Intelligent content, if you’re not familiar with the term, means a whole lot more than just good content. It means content that is adaptable to various formats and devices, reusable for multiple purposes, and highly discoverable, thanks to rich structure and good tagging.

Conference topics ran the gamut. Content strategy and engineering. Globalization. Localization. Personalization. Translation. Augmented reality and Google Glass. And impassioned pleas for content that is useful, convenient, and stands out.

There was a lot to chew on. But three themes stood out, themes that were invoked again and again and will be ringing in our ears for some time to come.

Content Magic Doesn’t Happen by Magic

Setting your content free sounds simple enough. The reality is that creating content for different people in different places on different devices at the right time takes intense planning and groundwork.

Think you’re ready for your Oreo moment? Think again. Oreo’s readiness for the famous Superbowl blackout tweet was the result of months of hard work collaborating among teams, hashing out processes and building frameworks.

The critical component? Content engineering, which Kanban’s’ Philip Wisniewski describes as bringing a content lens to engineering and an engineering lens to content.

Content strategy and content engineering have to work together hand in hand, as Colleen and Philip emphasized in their presentation, Oreos + Milk: 5 Reasons Content Strategy + Content Engineering Go Together.

It’s also why Content Science and Kanban Solutions are working together to introduce content engineering as a speciality. Learn whether your enterprise is ready for content engineering in our joint whitepaper on content maturity.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a breath and glance ahead at the next takeaway. And remember that the work is doable and will pay off with your visitors and customers. Just ask Nikon, IBM, or the dozens of other success stories presented at the conference.

Think Big – Start Small

The possibilities and promises of intelligent content and content engineering are great. But they are complex and involve lots of moving parts.

Dream big about what your enterprise can do with content. But don’t try to do it all at once.

Start with something small. Not necessarily your high-profile product, but a department or project that’s a bit under the radar. A team that doesn’t get a lot of attention but would like to. Educate them on the principles and possibilities and get them excited. And then do something cool.

If you can get a small win, you’ll get other teams who want in on the action, plus buy in from stakeholders. Build a few of those and you’re on your way to those big dreams.

Be the Bridge + Collaborate

The technologies around content and marketing are proliferating at a dizzying rate. For many organizations, marketing and IT still control the lion’s share of the budget and decision-making around these technologies.

But “random acts of technology,” as Content Marketing Institute Chief Strategist Robert Rose calls them, can derail the customer experience.

Content, he says, can be the grounding force of a business strategy. We could not agree more. And content strategists can drive marketing and IT to create an integrated strategy that makes the most of your resources for creating those customer experiences.

For content to reach its magic-like potential, it’s time to work with the marketers and the engineers. Let’s bridge the silos and collaborate.

The post Think Big and Make Magic With Content Strategy and Engineering appeared first on Content Science.

When your content strategy factors in engineering considerations and vice versa, you will be much more likely to succeed. Last week, Philip Wisniewski of Kanban and I walked through only a few of these considerations at Intelligent Content Conference. The slides don’t show everything we discussed, of course, but they make a useful introduction and list helpful resources.

The post Content Strategy + Content Engineering Go Together appeared first on Content Science.

If you care about user experience, do make a point of visiting a UX Thursday event in a city near you for a mix of inspiration and practical insights.

The post Learn to Call Your Own Baby Ugly appeared first on Content Science.

It’s tough to break down a content silo if you don’t realize it exists. So, to help you spot a silo before it wrecks havoc on implementing your content strategy, I’m sharing 5 types of silos I often encounter.

1. Department Silo

An oldie but not-so-goodie, this type of silo happens when different departments do not align their content efforts. Three signs of this silo include

• Different departments give conflicting or uncohesive messages.
  
• One department’s content catches another department by surprise.
• One department’s strategy interferes with the strategy of another department.

For example, when I worked for Cingular Wireless, the marketing department launched a promotion that thoroughly confused customers. Instead of boosting sales, the promotion inundated customer service with calls and emails that customer service wasn’t sure how to handle. Had the content for that promotion been clearer and better coordinated, Cingular Wireless could have sidestepped that logistical mess and ding to their customers’ satisfaction.

More recently, I encountered an organization whose public relations department controlled their social media. A different department oversaw their editorial content. Because the departments did not coordinate, public relations was not sharing any of their editorial content on their social channels. The company was missing a big opportunity to increase the reach of their editorial content.

2. Channel Silo

Another classic, this type of silo happens when different channels (or customer touchpoints) such as phone, web, and store do not harmonize their content efforts and even compete against each other. Symptoms of this silo include

• Each channel has incentive to keep customers using their channel.
  
• Messages or other content across channels are inconsistent.

As a rather extreme example, I once worked with a company that communicated their customers’ account status inconsistently on the phone (through their interactive voice response system) and on the web. Talk about inviting confusion!

3. Discipline Silo

This type is both old and new. The classic version is subject matter expertise vs. content strategy expertise. For an example, check out our case study or interview with CDC Travelers’ Health.

The discipline silo also rears its head in new ways, such as

• Content strategy expertise vs. design expertise. 
• Content strategy expertise vs. content marketing expertise.
• Content strategy expertise vs. content engineering expertise.

I discuss the silo between content marketing and content strategy in this article.

I’ll speak to the silo between content strategy and content engineering next week at my session Oreos and Milk: 5 Reasons Why Content Strategy and Content Engineering Go Together.

4. Customer / User Phase Silo

A recent silo, it has emerged because most businesses and organizations now have to support every phase of their relationships with customers, members, or users through digital content. Indicators of this silo include

• Providing content that isn’t appropriate for the user or customer, such as promoting a product or feature they already have.
• Missing opportunities to repurpose content in different relationship phases.

For instance, I once worked with a retailer that had useful content to help customers research products before they buy. Much of that same content also can help customers after they buy. So, we helped the retailer repurpose some of that content to help customers use and care for their products.

5. Feature Silo

Also new, this silo occurs when organizations take a product management approach to their websites and other digital experiences. The company breaks up responsibility for the website or the experience into features owned by product managers. When there isn’t a central product vision (as David Hobbs often stresses) and content coordination across features, this silo can emerge. The main sign is content in one feature unexpectedly affects or even contradicts content in another feature.

For example, I once worked with a hotel company that split its reservation flow (the process to find and book a hotel room) and the detailed content about hotels (hotel details) into two separate features. The reservation flow, of course, provided some hotel detail content. Once, the company almost released the reservation flow without accommodating a change to the hotel details content. Had the two feature teams not talked in time, the release would have thoroughly confused travelers.

Spot and Smash Content Silos

As the need for content has intensified in our increasingly digital business world, the types of content silos you could face have multiplied. I’ve only scratched the surface. Watch for the signs of silos so you can break them down before they muck up your content progress.

The post 5 Types of Content Silos to Break Down appeared first on Content Science.

Speaking of questions, you might have a few about this book. I’m sharing 3 key things to know as well as a sample.

3 Bits to Know About the Book

This book is different from Clout and from many books about research or data analysis. Here’s the scoop.

1. It’s a compact but rich ebook.

This book is not a Bible. It’s not an encyclopedia. It’s not a ponderous tomb of every possible permutation of data analysis you could possibly want to do. It’s a concise primer to begin evaluating your content’s effectiveness.

Also, the book is available only in electronic format. That means the cost stays quite reasonable. Instead of having to share one copy of a print book, a team easily can have several electronic copies.

2. It’s visual and linked.

Sometimes, words and numbers are not enough to communicate concepts. So, this book takes a visual approach where it makes sense. Because the design focuses on the ebook format, it works very well with ereaders and incorporates links.

3. It focuses on why AND how to start.

The publisher, New Riders, and I decided to make the book part of their Fuel series. Fuel is a source of energy or even passion. And, I find both energy and passion are essential to overcoming the organizational inertia that prevents content evaluation. It’s much harder to start a fire than to keep a fire going. So, I focused this book on the start. I intend this book to give you (and your teams) enough inspiration and enough process know-how to begin evaluating your content’s effectiveness.

Excerpt: Why Make Content Evaluation a Priority

When content is so important to your organization’s success, can you afford not to evaluate it? When you assess whether your content is effective, you avoid risk, save costs, and take advantage of opportunities. Let’s take a closer look at each of these reasons.

Avoid Risk

When you evaluate your content, you gain understanding of whether the content is effective. If the content is not effective, then you can change your approach. That understanding helps you avoid the risk of wasting time, money, and effort on an approach that doesn’t work or that could be more effective.

For example, a large technology firm invested in creating videos as part of a video strategy. The company did not evaluate the effectiveness of the videos until they created hundreds of videos. When they did evaluate, they found that 10 percent of the videos drove 90 percent of the traffic (number of visits and views). Less could have been more. Had the company evaluated sooner, they could have saved thousands in video production costs.

Save Costs and Optimize Resources

Avoiding the risk of investing in a content approach that doesn’t work is one way to save costs. Content evaluation can help you save costs and optimize your resources in several other ways:

Reduce churning—spinning on inconclusive conversations about content that waste people’s time and energy—and get buy-in from stakeholders and executives for content changes.

Get more value out of data collection tools your organization already uses, such as analytics, by getting content-focused insights.

Identify effective techniques and lessons learned that you can repeat for similar types of content across your organization—especially handy for large organizations and enterprises.

If your evaluation uncovers a problem that requires deeper follow-up analysis, that analysis becomes more efficient. Instead of exploring a wide range of causes, the analysis will explore a narrow range of possibilities.

Gain Competitive Advantage

Of course, avoiding risk and saving costs help with gaining a competitive advantage. Additionally, when you evaluate your content, you will likely see ways to improve the content as well as some unexpected successes. You can use those insights to your advantage and stay ahead of the competition. For example, IBM found that its digital magazine for midsize businesses, Midsize Insider, was effective at reaching midsize businesses around the world after only three months. So IBM continued to invest in the digital magazine to solidify its position with that market. If IBM did not realize quickly that its magazine was successful, the company could have lost that opportunity.

I’m only scratching the surface of the benefits to evaluating content. You’re smart, so I think you get the idea. By now, you might be wondering, “How do I start enjoying these benefits?” It starts with the right process.

Learn about the process and more from the book, available to order today. 

The post An Excerpt from Does Your Content Work? appeared first on Content Science.

Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead: Documentary or promotional film?

As part of a quest to eat a more healthful diet, I recently picked the documentary “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” as the night’s edutainment.

The story resonated at first. I watched Australian entrepreneur Joe Cross shed 100 pounds and cure his auto-immune disorder through a juice diet and then take his trusty juicer on the road to spread his message.

Then I learned that “Joe the Juicer” is now selling Breville juicers—the brand featured prominently in the film—as part of his get-healthy-with-juicing program.

The film’s message lost its credibility and impact as I started to wonder whether I had just watched a feature-length commercial. I questioned the motives behind the message. I questioned the ethics involved.

Enterprises, too, risk losing credibility and impact when they don’t consider ethics as part of their content strategy.

What exactly are ethics? They are the moral principles that guide our behavior. So, even a small ethical slip can prompt people to question those principles, eroding their trust in your motives, your brand, and your products or services.

The right ethical choice isn’t always obvious. In our digital age where media and marketing content are merging, making the right ethical decision becomes even more challenging. So, let’s look at a few areas of content where ethics come into play so you can devise guidelines before problems arise.

Transparency

Sponsored content, native ads, promoted posts, branded content—there are many ways these days to trade or pay to get your message out.

You’ll need to asses the pros and cons of these tactics in relation to your goals (see more on our post, Sponsored Content, Branded Content + Native Advertising), but don’t lose sight of the value of transparency.

The problem with “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” is not Breville’s possible involvement. It’s that the nature of that involvement is obscured.*

Companies can gain credibility by publishing relevant, high-quality content that their users value. In the course of doing business, companies acquire useful expertise that is worth sharing with their customers. Just look at how FootSmart shares running research and other expertise on The Running Shop and, at the same time, does not hide the fact they’re selling running products.

Your audience is sophisticated enough to understand promoted content and evaluate it accordingly. But, they will feel hoodwinked if you don’t clearly label sponsored or otherwise paid-for content as such, and you’ll lose credibility.

Photo Editing

We are all so accustomed these days to “awesomizing” our photos, adding filters and effects, that we’ve started to note when a photo hasn’t been altered rather than when it has (#nofilter). But altering photos can lead to trouble, too. Just think back to the buzz over faked photos from Kim Jong Un and North Korea, or way, way back to the controversy over a darkened image of OJ Simpson during his murder trial.

People trust photos as a record of reality, so photos should not be altered to mislead, confuse or misrepresent. Illustrations and other works created by combining or heavily editing images should be obvious and/or clearly marked as such. For help getting started on creating your own photo editing policy, check out Consumer Union’s collection of 38 photo manipulation policies. Another helpful Consumer’s Union report explains various photo manipulation terms along with examples.

Fact Checking

Is checking your facts really a question of ethics? Just ask any of the Internet-targeted Boston bombing “suspects.” Or Bob Barker, Jackie Chan or the pop singer Gotye, who are among many celebrities who’ve had to refute reports of their death. Or any subject of any Internet rumor ever.

In our connected culture, misinformation can spread like wildfire. And once it’s out there, it’s hard to correct. The more people hear something, the more likely they are to believe it (the result of a persuasive technique called amplification).

That puts the burden on you to check your facts before you put them out there—or be responsible for the consequences.

Homepage of Healthcare.gov the day it went live.

User Stories

Storytelling is all the content rage these days, and your users have some fantastic ones. But you need to be conscious about how you are using those stories. Will your users feel respected, or betrayed?

For a glimpse at how things can go awry, consider Adriana. All she was expecting for being part of the Healthcare.gov marketing was some free family photos. What she wasn’t expecting? To be the butt of online jokes and hatred after being featured on the home page during the site’s disastrous launch.

Even if people have shared their photos and stories themselves, are you opening them up to a level of scrutiny they’re not prepared for? Do you even have permission to use their photo, identity or story? A quest for authenticity, noble as it may be, can lead to exploitation if you’re not vigilant. Are you representing your users’ interests as well as your own?

Steps Toward Applying Ethics

We’ve covered a few topics where ethics play a role, but there are myriad more, and new ones are emerging all the time. Guard yourself against potential ethical pitfalls with these key steps:

• Make ethics part of your content conversation. 
• Consider creating guidelines or a code of ethics and keep it updated. 
• Cultivate a culture of respect for your users. Remember that a good content strategy is one that considers their needs as well as your business goals. 

And ask yourself these kinds of questions mentioned in Clout:

“Will your brand, idea, product, or service really deliver what your web content promises and supports? Are you helping users make good decisions that are not only in your best interests but also in theirs? If not, you risk violating your users’ trust in a big way.”

For more on the importance of credibility, check out our Content and Credibility Study.

*While the movie and its web site do not address the Breville partnership, I eventually found this statement on Cross’s “ReBoot with Joe” web site.

The post Concerned about Credibility and Impact? Consider Ethics appeared first on Content Science.

Content analysis is an area where it’s easy to know “enough to be dangerous” but hard to take the right approach with the right methodologies. As a simple example, I recently met a very intelligent Ph.D. who was interested in content analysis. He said, “I really want to do an eye tracking study on our Facebook page.”

Eye tracking is exactly what it sounds like—recording where people look on a computer or mobile screen. Would tracking his Facebook page bring him much insight? No. Aside from the limitations of eye tracking, this methodology wouldn’t shed light on whether posting content on Facebook was effective. The goal of posting content on Facebook is to get your content into your follower’s feeds and have people respond or engage. The goal is not to have people read your Facebook page top to bottom. To boot, more and more people use Facebook through small mobile screens, so their eyes can’t go to so many places, anyway.

That’s one simple example for a social media channel (or touchpoint). Now, imagine having to sort through methodologies to analyze and evaluate your web content across all channels? Not an easy task.

To pick the right content analysis methods, l advise not to start with methods. You’ll quickly stop seeing the forest and focus on the trees (probably the chlorophyll in the leaves on the trees). Take a step back and consider your goal for the content analysis. Then consider these two critical types of content analysis: formative and evaluative.

Formative Content Analysis

Let’s walk through the high points of this analysis.

Purpose

The purpose is to understand your current content state, with an eye toward forming a content strategy. Sometimes, people call this discovery. What I don’t like about discovery is the implied lack of focus. This analysis is not a wide open expedition to uncover anything and everything. It’s analysis with the goal of forming a plan for content. The analysis has to stay focused or it will not be timely or useful.

Sample Scope

Typically, the scope of this analysis falls into two categories: the content itself and its context.

A major outcome of this analysis is knowing the current state of your content.

Content landscape – What content (or source material for content) do you really have?

Content quality – What level of quality is the content? Is it following best practices to work well for users, content management systems, and search engines?

Content performance – What content are people using and not using?

To fully understand the current content situation, you might need to know more about the context such as:

User / customer / audience - Who are they? Who is most important? What works about the content for them and what doesn’t—and why? Are there any gaps between what they need and the current content? What channels are they using?

Business or brand goals - What are you trying to achieve online and with content specifically? What is your mission or brand, and does your content reflect your mission or brand focus?

Competitor / ecosystem – What other organizations offer related content to these same users / customers / audiences? What are they doing differently, better, or worse?

Process / workflow - How is content managed, curated, or created? What works well and what doesn’t? How does process (or lack thereof) affect content quality or effectiveness?

Technology / engineering – What platforms or tools are you using? How do they limit or enable reusing content across channels? How do they limit or enable making content easy for your users / customers / audiences to find? How effectively do they support your content process or workflow?

Who Uses It

In my anecdotal experience, content strategists talk about or use this kind of analysis often. Content marketers and communication professionals do so less often but could benefit greatly from it. If you’re like most content marketers, you do not have a documented content strategy (44% of B2B content marketers have one and 39% of B2C content marketers have one.) A useful step toward filling that gap is to conduct a formative content analysis.

I find content marketers focus more than content strategists on the second type of content analysis, evaluative. Let’s take a closer look at this type.

Evaluative Analysis (Content Evaluation)

I often call evaluative content analysis content evaluation. Here are some key points about this analysis.

Purpose

The main goal of content evaluation is to assess content impact or effectiveness and identify opportunities to refine your content strategy or optimize your content tactics.

A frequent side benefit of content evaluation is finding out whether your context has changed significantly. For example, I once worked with a government agency that discovered through ongoing evaluation of their website that students were becoming a larger and more influential user group than the agency expected. As a result, you can consider whether to change your content strategy significantly.

Sample Scope

The scope of content evaluation often encompasses areas such as these.

Impact on perceptions - How does your content affect what your users / customers / audiences think or decide? Do people perceive you or your content in the way you intend? Why? How does changing specific content affect a particular perception?

Impact on behavior – How does your content affect what your users / customers / audiences do with your content or as a result of your content, online and offline? Why? How does changing specific content affect a behavior or action?

Achievement of business or content goal(s) - Did implementing your content strategy achieve or make progress toward your goals? To what extent and why? Is there an actual or projected return on investment?

Changes in context – Have user / customer / audience needs changed? Has the competitive landscape or content ecosystem changed? Have business or brand goals changed?

Who Uses It

In my anecdotal experience, content strategists do not talk about this kind of analysis much, which leads me to think they’re not doing it often. Those who do talk about impact, however, tend to get more resources for their work or promoted to higher profile roles or projects.

Also anecdotally, content marketers tend to focus on understanding impact on behavior and optimizing content (using methodologies such as A/B testing) to increase a particular behavior. Content managers or engineers tend to focus on impact on process or technology efficiencies. In other words, evaluating content tends to be as “siloed” as creating content is. Everyone involved in content for an organization would benefit from coming together and widening the scope of content evaluation to tell a complete story of content’s impact.

Now that you have an overview of these types of analysis, some resources to dig further into them might be handy.

Our Resources

We do and advise others about content analysis often and have learned a tremendous amount along the way. I’ve assembeled a selection of resources that we created or helped create.

Slides and Articles

• Content Analysis: Know Thy Content
• Content Analysis: A Practical Approach
• Does Your Content Work for People?
• How Surveys Can Help You Create More Effective Content Marketing
• Content evaluation blog articles
• Content analysis blog articles

Books

• Does Your Content Work?
• Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content

Tools and Services

• Content Quality Checklist
• ContentWRX

The post 2 Critical Types of Content Analysis appeared first on Content Science.

But, evaluating content today at scale is not exactly easy. And, many content professionals I’ve talked to face challenges ranging from no time for evaluation to feeling uncomfortable with numbers. “I’m not a numbers person” is a comment I hear often.

To help overcome those challenges and more, we’ve developed a new product, a software service called ContentWRX. (We pronounce it like “Content Works.”) I’m delighted to share our expanded website that more fully explains what ContentWRX is and how it works. Here’s a glimpse of the home page:

And check the site again in February. We’re adding a Library with resources about evaluating content, using ContentWRX, and making content effective.

Visit ContentWRX.com >

The post Explore the New ContentWRX.com appeared first on Content Science.

Lisa Welchman

Hear “governance” and you may think about budget fights, policy arguments, and gridlock. In the digital world, governance doesn’t actually have anything to do with the government, but it’s very much about getting unstuck.

“A lot of organizations have reached the proverbial wall” in their digital efforts, says Lisa Welchman, a pioneer in the field of digital governance. “They’re in a stalemate, and they can’t move forward unless they get themselves and their websites better organized.”

Welchman has spent over a decade helping large enterprises — multinational corporations, international organizations such as the United Nations, higher education, hospitals and more — get themselves better organized by building governance frameworks.

We talked with Welchman recently about how better governance can benefit content work and her best advice for content professionals.

What’s the core concept of digital governance?

Digital governance is establishing appropriate decision-making authority for digital strategy, policy, and standards. Basically, deciding who decides. In a lot of projects, there are arguments and debates about user interface design, information architecture, editorial standards, or infrastructure platforms like web content management systems or portals. Those organizations have never stepped back and said, who is supposed to decide what the standards are for these things? Who are the decision makers?

Because the web grew so organically, there are a lot of people in the mix who feel like they have the authority to make decisions who maybe don’t have the expertise to do so but historically have been able to. If you can figure that part out, then you can figure out who to go to when there are debates or you need a final decision. So, it’s deciding, outside of the context of a specific project, who has the authority to make decisions about digital strategy, standards and policy.

How have you seen governance make a difference in the content arena?

In big organizations, the core web team often doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain all the content for the whole website or monitor all the content for the social channels or the mobile apps. So they’d like to decentralize, but they are reluctant to do so because people who have subject matter expertise might not have real web expertise—things like writing web copy or understanding how to maximize user experience.

Part of governance is stewardship of standards and ensuring that you create a standards-compliant environment inside an organization. That means more than saying, “I’m the expert and this is what the standard is, and if you can’t uphold this standard then you can’t be involved.” It’s enabling others in the organization to help support digital channels.

We see a strong connection between effective evaluation and governance. How do you view the role of evaluation in governance?

Once you have your strategy, the measurement piece comes into play, making sure that you have the performance metrics in place to evaluate whether or not you are actually doing the right things online, or doing the effective things online.

The problem in an environment with no governance can be that if you are down some business unit, and you’re asked to provide metrics to see whether some piece of content is effective or not, you’re going to build metrics that are about your business silo. So that’s good for you, but it’s not good for everything, It doesn’t address what your content is doing in another business context, if you’re doing cross-selling or whatever. That’s why it is really important to have a holistic view of evaluation.

What other advice do you have for content professionals?

I hear a lot of complaints from content people that my boss doesn’t get it, my stakeholders don’t get it, they’re not doing what we’re saying. I see far less effort from them in trying to understand the business case. My advice is: Listen to your stakeholders — actually hear what they are saying and understand what their concerns are — and take that more into account when you are developing your content strategy.

The other thing I say all the time is: Lead. It’s not okay to sit in the back seat and say “Listen to me” but be too scared to drive the car. A lot of content strategists want to lead from the back seat, and they are going to have to step up. That means understanding more about about management, budgeting, running content teams, and how their content is making the business money or gaining new members.

How can content practitioners better encourage or implement governance? 

When I go into organizations and say show me your standards, I often hear: “Well, they aren’t really written down, they’re in my head. I’m the expert, and people just run it past me.” Or, they’ll go somewhere to some irretrievable place on their intranet, find some giant PDF or Microsoft Word file, download it and email it to me. And I say to them: Is this the best you can do for your internal stakeholders? You’re complaining that they aren’t doing content right, but you’re making them dig around an intranet that’s a disaster area and pull out a 200-page file and find the standard they need — does that sound right?

How can organizations get started developing a digital governance framework?

The part that makes most people crazy is decision making about standards. Policy, which is like privacy policy, security, and accessibility, are important but less so on the day-to-day tactical level for most digital workers. If you don’t have the bandwidth or resources to start a full governance framework, figure out who has decision-making authority for different sets of standards. We usually break it into four piles: design; editorial; publishing and development; and network and server infrastructure.

I guarantee there’s a lot of people who think they have authority for designing standards, or who think they ought to. And this lack of clarity is what causes so much debate during projects. So, sit down and have that conversation around those standards outside the context of a project. Because if you’re in the middle of a project and you try to make these decisions, it’s called a fight. If you do it outside the context of a project, it will be a conversation.

Lisa Welchman is founder of Welchman Pierpoint. Learn more about her at www.welchmanpierpoint.com. She will share her methodology and insights in a new book, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, coming out later this year.

Read more about governance and evaluation in our post, “My Goodness, My Governance.”

The post Managing Chaos appeared first on Content Science.

The Role of Content Strategy in Travelers’ Health
Kelly Holton, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Want to Take Your Content Marketing to the Next Level?
Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute

How to Spark and Scale Enterprise Content Strategy
Executive Team at Dell

Preparing for Content-Driven Collaboration (on Intranets and Extranets)
Lance Yoder, Cerner Corporation

To Reach Your Audience, Less Content Is More Content
Martha Dennis, University of Georgia Terry College of Business

Mental Model Mapping
Lauren Moler, National Instruments

Is Your Website a Project or a Product?
David Hobbs, Hobbs Consulting

Running to a New Market, Thanks to Content Strategy
Lauren Schuman, FootSmart

Burst Rate vs Soccer Games: The Role of Content in Guided Selling
Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering

Stop Pretending and Start Testing Your Content
Carol Barnum, Author of Usability Testing Essentials

Exploring the Early Days of Engineering Automation
Pete Pettit, Graybar

The post A Collection of Our Content Interviews This Year appeared first on Content Science.