Content should be at the core of your internet strategy. Yes, think about balancing sales channels, connecting the site’s goals to your organizational objectives and getting your look and feel right. But content remains king, so knowing how to effectively deploy and manage it will be critical to your online success.
Before presenting at the Gilbane San Francisco conference, I was able to take in a few of the sessions, and two in particular provided excellent insight into the role that content can play in achieving business objectives and the business considerations that must go into being able to manage content.
Actionable content
Gilbane Consultant Bill Trippe discussed this useful concept in a presentation to the CM Professionals Spring Conference, which started the day before the Gilbane event. Bill explained that Forrester originated the phrase “transactional content,” which Mary Laplante and Bill Zoellick from the Gilbane Group have defined as:
Transactional content can be defined as shared information that drives business-to-business processes. It is the content that flows through the commerce chain, initiating and automating processes such as procurement, order management, supply chain planning, and product support. Transactional content is shared in the sense that it is exchanged among partners, suppliers, customers and distributors who each can contribute to it.
Bill and Gilbane colleague David Guenette have taken to calling it “actionable content,” and Bill provided some eye-catching stats explaining why the concept is so important:
- Less than 10% of users will contact a supplier whose Website does not provide detailed product and service information (2004 Content Solutions User Needs)
- 91% of industrial buyers rely on the Internet to collect information and 90% of industrial buyers visit the Web and eliminate potential suppliers before they even consider calling (Outsell, Inc, ICR Research, others).
While understanding actionable content is critical, implementing it is complex and difficult. As Bill notes, it requires multiple media, multi-platform integration, and cross-functional teams.
In our experience, many companies are beginning to recognize the important contribution content makes to their business goals, even if they are not yet familiar with “actionable content.” And, once they accept the need to tackle an important business challenge, they recognize the importance of developing an effective plan.
Managing content
In his outstanding tutorial called “Web Content Management Systems: Architecture & Products,” Tony Byrne of CMS Watch provided a comprehensive overview on the topic. Among the key messages that emerged was that acquiring and implementing a CMS is not a straightforward business decision due to:
- Complexity of choice. Tony estimates that there are approximately 2,000 systems available, although about 1,600 are “consulting-ware” that have only been implemented a few times.
- Wide variance in price points. With Enterprise Web CMS solutions starting at $250,000 and Open Source options beginning at $1,000, assigning a budget prior to searching for options may prove virtually impossible.
- Estimating Total Cost of Ownership. TCO can be summed up with a simple question: what does a free dog cost? Open Source provides a great example of why a TCO model is very important for a CMS. As Tony pointed out, these “cheap” solutions often require extensive integration, a cost for which many companies fail to budget. He suggests that for every $1 spent on software, you allocate between $2 and $8 on services.
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