Content Management Tidbits

If you like to imagine a typical Content Manager as a lonely geek, perpetually glued to his or her computer screen and furiously typing, I am afraid you are up for some disappointment. There are a lot of soft skills involved in content management: being good at building relationships is hardly the less desirable.

How so?

We already talked about conceiving a sustainable content life-cycle and setting up the most cost-effective processes. One of the most sensitive steps in this task is identifying key players. Don’t be fooled by the business jargon. Behind every “key player”, or content owner, there’s a person. More often than not, they already have their job, with deadlines and meetings and what else. Odds are, their new status of “key player” will be considered as the umpteenth nuisance.

In the best case scenario, managers are excited about their department being involved in the new process. And maybe the “key player” is happy to contribute as well. But, hey, I’m Italian, wishful thinking is not part of my DNA. So let’s consider a different scenario: happy manager, unhappy “key player”.
Make no mistake: an unhappy key player means your well-conceived plan will stall at some point. And that’s something you, Content Manager, will be held responsible for.

Here are some tips to avoid the stall:

• Be proactive When identifying key players, be involved and name names. Which ones? People you worked with already, people on the same wave lenght, people who know something about communication. And make sure to contact them beforehand, to share your intentions, so they don’t feel trapped by another (unpaid) burden.
• Promote the position You don’t have to lie: being part of the process is both time and energy consuming. Never, ever, try to sell it as something different. But try to highlight the pros: a nice break from the routine, an interesting task, the chance to see their job acknowledged on an individual basis and not as a team member.
• Talk to their managers It is vital to gain support from the management. It is vital that managers acknowledge the role of their key players, and the responsibility that comes with it. So, promote the position with them too. They have to be willing to invest some man/hours to see the benefits of having their department achievements constantly and consistently communicated.
• Ease their burden… You may have set up an amazing automated process, but sometimes daily issues get in the way. Be ready to be flexible, when you see that one of the key players is under a lot of pressure. If you don’t get your content on the CMS, you can always be briefed during a coffee-break, and write it yourself. A team is a team, even when it crosses departments.
• … but don’t take it all on yourself On the other hand, if your flexibility is often required, we have a pattern, Houston. And not a good one. Set your boundaries first, and if they are not respected, look for another key player.
• Make it entertaining I do have a secret to make this work: everybody has dreamt at some point to be a journalist. Well, create your magazine. Be the editor-in-chief. Have your correspondents. Tip them. Let them tip you. Research together. Listen to their scoops.
• Give them training, give them tools Try to set up some in-house training in the early stages, gather your key players together, and explain them the process. All of it. Let them see how it works, and why their contribution is important. Try to educate them about the deliverables. Let them see how their content will be worked and reshaped. And then hand them templates that will ease their job as correspondents.
• Don’t let them feel alone Nothing is more disheartening than being left alone with a new task, so give a lot of feedback. And don’t keep distinct lines of communications between you and the key players: let them talk to each other. Good ideas bounce in a network, and not in a straight line.

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Proselytism? Yeah, in a sense. The bible, here, is a document called “editorial guidelines”. Anyone or any entity publishing any kind of information should have theirs.

When you start working for a company, the very first thing to do is to ask them for their guidelines, and learn them by heart. You, as a content manager, will be the high minister in charge of compliance and consistency. Your role is almost sacred, in that sense.

And, as the title suggests, if there are no editorial guidelines stop losing time reading this blog, and start writing them. It’s your big chance: you’ve been just upgraded from minister to prophet.

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A lot of people think that they would come up with the best ideas pretty easily, were they only given carte blanche on a project. And I’m sure this finds most of you in agreement.

Well. It happens, sure, but only with a certain type of mindsets. That is those really lucky minds who are able to conceptualize every scenario in their heads, who can draw deductively the details of a plan and who can inductively go back and forth from the single detail to the whole scenario. I don’t know about you, but I am positive that my mind (and that of my friends’ and colleagues’) is not so efficient (sigh!).

Call it “desert paradox”, call it “tabula rasa syndrome”, were we given the chance to use any solution we want, most of us would freeze. It’s our personal version of the writer’s block.

So, how do you overcome this block?

Let me answer to this with a quote. The author is Age (aka Agenore Incrocci), of the prolific duo Age & Scarpelli, two of the best and most creative screenwriters of the Italian cinema. In his book Scriviamo un film (Let’s Write a Movie — sorry, apparently no English translation around), Age gives a lot of solid, sensible advice to would-be screenwriters, struggling to find a story, or to depict a character, or to put an end to a plot. We are not writing for a movie: maybe we are in the design process; or maybe we’re just struggling with a copy. The analogy works the same.

The chapter’s title is “The file in the cake” and here are some excerpts (very very poorly translated by yours truly, I’m sorry):

The convicted, the prisoner in the cell — the topic of so many tales, movies or comics — he knows he has only one way out of jail: the little wired window. And, in order to violate it, to open a way out, he must hope for a “nail file in the cake” (the knotted sheets will come later, they are an optional).
How can he get that file? From whom? Screenwriters often find themselves in a position not very different from the prisoner’s. Or rather, I think they have to try hard to put themselves in that position. The delusion that, with free hands, we could let out our creativity freely doesn’t grant predictable outcomes; on the contrary, it makes us wander aimlessly, and dispels our ideas, rather than support and assist them. There’s nothing more stimulating for creativity than the necessity to come up with the solution to an issue (be it small or big) within strict limits, than being bound to browse through what already exists, that we know already and that is, in a certain way, at our disposal to solve the issue. By “what already exists” I mean:
a) the setting we are in and which contains:
b) the things (the “tools”): rummage your characters’ pockets: they can hide everything you want, we want, and that — with “professional honesty” — has been put in them;
c) the situations that have been already set up, the “work in progress”;
d) the characters, with their relationships, nature, habits, jobs, tics (which are rarely accidental in a movie).
It is somehow a bet. And, above all, a game. Like a word play where you have to obtain words from the letters that form another word: things, facts. The nail file in the cake.

So, next time you are given budget limits or very strict project limitations, don’t complain: stop for a second, and think of them as your saving grace, as your file in the cake. Without them, you most probably would get lost.

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This brand new column is for short and very practical suggestions. Enjoy!

Who’s the Content Manager’s worst enemy? The Content Manager, of course, who should be smart enough to write/author content needing as little updating as possible. Remember this, next time you land on a page reporting the statement that something is x years old.

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Reading back the previous entries, I realized that I focused mostly on the essence of the role of a CM, and I didn’t give any of those nice tips&tricks people so badly need when they make their reaserches online… (if you want, put a colon and a closing bracket here — yours truly doesn’t like emoticons too much!)

So, let me make up for my academical ramblings, and let’s take a closer look together at the daily routine of managing content. One of the first qualities you want your content to display is: consistency. You want your web content to be consistent with the offline materials: style, tone, vocabulary… you name it. Different content, sure, but same facts, and a “familiar” way to present them. The user must recognize the “tune” your company is singing.

It’s an easier task when your company is small: you may end up managing all the content, thus having the most consistent communication around (and maybe no life whatsoever outside the work premises). It gets more complicated when you manage a team for a bigger company: many heads, many styles. It gets really tricky when you manage localized pieces of content. It can become a living nightmare when you juggle with all the above variables in a complex multinational company.

So… where do you start?

Keeping. It. Simple. (Stupid. No, I’m not insulting you, I promise! That’s a not-so-obscure reference for the first-hour web designers. KISS. Internal joke. Sorry, it’s such an amazing day today, it’s almost exhilarating! I can’t help it! OK, Back to business.)

So, here’s the first über-practical tip.
Write simply.
Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy.

First, because every writer is (or should be) pretty literate. And sometimes pretty literate people tend to overdo when writing: it’s like an intoxication of words, it takes a while to sweat it off your system.

Secondly, because some languages demand complex synthax. It may come pretty easily for the English/American natives. I know for sure that it’s not so easy at all for Romance languages speakers.

So: short phrases. Second-guess your well-formed sentences. If you feel like describing a noun with two adjectives just stop and think: “Do I really need the second adjective?”. More often than not you don’t. And if you think really hard you may end up realizing that you don’t even need the first one. And that choosing another — more fitting — noun would address the problem to the root.

I can hear somebody in the background coughing. You’re right. Busted. I. Don’t. Write. Very. Simply. At least here. But I have two major excuses. First, this is my blog: that is my very personal corner, which probably tells more about the way my mind works than about the work I do. And, last but not least, I just finished re-reading for the twentieth time Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco: a triumph of logical, synctactical, lexical and erudite complexity (four adjectives! FOUR!). It’s so intoxicating, it will take me weeks to sweat it off.

In the meanwhile, we can do some exercises together. I’m sure it will help.

Subject. Verb. Complement. If any, that is. And then, a nice round period.

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Content Managers appeared one day, when it became evident that there was more to websites than flashy graphics and hard coding. On that day organizations realized that websites had to communicate with users, and not just catch their eye. And, when they tried to put their communication strategies into words, they realized that the traditional figures weren’t really useful anymore: most copywriters (and rightfully so) needed a confined frame (format) and an exhaustive brief to deliver their work, and they couldn’t be held responsible for the whole editorial plan.

Did I just say “editorial”? Did I just use a term coming from the last ice age?

Yes, I did. In a world where “publishing” has become a synonym with “hitting a button”, we tend to forget that, in order to “communicate” effectively, you need a plan. Communicators draw the strategic lines, but someone has to turn those lines into practical guidelines, make them into a structure, and only then put content in it. A good Content Manager is able to analyze the overall communication goals and come up with a plan about a) what should be told (content) and b) how (format/structure).

In the next tidbit: Web Content Manager or Content Manager?