Confab 2012 is live! Blog
Content Access Must Evolve With Business Needs
Confab speaker Rahel Bailie wrote our second guest blog post. She details the challenging situation faced by companies with unique content access requirements.
-Clinton Forry
Organizations need to find, filter, and use very specific pieces of content in increasingly short time spans. The support center reps who expertly flip through their oversized binders crammed full of product content supplemented by sticky notes is a fast-dying stereotype. Now, the call center has software that pulls content from a repository, with response times monitored and timed. User assistance content is no longer shipped to translators in their entirety for translation. Now, content is run through translation memories, and the new or changed content modules are extracted for translation and re-inserted into the translated files.
Dealing with the product content can quickly get unwieldy. For every page of sales-focused product description, there can be dozens of pages of related technical content that needs to get created and maintained. Multiply this by a number of product variations or product lines, and you have a complex network of content that has its own ecosystem. Then add the several language translations that emanate from this body of content, and the stakes are exponentially raised.
Traditionally, this content has lived in a large silos called "technical content", with smaller silos within, for product documentation, training, and support. The cross-over between content silos has begun, accelerating due to forces beyond our practice area. Social media has brought together the pre-sales and post-sales material together under the umbrella of brand management. Twitter became the great leveler, where a product question gets a quick response, and that response often includes a link into the mass of available support content.
For organizations to have content that can respond to these content-on-demand needs, there are some fundamental differences in how product content is created and maintained. An important aspect of managing product content has become the adherence to international standards for content architecture. Well-structured content provides a framework for a better content lifecycle in all the quadrants: from the creation and metadata, to content management, to publication and recall, localization, and ongoing maintenance.
About the Blogger, Rahel Bailie:
Integrator of content strategy, requirements analysis, information architecture, and content management to increase ROI of product lifecycle content. Aficionado of content structure and standards. Founder of Intentional Design, Fellow of STC (www.stc.org).
Rahel will be presenting "Good Products Deserve Good Content" on May 10th at Confab: The Content Strategy Conference.
