cent of the world’s content was created in the past two years – and that volume is set to increase by 500 per cent in the next decade. We need to keep exploring how we can manage all that data effectively.
Meanwhile, the forms in which content must be produced are changing. Mobile technologies like Spritz and personalised news-delivery services such as Vox Sentences suggest a growing demand for information efficiency, while the Apple Watch and other microdevices put pressure on information creators to create content in more compressed – or at least, more translatable – forms, regardless of personalisation.
In both cases, best practices are still being established: a process in which we, as content professionals, can all play our parts. Hopefully, the strategies we’ve outlined here will give you a head-start when it comes to creating future-friendly content.