The 4 (or 7) Jobs Content Requires and how to deal with them
NOT What you want your content operation to look like, but…it probably does today
The desperate plea from the market was loud and clear: “Help us deal with content; it’s vital yet required, hard to deal with yet indispensable… Help!”
When we first started our customer research, we came up with a large set of answers as to what tools our potential clients needed to efficiently share information today. Originally, we thought that there were 7 activities you needed to do to use information easily in any business. This was our list:
Find it. Get it. Use it. Share it. Track it. Monetize it. Update it.
That’s a lot of moving pieces and while every one of those jobs eventually got its own tool in Skywriter, it was way too much to market. Bell Labs might have realized in 1950’s that the human mind best remembered 7 digits, but 7 phrases?
Way too much. We needed to boil this down even further, without diminishing the capability of our solution for this enormous task.
Thinking through this took a lot more conversations and listening to what people were saying to us. All of these were valuable activities and every one of them needed to happen for every piece of content. The breakthrough came with our detailed conversations with the Insurance and Benefits markets. Both of them send a lot of content for marketing needs and, as a highly regulated industry, compliant content distribution.
It turned out that “finding it” and “getting it” were so interrelated that we could treat them as one. This makes sense if you think about your process for finding and getting a piece of content; for most people the searching and the getting are part of a single process. Even when the “getting” part meant several steps (e.g. looking up passwords or other credentials needed to get a piece of content), most people see it as one activity.
Cool! From 7 to 6 things. Getting better.
The next big turning point was our conversations about what the Insurance and Benefits companies needed to do after they published something. That made the whole idea come together; all of the post-publication jobs came under one header: Manage it. Bingo! That made it four, not seven, Things You Need To Do To Use Content efficiently:
Get it, Use it, Share it, Manage it.
This aligns nicely with a lot of things that we see in business, where after a task is basically complete, the on-going support of whatever was done falls to a general category called “management.”
What became clear as we were completing that round of research (because when you’re developing a SaaS product you can continuing improving and tuning your solution) is that in this world the “management” task could be huge and never-ending. We found, in fact, that for Content Operations, “management” was one of the most time-consuming, difficult, and expensive parts of companies’ continuing operations.
Just once piece of managing content, Updating it — keeping what you’ve already published fresh and relevant — is a dauntingly expensive and difficult task to undertake. In this world of “publish everywhere,” just knowing all of the places one particular piece of content has been published is extremely difficult, if even possible. Knowing where you’ve published 100s or 1000s of pieces of content have been published is simply absurd to even try…without Skywriter.
Let’s unpack these four Jobs That Content Requires, and see how the market pushed us to handle each.
Get it (used to be Find it and Get it)
There are really 3 aspects to this, and the first one is simply remembering what you have. For any sized company and any pace of publishing, eventually you simply have too much to remember all of it, let alone where every piece of it lives. For our clients, stale content can be even more harmful to their business and brand than no content at all.
The growth of the cloud means that content can now also be anywhere; AWS, internal drives, Google, private clouds, websites, social media threads.
If you don’t know what you have and you don’t know where it is, gathering content itself becomes a hugely time- and resource-hungry activity.
You may have spent tons making evergreen content, but it’s only evergreen if you always know what and where it is.
Thus, Get it, really encompasses three elements: knowing what you’ve got, knowing where it is, and knowing the keys to the kingdom of where it lives.
Use it.
Once you’ve found what you need, you need to use it. Combine it with the other content you’ve found, add your own value to it, like your perspective, a how-to, or useful tip.
While simple sounding, this is frequently a major hurdle for many companies, often involving multiple applications and lots of manual labor. Graphics programs, word processors, browsers and more all need to be (often) manually integrated to produce every piece of content. When we say that old-school Content Operations are often cobbled together, this is one of the main areas we talk about.
Share it
The publication side — sharing your content — is just as hard as gathering the content, because you might need to share it everywhere. A webpage, social media, email, messaging, and more is coming (like AR content).
Further, you don’t want to share every piece of content with everyone in your customer database, or CRM, or whatever you use to keep your customer lists.
This is an area where we really needed to make Skywriter shine, because it is, we discovered, a major hole in many Content Operations.
The best solution turned out to be having Parent and Child accounts in Skywriter. With this structure, each group (or even person) you need to share specific content with can have their own Child Skywriter account and the Parent account can publish to each one of the individually or collectively, as needed.
With this architecture you can give each person or group their own information portal that you populate as needed. With Skywriter, an Insurance Carrier can have individual portals for each Broker and always be sure that every Broker has exactly the right information for their unique needs, and every individual portal always has the freshest version of each piece of content.
Manage it (used to be Monetize it, Track it, and Update it)
All of these separate jobs fall under “Manage it” because it all happens post-publication and it’s all about seeing what kind of responses your information is getting.
Manage it includes everything that happens after a piece of content leaves you, it needs to be tracked, measured, and evaluated for how it can be monetized (essential for companies who make revenue from publications). Forwards, shares, clicks, website visits, reposts, everything you can track you want to track. That allows you to see its growth and your ability to monetize it.
According to our research, these two are the most difficult and expensive part of the whole Manage it process:
Monetization
Skywriter is designed with the channel in mind. Parent accounts can have Child accounts that are a regular revenue source. Monetizing your content has never been easier. And, from a Parent account, you can be sure that every Child account has exactly the right and the latest content set in their own “information portal.” And you, the Parent, have total control over what gets delivered to their portal and can see all of the activity that happens to a piece of content once it is there.
Updating it
Updating is one of the hidden costs that massively increase the price of content operations. Skywriter automates much of that process. Because we don’t have to keep a copy of the original file, just the link to it, if that link changes we can alert you to that fact, and fire off a workflow that updates all existing copies of the original document. No more scrambling to figure out if your channel partners, customers, or distributors have the latest content. You’ll simply know they do.
This was a huge demand in the market, and it took many brainstorming hours to solve it. The solution turned out to be to not pull the content into Skywriter, but to leave it in place and simply monitor the links. You can pull the content into Skywriter, but that creates the same problem as most other content tools on the market.
Once you make a copy you lose the link between the published content and the original file, and retaining that link was the key to unlocking this functionality. Rather than keep all of your content inside Skywriter, we leave it in place and just monitor it for changes; broken links, updated files, and any other changes.
By leaving the file in its original home, we can simply monitor and advise if anything changes, suddenly making keeping information updated a simple and automated task.
This is what a modern, sleek, and efficient Content Operation should look like.
The problems of content-sharing are (finally) over
Like many things associated with the internet, the content problem has grown over the years, by small increments, until today it’s a terrible mess that effects almost every business, because every business has to share (publish) content all over the place.
The more complex the problem becomes, the more time and more costs it consumes. And with new media types (e.g. AR and VR), it’s clearly trending toward getting worse, not easier.
Unless you use Skywriter. By listening closely to the market, we’ve solved the Content Problem with an easy-to-use application that is built, from the ground up, to efficiently deal with the realities of content today…and tomorrow.
