WhiteShark5
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9 years ago Author: Simone H Blog Post 02/19/2013
The weaknesses of content management systems (CMS) have always been pretty obvious to me so I was not at all surprised when Karen McGrane referred to them as “content mis-management” in her content strategy workshop at Webstock this year.
A big part of the problem is that we’ve gotten sucked in to believing that content creators need a MS Word-like WYSIWYG interface, but this allows them to dump unstructured ‘blobs’ of styled content onto the web. These blobs are inevitably unsustainable and in the face of the need to now re-style content for various forms of delivery, including but not limited to mobile, they are extremely limited.
The content management system [should] be set up to fit with the various tasks of its users and to publish the various chunks in the most appropriate way. Karen gave us ten ‘rules’ for content strategy:
Quit thinking you can just guess what subset of content a “mobile user” wants. You’re going to guess wrong. Do your research, look at competitors, and evaluate your analytics data. Figure out how to convince the people with money that you need a content strategy for mobile. Before jumping into imagining new mobile products, figure out how you can achieve content parity. Same content where you can, equivalent fallbacks where you can’t. Use mobile as a catalyst to remove content that isn’t providing value. Edit or delete content to make the experience better for all your users – desktop and mobile. Don’t create content for a specific context or platform. It’s not your desktop content, your mobile content, your tablet content, or even your print content. It’s just your content. Develop a process and workflow that will support and enable maximum content reuse with minimum additional effort. That’s adaptive content. Create content packages: a flexible system of content elements that cover a range of possible uses. Then manage and maintain those content elements all in one place. Separate content from form and create presentation-independent content. Don’t encode meaning through visual styling – instead, add structure and metadata to your content. Ensure that your content management tools make it easy – and possible – for your content creators to develop the content structures needed to support adaptive content. Invest in CMS frameworks that support multichannel publishing, and make sure your tools, processes, and workflow will support that.
very interesting data about mobile usage and presented her ‘four mobile truths':
Content matters: there’s an increasing % of people who rely entirely on their mobile: in USA 1/3 of mobile users ONLY use their mobile (no other internet access) + these people are frequently the young, lower income and/or new migrants; Strive for content parity: people DO read long content on their mobiles so you must provide equivalent content; Its not a strategy if you can’t maintain it; You don’t decide what devices people use – they do: 100% of your audience is going to be mobile 50% of the time.
The above gems neatly encapsulate the theory, Karen then went on to brief us in several practical tools to make it all happen including:
content modelling: defining content packages, structured content and metadata; making a content inventory (broad for desktop, fine-grained for mobile) and how important it is to do this yourself; and designing the publishing workflow around tasks rather than the content model.
We need to get over thinking that there is a primary platform where content ‘lives’ and finally do away with the “stupid print dinosaurs”. Don’t start with print, or web, or mobile, start with content, write for the chunk, demystify metadata, and demand a better CMS workflow.
The CMS is broken. The way to fix it is structure, not WYSIWYG.
http://cclbibliofile.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/down-with-blobs-long-live-chunks/