Content management, broadly defined, covers everything from a legal pad to a library to YouTube — all the many ways of organizing information to make it useful. The rise of computing and the Internet, in particular, have brought forth vast new quantities of information as well as new ways of sharing and managing it.
What are content management systems?
By content management system (CMS), we mean software that enables users to organize, store, search, and retrieve different kinds of information online. The information can exist in varied formats — straight text or hyperlinks, sound files or graphics, videos or flash animations — and the online delivery platforms can include Web pages, blogs, wikis, videos, social media and other online outlets.
Managing a static Web page and a blog or two is pretty easy. But companies today have opportunities to leverage their knowledge much more effectively, and to do so they require more robust systems to create and manage content — continuously, at any time, as the organization changes.
Knowledge lies within
How can a company get great timely content onto its sites? One of the best ways is by tapping the experience and wisdom of employees. A business leverages that human capital when it enables employees to create content and publish it directly.
A well-designed CMS permits virtually anyone to manage online content in ways that once required advanced design and technical skills. This distributed content creation is something new in business, allowing companies to enlist wider layers of employees in developing and publishing information. Some examples:
• After a new product gets the green light, the project manager uses a CMS to publish the news on the company’s Web sites. In a matter of minutes he uploads a press release, screen shots, products sheets and a video, and then updates the company’s pay-per-click ads.
• A company wins a big contract on the eve of a trade show. The marketing director writes an article, posts it to the Web site, and runs down his CMS list. With a few keystrokes he changes an obsolete phone number on one page, adds an address field to another, updates a graphic elsewhere, and even sends the news article out for translation to French and Spanish.
• “Hello, IT? Is there a mistake here?” The east-coast plant manager says he’ll run short of frames if his scheduler follows the online manual. Other plants will be calling tomorrow — but the programmers rewrite a sentence and post the revision. Notifications and version control flags flow automatically, and production lines keep humming.
• The new-hire admin in HR knows Word but no HTML. On his first day, he uses a CMS to build a Web site for the blood drive — a multipager with graphics and flash, drop-downs and forms, a video from the CEO. And with his knowledge of Word, he gives the site a noticeably professional look.
What these employees have in common is the ability to strengthen their companies’ online impact quickly and directly. Some work internally, others externally, but in each case the content they post draws visitors, directly and through search engines. And these visitors use the content they find to advance the company’s goals.
Fresh content is king — just ask Google
The companies that leverage the Web most effectively are those that maintain dynamic, up-to-date content on their sites. One of the main reasons is that such content attracts search engines. Google, for example, publicizes its preference for informational sites over commercial ones.
That doesn’t mean a Web site can’t be used for advertising. But in addition to short, sharp taglines and ad copy, companies should include substantive content — white papers, FAQs, knowledge-base articles, and so on — that give the site an informational character.
And it’s not enough to fill a site with information and then leave it alone. Search engines also favor freshness. Google knows its search customers want relevance and currency, so its search algorithms assign higher rank to pages and sites whose content is frequently updated. In addition, sites with fresh content are more likely to grow link partnerships with other sites.
The benefits of a content management system
More timely and effective communication. It’s a universal best practice in business. Give employees clear instructions and they’ll perform tasks more efficiently. Focus sales force messaging, and sales will begin to align more closely with strategy. Target an audience closely, and the marketing machine will find, pitch and convert more customers.
Increased search engine traffic. Content is search-friendly, because search engines rank sites to satisfy their own customers — searchers who prize fresh content over marketing claims.
Stronger collaboration. Building a culture where employees truly share knowledge is a big undertaking, and every company that embarks upon it finds out that sharing generates content. To reap benefits, this content must be easily accessible to those who need it.
Reduced disruption from employee churn. By systematizing and diffusing individual knowledge, a CMS helps to minimize the effects of employee comings and goings.
Reduced costs. A CMS can free up IT resources from maintaining Web content. It’s not longer necessary to devote skilled, $70,000-a-year employees to writing routine HTML, sizing graphics, cutting and pasting, creating standard forms, and reporting site statistics.
What to look for in a CMS
Many Web products advertise “content management” features, but sometimes these amount to little more than marketing claims. A company’s first look at any CMS should focus on three areas that combine into a true system:
Ease of use. Is the interface unique, or does it correspond to widespread standards? To put employees to work creating content, not learning new formatting rules, go for convention. If the CMS offers a variety of templates and an intuitive, what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface — especially one based on Microsoft Office — anyone can access familiar tools easily. This gives every employee the comfort of knowing they too can create new content with some typing and a few clicks.
Functionality. A CSM should let users manage different media — text, images, flash animation, sound, video. And look for functional site tags, so users can easily create interactive Web pages with drop-down menus, forms for gathering information, and online transactions. Adding passwords, search, print, rating and discussion functions to a page should be easy, and language conversion should be built in. Don’t forget stats and path analysis, the more granular the better, so you can understand how visitors use the site.
Integration and scalability. A CMS should let users easily link content and features on the same site and elsewhere. And it should integrate readily with key business processes in marketing (including pay-per-click campaigns), sales, accounting and operations. But robust doesn’t mean all or nothing. The best CMS designs are modular, allowing a company to grow its online presence — adding video features, for example — on its own schedule.
Key elements in a CMS implementation
Nail the business case first. Content management systems share some basic principles, but they are far from identical. Every business is unique, so understand your goals and expectations. How will you measure progress and define success?
Define the stages. Universities devote whole curricula to content management. For an online CMS, these are the basic stages:
Workflow: business rules, procedures, ownership Creation: authoring responsibilities, single-source tools, editing Storage: file systems, version control, access rights, archives Publishing: channels, personalization, usability testing
Manage change. Hidden knowledge is an orphan, but transparency raises new issues of ownership — not to mention review processes, security and access. Audit trails become more important: Who touched what, when? You’re not just training people on a system, but on business processes, thus increasing productivity and business profitability.
What about IT?
Some IT organizations are mired in busy work — creating and recreating similar forms, translating press releases and documentation updates into HTML — and they will welcome technology that frees them up for core missions of systems support, security, and delivery of business intelligence.
But a robust CMS can meet resistance in some shops— especially when it succeeds, and management begins to apply it more widely. Before long a new administrative assistant is creating and managing multiple and complex Web portals, and an IT fiefdom may be threatened.
Content management isn’t an alternative to IT. Rather, it’s a powerful tool for employees in marketing, corporate communications, accounting, and virtually every other function — including IT. A well-designed, properly implemented CMS helps each department organize, exploit and share the full depth of its knowledge, thus strengthening its contribution to the company’s forward progress.
A well-implemented CMS improves IT productivity. At the most basic level, it helps IT employees focus on operational reporting and business intelligence instead of content management and HTML generation. It helps this critical department rise to its strategic task of enabling business, rather than creating, supporting and hoarding complex systems that have been rendered obsolete.
If you’d like to know more about content management, and how your business might benefit from it, InterScape Inc. has the experience and expertise to show you the ropes and provide CMS solutions with the Knovial Platform. 1-866-DEV-7766 or visit us at http://www.knovial.com.
by MATT FRANCIS
