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First Gilbane Paper and Dirty Plates

August has been a busy month, hence this neglected blog – but I have been unchained from my desk as I am pleased to say that my first paper for Gilbane has been published. In a departure from my normal web engagement wittering, I have the opportunity to get serious with the meaty subject of website governance / content compliance.

In the pressure to be engaging over the web, neglecting website governance and not ensuring the quality of your content is like running a restaurant, switching on the neon sign, hiring the most charming front of house staff and then not paying attention to the cleanliness of the plates.

As I have written in a  guest post shortly to be published on Fierce Content Management – while the cool kids are wondering who this visitor is and how do we serve them relevant content to their iPad – someone or something needs to be watching out for the quality of that experience.

Out in the world of the content publisher, there is an increasing demand for content – we have multiple sites, we need to create relevant content for different audience segments, we need to participate in the social web and publish to multiple web destinations.

More content means more authors and a demand that content management delivers on its promise as a framework that democratizes the process; we need web content management to be adopted outside marketing and communications.  Organizations can no longer rely on emailing content to a small group of gatekeepers in marcoms that can ensure that each communication to leave the enterprise is on message, correctly spelt and brand compliant.

We are also delivering and syndicating our content to a wider audience, to multiple web destinations and devices and our corporate website is no longer the sole destination for content consumption. If I stretch my restaurant analogy, the diner wants it their way, to go or delivered to their plate – wherever they are.

In a restaurant, the odd grubby plate can be excused by that charming maître d’ – maybe a free bottle of wine and an apology – but as our content consumer is eating on the go, reading an RSS feed or browsing a mobile app – there is no beautiful brand context that can distract them from the fact we can’t spell the name of our own product.

The paper (sponsored by Magus) looks at whether our current CMS tools are the answer as we found that regardless of content technology implementations, for various reasons that I explore – these mistakes still make it through.

I’ll be writing a more detailed post about it on the Gilbane blog later this week as we confirm the details of some follow up events and I welcome your feedback.

Image courtesy of eraphernalia_vintage reproduced under creative commons license


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