DrupalCon 2013 in Portland Oregon is right around the corner! I’m so excited for my talk: “So Happy Together (Content Strategists and Project Managers Are)” on Wednesday, May 22^nd at 10:45AM.

During this session we’ll discuss how much we CMS Mythbusters respect and appreciate the rapidly emerging discipline of content strategy. Ironically, after all these years building CMS driven websites, there is one thing we still wish people were more aware of: content matters. Sounds silly right? After all, the ‘C’ in ‘CMS’ stands for…Well, content.

However, project stakeholders are often so wrapped up worrying about technical risks or marveling over new designs that content can nearly be forgotten or worse…Treated as an unimportant ‘detail’ to be figured out later (queue Lorum Ipsum).

Content Strategy Meets Project Management

We’ll take a look at tools of the trade in content planning and strategy, discuss when and how to integrate content strategists and some of the consequences of ignoring this important aspect of designing and building new web properties. We’ll also be handing out *exclusive CMS Myth prizes* so you won’t want to miss this one!

P.S. – If you’re a regular CMS Myth reader and you recognize the title of this session, your eyes are not deceiving you…It’s based on a blog post I wrote last year.

As the folks at CERN recently celebrated, it was twenty years ago that the core technologies and standards of the world wide web (including code for a web server and a line-mode client) were officially placed in the public domain. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, designed to enable researchers to share research documents across multiple computing platforms and formats, would quickly outgrow these academic beginnings to become a global force for business and social interaction.

It helps to remember this history, though, as we still struggle with one of the fundamental assumptions of early HTML (and its predecessor SGML):

Content has its own internal structure separate from the specific presentations which might be made of it.

This core notion of separation of content from presentation has been a challenge ever since. We just can’t seem to come to grips with the notion that the web is different than print, and that rather than trying to control the output across device types, contexts, and users, we ought to aim for flexibility. (In the 10 years between John Allsop’s The Dao of Web Design and Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design, the majority of the industry – with some notable exceptions –  largely fell back into a pattern of fixed page designs for the desktop browser).

Enter Content Strategy

While the approaches like progressive enhancement, adaptive web design, and responsive web design have helped the situation significantly, by helping realize the goal of flexible presentations rendering reasonably on various devices, form factors, and contexts, they only account for content presentation.

Content strategists, most notably Karen McGrane (Content Strategy for Mobile) and Sara Wachter-Boettcher (Content Everywhere) have forced us all to recognize that without structured content – without forcing the content management systems and strategies we’re dependent upon to recognize, capture, and make use of structured content – we can’t ever truly be prepared for a world of adaptive content. The apparent flexibility of the WYSIWYG blob in fact prevents us from realizing the best presentation for each context; if we want true flexibility, we need structured content.

Content Blobs

WordPress has often been the poster child for – or represented the anti-pattern of –  unstructured content. McGrane wites:

If your organization is using a blogging platform like WordPress as its CMS, you know what this looks like. Content creators get one big field for the body of their content, and it’s like their own personal playground.

WordPress’ focus on a WYSIWYG authoring experience and the legacy of posts/pages has been loved by authors and content creators, because it allows a great degree of flexibility, or what authors see as flexibility. In fact, one of Matt Mullenweg’s favorite features in WordPress is “distraction free writing mode” in which everything but that “one big field” disappears into the background.

That apparent flexibility, however, comes at a longer term cost because the content it captures is not structured. What WordPress stores in the database is a messy melange of plain text, html markup, references to images and other assets like files, headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, and “shortcodes” which are specific snippets of text designed to be understood by plugins and transformed on display into consumable html.

WordPress plugins, themes, and templates can and will impact the presentation layer, adding styling onto that markup and processing shortcodes, but their ability to have structured, regularized, programmatic access to specific parts of the content (in order to execute rules) is very limited, because of the flexibility allowed to the person inputting the content.

Making WordPress Chunky

It doesn’t, however, have to be this way. If you have a content model, WordPress can be made to respect that model and provide interfaces for content creators which encourage require structured content and rich metadata.

Some basic structure and metadata are already built in, of course: title, body, excerpt, author, categories, tags, featured image, and (depending on what plugins you’ve elected) SEO-related metadata. Setting a featured image, for example, stores a specific relationship between the post or page and the media asset that can be presented different ways in different contexts: often, the featured image is included with the excerpt on list style pages in a smaller size, and becomes a hero image on “single article” type pages.

WordPress has also for a long time also allowed the notion of custom meta data, which requires some content modeling and some development, but enables users to add specific fields to content entries representing specific parts of the structure. For example, it’s a trivial exercise to add a subhead in addition to headlines, or to add a “pull quote” field to be treated visually in different presentation contexts. (Although it’s called custom meta data, and stored in a post-meta table, such information doesn’t have to be “metadata” in the purist sense; it can also be part of the content itself).

For $100 off a three-day conference registration use code CMSX54417

Beyond Posts and Pages

This is where one of the talks I’m giving next week at CMS Expo in Chicago comes in: Beyond Posts & Pages – Structured Content and Content Types in WordPress.

Since version WordPress 2.9 (which is to say since late 2009), WordPress can not only be made to think about posts and pages in a chunkier fashion, and to gather richer metadata about the content it is being used to manage, but to create and manage other types of content. Developers have the capability to create custom content types (which WordPress refers to as custom post types, often abbreviated CPT). Sites managed in WordPress can leverage a fairly rich content model, including multiple custom content types, different custom taxonomies for each of those content types, specific meta data or content chunks for those content types, and even (via plugins) relationships between those content types.

In the talk I will walk through a specific example – a site built during New England GiveCamp a few weekends back by a small team for a non-profit focused on encouraging youth understanding of and participation in civic action. We’ll cover:

• Registering (which means “creating”) a custom post type via theme or plugin
• Template hierarchy and styling custom post types
• Custom taxonomies and permissions
• Custom fields and meta boxes for adding/editing them – controlled vocabulary or free form
• Secondary HTML content areas

I will also discuss some of the limitations and challenges of doing complex content types in WordPress: search, alternative outputs, and relationships. It’s definitely a WordPress specific talk but many of the core concepts we’ll be discussing will be helpful for those modeling content in other platforms as well.

This month is a busy one for the CMS Myth team — from Philadelphia to Chicago to Portland, the Mythbusters will be out in force! The CMS Myth will be represented at J. Boye, CMS Expo, Drupalcon, and WebVisions, as John mentioned last month.

I took a minute (forty, actually) to pick the brains of some of our favorite Mythbusters on where they’ll be, what they’ll be talking about, and what they’re looking forward to at the conferences they’re heading off to.  Check it out in the G+ Hangout below:

True, I won’t be out and about this month, but I’m eagerly awaiting my turn to get to Confab Minneapolis, which is just a month away! In the meantime, I’ll be brushing up on some new reading and continuing to head up the Team Content charge back in Beantown.

In just a few weeks the CMS Myth will once again be attending, speaking at, and covering the CMS Expo in Evanston, IL. CMS Expo is a unique conference in a number of ways:

Real world experience

While other conferences give you talking heads, marketing department representatives, and sales pitches, CMS Expo focuses on real practitioners. Over three days you’ll find plenty of opportunities to connect directly to practitioners familiar with both a broad number of technical problems and (more importantly) non-technical challenges you either have encountered or will soon.

CMS Expo gives you the opportunity to talk to other business, content, design, and technology practitioners about how they’re identifying and solving these challenges. Attendees come from non-profits, higher education, small businesses, and enterprises, publishers, agencies, and government – but they all share membership in the content management tribe and a recognition that there’s gotta be a better way.

It’s not just technology

As we’ve always said here at the Myth, Content Management is not a technology problem. While there’s no shortage of technical expertise at CMS Expo, there’s also tremendous breadth into content strategy, business strategy, governance, design, measurement, and marketing. This is a conference that recognizes your goal isn’t just to get a site launched but to operate a successful business. Everyone on the team will find conversations on familiar problems and (even better) a few they haven’t yet started to consider.

Finding the opportunity to dive deeper

There’s something about spending three full days in suburban Evanston that opens up the opportunity for longer conversations. Often the best part of any conference is the hallway conversations between sessions and outside the scheduled program. CMS Expo offers the opportunity to identify folks you want to get to know and really explore more deeply the challenges and opportunities ahead of you.

Photo by davecito under CC-BY

Broad platform coverage

Last year’s CMS Showcase included fifteen platforms. This year’s lineup is more modest, including Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, OpenText, Jahia, and SageFrame – though undoubtedly many of the other platforms will be topics of discussion throughout the week as well.

As someone who spends lots of time involved in platform-specific conferences (DrupalCons and Camps, WordCamps, and Sitecore meetups in particular) it’s refreshing to be at a conference which includes a breadth of solutions and doesn’t segment the audience off into their own content tracks but encourages and forces cross-platform discussion and friendly rivalry.

Great speakers and sessions

This year’s agenda is full of sessions I want to see, and speakers I either want to meet or reconnect with. Here’s just a quick sample of some of the folks I’m looking forward to:

• Sarah Beckley, who will be talking about Future Proofing your Business Content and Making Your Content Dance. (Leave it to the content strategists to come up with the best talk titles)
• Jeff Eaton, a long-time favorite speaker in the Drupal community and one of our Five (More) Content Management Blogs You Should be Readingimpending Mobilocaplyse.
• Margot Bloomstein on Cart, Meet Horse: Content Strategy for Content Management. (See our interview with Margot about her book Content Strategy at Work).
• Tony White on Are you Using the Right CMS? (Will be interesting to see how he handles the CMS Selection Myth).
• David Hobbs on Content Migration (see our two part interview with David)
• A series of WordPress presentations from Aaron Holbrook, Jake Goldman, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and me.
• Mythbuster Emeritus David Aponovich on the Five Secret Weaknesses of your WCM
• Tom Wentworth, now Acquia’s chief marketing officer, formerly in marketing at Ektron and before that Interwoven (that’s a unique background).
• Robert Rose and Scott Liewher from Digital Clarity Group
• A media and publishing panel featuring the Associated Press (Paul Caluori) and The Nation (John Cary)

I hope to see some CMS Myth readers – do say hello if you get a chance. For $100 off a three-day conference registration use code CMSX54417

It’s been a big week in the CMS world with Forrester Research publishing its much-anticipated 2013 Forrester Wave for Web Content Management.

This research report from the venerable Cambridge-MA headquartered think tank published every year or two can move markets, make (or break) vendor reputations, and inform the CMS short lists of the Fortune 1000 set.

The byline on the 2013 report should ring familiar for longtime readers of the CMS Myth. David Aponovich was a key contributor to the 2013 edition as a Senior Analyst on the Application Development & Delivery team at Forrester.

David of course was a collaborator of ours at ISITE Design for almost six years as a web content management strategist and CMS Mythbuster contributor. And not just any run-of-the-mill-cape-wearing-mythbuster either. David helped create and establish the CMS Myth brand and blog five years ago after some backroom conversations at a Gilbane show out West. Any CMS insider knows the real plans for industry world domination are hatched at the hotel bar during Gilbane’s annual gathering.

In reading the Wave report this week, I realized we never gave David a proper Mythbuster sendoff on this blog when he left to join Forrester last August. Overnight, our loyal readers were left with a huge void when he got the (well deserved) tap on the shoulder from the “major leagues” and took his talents to the global technology marketplace via North Cambridge.

David’s stellar reputation in the CMS industry of course preceded his time here. He was a marketing executive at a leading CMS vendor and had numerous roles covering technology for analyst firms and publishers. And don’t get him started about his days as a good-old-fashioned beat reporter in the then thriving print newspaper industry. Talk about publishing 1.0.

Forrester is fortunate to have such a pragmatic thinker on its team. Watching the last eight months of his activity, I can already see the positive mark he’s having on their research and thought leadership.

David’s contributions to the Myth leaves a “long tail SEO-rich legacy” of nearly 50 blog posts, not to mention dozens of presentations and I’m not even going to count tweets. He was often the first responder when a reader would call or e-mail with a heartfelt story of CMS pain or breakthrough success. Being a Mythbuster is one part analyst, one part practitioner and three parts therapist.

Here are a few of my personal favorites of David’s from the archive:

• Stop the RFP Silly Season for Web Projects: A candid look at the insanity behind the vendor/client dance orchestrated by the great wall of procurement.
• Avoiding the CMS Death Spiral: Informed by one too many organizations reaching out for help as a last gasp of a failed CMS implementation. A blog post I still get calls about two years later.
• CMS Wisdom from the Trenches: Primary research done by David and team on the lessons learned from more than 50 organizations that recently went through a CMS implementation.
• CMS Marketing Suites: Sweeter in 2010: David picked up on this now red-hot trend more than three-and-a-half years ago posing questions about the merits of best of breed vs. integrated suites. The topic has come full circle as a big theme in the recent Wave report.
• The Origins of the CMS Myth: David’s first post on the site and about as close as you will get to a founding story on how the blog got started. This post is so old you can see the fonts are all jumbled as it was ported and re-ported through a series of blog face lifts and WordPress updates. At this point we think it adds character, so we’re leaving it.

The hits of course don’t stop here. He’s continuing to blog in his new role at Forrester, backed by one of the better research groups in the business. It certainly makes our Mytbuster operations look like the minor league Toledo Mud Hens.

We’re excited to continue following David and I’m glad that we can still connect regularly to talk shop and swap stories about the industry, and of course our beloved Boston Red Sox. David will also be keynoting CMS Expo May 14-16 in Chicago where Mythbuster John Eckman is also speaking.

Raise a pint with me to thank David for his generous contributions on the CMS Myth and wish him continued success in his role at Forrester.

Cheers, David.

Now that the Northeast is gradually thawing out from a belatedly snowy and cold winter, it’s time to start up the mythbuster van and get on the road. This May offers a number of opportunities to meet the mythbusters in person, and maybe even win some of the long-rumored CMS Myth apparel line.

First up is J. Boye 2013 May 7th-10th in Philadelphia, where Jeff Cram will be running a workshop on Creating a Digital Experience Strategy and Dave Wieneke will be presenting on Digital Disruption in the Age of the Customer. (No word yet on whether he will be bringing his axe).

Then it’s off to the windy city for CMS Expo May 14th-16th, where the showcase CMS platforms this year include Drupal, WordPress, OpenText, Jahia, SageFrame, and Joomla!. In addition to covering the expo for the Myth, I will be giving two talks: Beyond Posts & Pages: Structured Content & Content Types in WordPress and We’re on a Mission: Using WordPress for Non-Profits.

Lastly, in the Myth’s other home town, Portland, May 20th-24th brings DrupalCon and WebVisions running concurrently with joint tickets available. Jake DiMare will be speaking (at DrupalCon) on “So Happy Together (Content Strategists and Project Managers Are).”

If you’re at any of these events, please stop us, say hello, and share your war stories from the trenches or myths you’d like to see busted.

“What we need is not more content, but content that does more”

In many ways the core challenge of the content management industry has always been the separation of presentation from content, to enable the re-presentation of content in multiple contexts and devices, to different audiences, and in different formats. But, as Deane Barker and Jeff Eaton discussed late last year on Insert Content Here, web CMS platforms in particular have tended to “leak that abstraction all over” – mixing content and presentation details together. Content editors, after all, really had a mental model in which they were producing web pages which looked a specific way, and the “broad reuse” goal fell by the wayside in exchange for WYSIWYG editors and embedded styles.

Mobile has (as Karen McGrane and others have noted) revealed for all to see that the emperor has no clothes, demonstrating just how poorly our desktop-web-design-oriented page layouts and systems handle change. When your content is stored in undifferentiated HTML-and-CSS-together blobs, it becomes impossible to future-proof and adapt to changing circumstances effectively at scale.

It was in this context I was so excited to see that Sara Wachter-Boettcher was coming to speak to the Content Strategy New England meetup about her book Content Everywhere and more broadly the opportunity structured content offers and how organizations turn that opportunity into a challenge.

For me the key message of the night (for which there were many great contenders – see the storify tweet recap below) was that we don’t need more content, we need content that does more. Structured content, which has semantic structure and geography (set of relationships) is the concept which truly enables future-friendly content strategy.

She also offered what I took as a nice improvement to standard definitions of content strategy (emphasis mine):

Content strategy bridges the gap between executive vision and daily execution, defining how content will serve the organization over time

If you’re only thinking about your content strategy in the context of the current project, the current form factors, the current devices, or the current trends, you’re not building a sustainable model for the future. It may take a bit more investment up front to properly model content and understand its inherent structures and patterns, but not doing so will inevitably mean making choices that result in brittle, inflexible, and “fixed” solutions.

(Quick relevant plug: I’ll be speaking on Structured Content and Custom Post Types in WordPress at CMS Expo 2013 – other speakers include Jeff Eaton, Margot Bloomstein, and many others).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of roles on a successful web content team again lately. However, unlike last year when I wrote this article about the various roles on the agency/integrator side…This time around I’m thinking more about long term content management roles on the client side. Specifically, how the lack of experience around working with content management systems will affect long term organizational ability to effectively communicate online. Here’s a story that’s as old as the web, but keeps on repeating…

My team and I recently deployed a website for a truly beneficial and valued local non-profit organization. When we deployed the site and turned over the keys to the castle it was beautifully designed and moved the organization from a flat HTML web brochure to an impressive (by any standards) dynamic content platform with audience specific pathways, cross pollination of related content, an open source CMS, and responsive front-end experience. The organization, while incredibly adept at positively impacting the lives of those less fortunate in our community, couldn’t manage a web content management system if…Well, if their donations depended upon it. And as you can imagine…To some extent they do!

There’s nothing like the first time you go to check on the picture perfect design your team worked on for hundreds of hours and then deployed…Only to see what your client has wrought with improperly sized images, absurd combinations of font colors and sizes, and unnecessarily long navigation labels. It’s easy to be sensitive to this problem with an organization whose mission is to change the lives of the needy. Even though it would be a trivial task to demonstrate the return on investment in marketing resources, anyone can understand why non-profits are reticent to divert funds from their core activities.

Investing for the Long-Term

However, to all those regular, for-profit businesses out there who own a CMS or are thinking about owning a CMS, but don’t have the proper resources to manage it…Prepare for failure. And don’t expect your integration partner to be sympathetic. We say this a lot at the CMS Myth, but it’s another point well worth repeating: Modern, content managed websites are PROGRAMS not PROJECTS.

If you have invested in a content management system but don’t plan to update your content, you’ve overspent on technology. If you plan on updating your website regularly but don’t have the personnel to fulfill your goals, you’ve under invested on personnel. People are part of a content management system and some would say they are the most important part.

I’m here for your widows and orphans.

It’s critically important to understand that a web content management system will not manage content on its own and it is dangerous in the hands of people who don’t know how to operate it. It’s a tool — much like a chain-saw in the wrong hands, it can truly turn a gorgeous website into a massacre.

So what’s a forward looking, thoughtful organization to do if you have nobody capable of working with a CMS? I wish this were easier to answer, but it depends on a lot of factors which must be considered. Issues such as, how often will the site be updated? Does your organization value continuous improvement based on measurement and analytics? Are you trying to serve multiple audiences? How big is your organization? How much content is there to be managed? Will this team also manage the content distributed via other channels such as the social web?

The Right CV for WCM

At the very least, a strong web content manager would be made up of a person (or combination of people for larger orgs) with the following skills (in no particular order):

• Copywriting for the web (understands the impact of content on search results, content geography, taxonomy)
• Photoshop (or competence with some other image editing software)
• Basic design skills
• The ability to communicate effectively with designers
• The ability to communicate effectively with developers
• A basic understanding of the use and importance of tracking and analytics
• A genuine desire to work with technology solutions (not the technophobic luddite who volunteered for the web job because they thought it equaled job security)

Ideally these more advanced skills may also be beneficially handled in-house:

• Basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Content strategy
• Expert ability with measurement and analytics
• Expert ability with search optimization
• Deep knowledge of the various social web ecosystems where your organization is represented (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Etc.)

The good news is many organizations are beginning to understand managing web content is a necessary consideration, and not a job for the person who usually lays out the print brochure. The other good news is as the millennial generation enters the workforce there will be plenty of digital natives who both intrinsically understand and appreciate the power of dynamic, on-demand publishing. That being said, there are still plenty of orgs who don’t get it yet…And so I’d genuinely like to know: What are your experiences dealing with understaffed web teams?

The other day, I had the opportunity to connect with Bob Johnson, Vice President and Principal Analyst at IDG Connect after attending a local SMEI Boston meeting. Years before “customer experience” became a household phrase, Bob was VP of the Customer Experience Practice at IDC, and before that VP of Sales Effectiveness at the META Group. I took some time to talk with Bob about leveraging content strategy for the sales force, an area he’s both well-versed and passionate about. 

Great seeing you at the SMEI meeting on mobile the other day, Bob. I’m excited to share some of your thoughts on content strategy with CMS Myth readers. To start, the term “content strategy” can mean different things to different people — what does content strategy involve when you’re talking about it?

The content strategy is the objectives and goals the content is supposed to address for your organization, and the sources, technology and people decisions you’ll make to maximize a return on content. Strategy requires execution, which leads to problems we typically see in content strategy.

The content strategy is often disconnected from the MBOs that individuals have. The strategy doesn’t include goals such as closing gaps in the content portfolio or making the content more modular or increasing its pass-along value. So often the strategy is not followed by tactics that reflect the real world. The strategy is often done by someone who has responsibility but not authority, but the person in charge of executing the content strategy needs to have the authority to mandate.

Another thing that we see is that content strategy tends to be done in a vacuum. That sounds funny, but it often doesn’t take into account platforms such as mobile, or social, so sometimes you’re trying to do something in your strategy but it’s not reflected in the content you’re producing for social media.

Many people think of content strategy as being about marketing. How does it relate to sales enablement? 

In terms of sales enablement, content strategy should also provide sales support. Currently content strategists are typically focused on lead gen and brand awareness, rather than the sales support. You need to get sales involved right up front when setting up your strategy to see what they need, use, like and don’t like, and what’s taking their time. Not a lot of companies do that. They tend to be more organized around specific campaigns rather than enabling success at the later stages of the buying process.

Some people might say sales people are tough to please. How can content strategy support them better?

The sales person wants content to be relevant, and to drive forward the selling process, and to answer questions that buyers have. Only about a third of content is used, though, because it doesn’t do one of those three. And then they create their own content, spending hours and hours, adjusting existing content to make it relevant for the buyer.  Content creators must see what sales people actually use by getting out there and observing. So ask yourself “when the last time was that someone responsible for creating digital content went on a sales call?” The answer is they likely haven’t.

How can customization be made easier for sales people?

Most of the customization done today is in documents or slide decks. Salespeople also sometimes try to gather relevant articles and show insight that way. Relevant content might compare and contrast products but do so by providing a discussion framework rather than feature by feature comparison. The key thing for the content creator is to create content that says up front who it’s for and what buying stage it covers – a decision-maker versus a recommender, and so on.

Most content needs to be short, focused on a topic, role or value area, and concise. A salesperson doesn’t want to side track a conversation, they want the content to enable speaking to their value and differentiation. So if the asset you provide is a 20-page white paper but only pages 7-9 are relevant to the point of conversation, that’s problematic. So you have to think short, think modular and enable the sales person to use aspects of an asset not just the whole thing.

Who is doing it well, do you think?

Despite people‘s focus on content strategy and making it modular, we’re still seeing 20 page white papers when, according to IDG Connect buyer research, it shouldn’t be more than 7 pages. Now, organizations are starting to get the message and not measure the value of their new content by the pound. There is a $500 million dollar software company where the new CTO said, “Okay, all of your content on the website will be taken down in 12 months unless you prove it still serves a purpose and need.” It was extreme, but the message served a valuable purpose. That is, you have to reassess assets and not simply create them, post or use them and then leave them up forever in some pseudo asset graveyard on your website.

Marketing and sales automation technologies are moving to help manage content and the race is one between them, Now, while content management systems support web content they are not sufficiently integrated into how sales people work. These two areas see overlap in functionality. And content is the battlefield. Whichever platform does a better job at leveraging the large investments in digital content into the sales process will have the best chance at victory. A lot of the marketing automation tools are doing a better job of helping to profile the content that they have, but they need to be moving that information over to sales automation tools that the sales rep uses actively.

You’ve said that “content strategy” is an oxymoron.

Right, I’ve written that. An oxymoron is something that’s nonsensical; it just isn’t true. A lot of people don’t know what a content strategy should be or why they should be doing it. They just know they have a lot of content. So when they set out to do a content strategy they don’t address the underlying things that need to be addressed to be effective.

There are process issues, roles and responsibilities, communication and coordination, set tasks that repeat and others that are driven by upcoming or single events. You must look at consistent common metrics, definitions, guidelines and ensure that the organization is aware of the existing content portfolio mix as well as the gaps to fill.

In many ways, it is a change management process. You’re changing how your organization looks at the role of content as buyers look to go deeper into the decision process before they engage sales. You must overcome the fact that humans are creatures of habit, and if they’re used to producing 20 page white papers unless you give them a reason to not do it and give them new goals, they will quickly snap their behavior back to the same shape. If you’re going to have a successful content strategy you have to tie desired behavior to the systems you use, goals and requirements/methods. That way, if the creators, whether they reside in product management, marketing communications or sales support, fail to meet those objectives they also fail to attain one of their individual MBO goals.  

So put together the rewards: I’m going to reward you more for creating a piece of content that addresses a gap in our portfolio. Or that is modular and can be used in different ways, because it is broken up into self-contained sections. They need to learn how to put linkage into an asset to increase its pass-along value. A lot of people don’t know how to do this, you can’t expect them to know, so that makes content strategy for many organizations something that they give lip service to without thinking about the hard work to make it stick. You’ve got to educate individuals on how to create optimized content as part of the overall change. Then, content strategy becomes part of the fabric of how they work and is an enabler rather than oxymoron.

Content experience touches everything that you do. It’s central to customer experience. It’s central to customer service, it’s central to sales, it drives marketing. So let’s not treat its creation as reactive afterthought, driven by a new campaign, rather as something as important and central as breathing. Something you consider every day as you connect assets, repurpose them and build them based upon how they improve alignment with buyer needs and drive the sales cycle.

…And we’re live! In addition to blogging about content management the CMS Myth team can now periodically be found hosting hangouts on Google+. In this first episode Jeff Cram, John Eckman, Katie Del Angel, and Jake DiMare discuss a wide variety of CMS related topics including:

• The origins of the CMS Myth blog
• Goals for growing the CMS Myth community on Google+ with hangouts
• The CMS Demo Myth 
• The various roles on winning content management teams
• What we’re reading

No word yet on when the next hangout will be but we hope to get in at least one a month so stay tuned for more information. In addition to our general discussions, we plan to include guests who are practitioners in the field of web content management, content strategy, and customer experience as they relate to content management systems. As always, if you’ve got a CMS Myth you’d like us to explore, or you’d just like to chat with a CMS Myth buster in real life…Drop us a line!

Just a quick note, the audio is a bit challenging for the first few minutes while we got the hang of production in a busy office. It smooths out nicely and stays quite clean throughout the remainder of the episode. Hope you enjoy!