Bill Gates famous saying regarding ‘content is king’ meant that internet have started revolutionizing the exchange of scientific information in a specialized manner. The essay written by Bill Gates in 1996 and published on Microsoft Website said all that is been realized and followed today by top business entrepreneurs. He said, “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” This brought a revolution around 3 decades back in many industries but the long-term winners were the ones who used and applied the digital content management process in their business.
What is content management (CM)?
Content management can be defined as a process in which collection, delivery and governance of digital content is taken care of through information management. The term CM is typically used to demonstrate digital content administration, its Lifecycle and how it can be transferred from creation to permanent storage or deleted from the system. The digital content can be of various forms such as audio, image, video, multimedia, etc.
Steps in the content management process
Content management process and practice can be managed variously, depending upon the business purposes. Though, some basic steps involved in the content management process have been mentioned below.
Step 1. Organization of content is the first step in the content management process where different categories are developed, schemes are classified and taxonomies get designed.
Step 2. In the second step i.e., the creation stage, content is been classified into various architectural categories.
Step 3. Third step involves content formation and storage-related decisions based on the mode of access, security, delivery among other factors that depend on the business needs.
Step 4. Next comes the workflow process where rules are been designed to ensure that content is facilitated through several roles while managing consistency between business policies.
Step 5. The fifth step is editing and versioning which requires managing multiple content versions besides making presentation changes.
Step 6. Publishing is the next step where the content is delivered to the users or the website visitors or for internal publishing through intranet for office employees.
Step 7. The final step involves deleting or moving content to achieve when content becomes obsolete or is infrequently accessed.
What is Content governance in content management?
Content governance is one of the significant aspects of the content management process which not only provides content creators with a detailed structure but with guidelines to make digital content more effective. Content governance determines priorities, assigns content ownership, give detailed standards and generate access to control mechanism. This further helps in creating a consistent experience for the users, develop internal controls and reduces content bloat. Some of the common content governance tools used by businesses include taxonomies, content workflow and style guides. Record management tools are also used by some to include audit trails for legal compliances.
Different types of Digital content management
Various kinds of tools and processes are available to manage every single category of digital content. Some of the management categories are listed below.
Mobile content management: MCM or mobile content management process helps in securing access to corporate or business data on smartphones and tablets. Some of the significant components enabled in MCM are file sharing and file storage.
Web content management: WCM or web content management can manage, create and display webpages. The WCM can be described as a program that provides businesses with ways through which digital information can be managed on a website without having prior knowledge regarding web programming. WCMs can include components essential for a particular industry like content management application automating HTML production.
Social media content management: SMCM or social media content management helps in creating and organising social media marketing strategies through pre-defined goals besides analysing engagement. Some SMCM system includes Google Analytics, Sprout Social and BuzzSumo.
Enterprise content management: ECM or enterprise content management systems contains components that assist the business in managing data efficiently. ECM components drive the success of goals like eliminating bottlenecks, streamlining access and overhead reduction. Other tasks include routing, content governance, version control and security.
What are content management tools and systems used for?
Besides providing a content management platform to the business for managing specific kind of content, there are CMS systems that provide an automated process to collaborate digital content management along with content creation.
More commonly, a CMS features format management, capabilities to update content and publish them functionally. A CMS allow its users to generate a unified look and provide them with version control access. Though the downside to it is that it requires particular training for content developers. The digital asset management or DAM system is another CMS kind that manages movies, documents and rich media assets strategically. Some examples include Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.
Is metadata important for content management?
In one word, metadata is the context behind all your data. In terms of digital content, metadata applies to all those elements a customer or a user might wish to interact with. For instance, it can be image, video or URL and those components of an experience you would like to create. When a business prioritises their metadata application within the content management process, they not only unlock the full content value but also makes it easier for the analysts to understand the content ROI. This means, metadata is the core behind transferring your digital content like an asset for the business. The metadata experience may include many things such as creativity, tactics, marketing channels and product introduction. Many businesses would typically lose the true value behind content creation by failing to apply metadata consistently. This impacts the content management process by undermining asset utilization, and confusing site navigation.
Governing metadata for effective digital content management
You must be wondering that when we have already included metadata and tagging in the content management process and the business has a well-defined taxonomy, what sense does metadata governance make. Well, the fact is a lot of data or the information is lost during the translation while you try to manage your digital content across the complicated business without governing metadata appropriately. Examples include content creators who can personalize or tag content but might leave necessary data since they are siloed from digital content strategists whose expertise or priority can be one of the brand voices. Many business owners think that standardising and running the ETL process is easier at the end of the campaigns, however, in reality, the time is wasted and the data is lost in the content cycle or during back-end-data recovery. Belowe have sorted a few simple elements that can help you in governing digital content metadata.
- Across the organization, define a taxonomy for every digital content.
- Begin a standardized and enforced process to tag and create new content.
- In an automatic validate page, engage a solution, enable data readiness and provide marketing tags. Although this step might get overlooked very often, you cannot go back without this step or solve any experience which goes live.
- Maintain every data format or data flow throughout your marketing ecosystem derived from a primary location.
Final word
In reality, the digital content management process holds a very significant place in the successful running of an enterprise. Content management process not only helps businesses in meeting the complex demands of enterprise system but also makes business functions, accounting and tech stack easier. By making all the taxonomies placed in a centralised environment, business owners can get ensured that metadata’s full scope is available and nothing is missed during a content creation procedure, or misunderstood by any of the outsourced units.