Happy 200th Post, Content-ment. Plus, a Look Ahead.

Cheers, mate! (image: The Contented Drinker, by Adriaen Van Ostade)

In July 2006, I started a blog. This blog, in fact. Because I needed to know what blogging was all about.

Now, my CMS tells me it this post is my TWO HUNDREDTH POST.

So, instead of baking a blog cake with 200 candles, I thought I would do something more fitting. Like writing a blog post with both a look back and into the future.

Where this blog has been

I started this blog under the moniker of "Superfly Media." I even had the URL for a while. The name was a bit of an inside joke.

There were lots of posts about online and mobile technology and how it related to broadcasting. (I was working at Public Radio International at the time.)

In the meantime, some exciting things have happened.

One of the posts, "BBC and DRM, OMG," from this humble blog was excerpted on the BBC's Backstage blog. OMG, indeed.

Another post, "Content Curation versus Content Aggregation: A Velvet Mr. T Painting," was featured prominently in Steven Rosenbaum's book "Curation Nation." (Rosenbaum's book excerpt is on the Brain Traffic blog.) A book? My words, in a book? Even more OMG!

In 2009, I changed the name to Content-ment because:

• It was a clever play on the notion of contentment and content
• The old blog name lost its appeal and utility, as inside jokes do
• The URL was available

The emphasis of the writing here has always been on content strategy, production, distribution, consumption, and its value. And it always will. For instance...

Where this blog is going

There is a big project coming.

A fun project. An exciting project. It'll happen right here, on this blog. Mostly.

I've been sketching out a series of posts about the changing dynamic of content ownership, consumption, and its impact on the content lifecycle. There are going to be a bunch of them. There will be infographics. Interviews. Probably more references to Miles Davis.

I can't wait to get it out into the open. And share it with you.

This project will end in a grand experiment, of sorts. In the cheeky tradition of Internet, I shall keep some of it a secret for now. That'll be part of the fun.

And, thanks for reading thus far

Some of you have been reading since day one. Others have just found it. Some have shared it, some have left comments. Some agreed with my thoughts, others not. I thank all of you for spending the time with it. Really, really, for real.

When I started in 2006, I just assumed that no one would read it. I am still in awe that anyone does. Thanks!

And now, The Dells singing "Dreams of Contentment."

Exit Music for a Website: Decommissioning

Where we ate, poor apostrophe use and all.

We’ve all seen it - a website that is woefully out-of-date as a result of something significant happening. Business closure, acquisition, loss of funding for a particular initiative. Websites have a peculiar tendency to stick around in a way that other media don’t have to worry about after the curtain has closed.

Normally in the world of website creation and management, we focus on the beginning of website’s lifecycle: LAUNCH.

If we are lucky, and a solid content strategy is in place, we enjoy the benefits of a robust governance plan throughout a website’s productive life.

But, rarely is the focus on the final part of the lifecycle: decommissioning.
Richard Ingram wrote about this very phenomenon in a fabulous post on his blog titled “Decommissioning a doomed website.” He carefully outlines the major steps that a website owner should take when decommissioning is imminent: announce, downsize, single page, redirect.

Decomissioning: The Final Course

Recently, on a trip to my home state of Iowa, I encountered this issue first-hand. Here are the highlights: 

1. Friends recommended a chef-run restaurant
2. I called restaurant to inquire about a reservation [got the answering machine]
3. I visited the website [everything seemed normal]
4. Wife and I pull up to it, greeted by a sign taped to the door: “Closed for business.”

What were we to do? We went to the regional sub shop instead [also delicious]. We asked the help there about the restaurant. They said, “Oh yeah, the chef got a Head Chef gig down in Des Moines at some fancy place.”

Hmm...

Business Not as Usual: An Opportunity

In a geeky fashion, I immediately remarked to my wife that there were several missed opportunities on this website from a business perspective. While the chef was no longer the owner of the restaurant where he wielded knives and pots, he did stand to benefit from any additional traffic to his new place of employ. 

To assist in this matter, the chef could have:

   1. Used the closure to announce his new position/chefdom
   2. Placed a redirect to a page on his new employer’s site
   3. Offered a discount at the new place to people that mention his old restaurant
   4. Informed past diners of the continuation of some favorite dishes in a new place

There are dozens of places to make this type of announcement. Facebook pages, Twitter, Yelp [in this case], etc. However, the single most significant place to make such an important announcement remains the website. [It is still the top Google search result.]

I can’t be alone in my dining preferences as a visitor to my home state. Certainly others would have heeded the call of this fine chef to make the trek to his new kitchen in the state’s capitol city.

When customers are loyal, they are loyal to more than just a thing. They are loyal to a presence, a talent, a personality. It goes a long way. I only wish that I had stepped into this place sooner, to tell the chef that a change in business, from an online perspective, is not a loss, but an opportunity.

Attack of the Rotten Content

Your content is rotten.

Okay, maybe it's not.

When did you last check it?  It won't turn green and fuzzy or smell funky.  But it can still "go bad."

The New York Times recently featured a story about Emory University's efforts to preserve for posterity the works of noted author Salman Rushdie. While content like Rushdie's notes have a long lifespan, a great deal of content on the web has a much more limited life cycle. Neither the creators nor the consumers wish to have certain content live past its expiration date.

When Good Content Goes Bad

The acronym used to describe content's redundancy, outdated-ness, or triviality is ROT. Cheeky!

ROT happens without anyone even realizing it.  There is no content on your website that is completely immune to ROT.  Certain kinds of content are more prone to it than others:

• News items
• Political items
• Events
• Press releases
• Product descriptions

We've all witnessed particularly egregious examples of it in the past.  Maybe it was a press release from two years ago on the homepage.  Or an invitation to an "upcoming event" that took place two weeks ago.  Or a banner for a new product from two updates ago.  They are often painfully clear and a pain to deal with from a user perspective.

Outside factors can also have a major impact on the currency of your content.  You can plan for internal changes, but some things will force your content into a world of ROT:

• Product recalls
• News stories / current events
• Competitor's activities and advances

What is the worst than can happen?

So what if the content is a little moldy?

People visit website to accomplish tasks. Do things.  Buy stuff.  With content that is redundant, outdated, or trivial, your site will become hard-to-use.  Tedious.  Visitors will have to decide on their own what may or may not be accurate.  Or, even worse, the content becomes an active liability. Lawsuits!  Unmet business obligations! Other concerns:

• Negatively impacts brand
• Bad experience overall for the user
• Causes doubts about your content's veracity
• Endangers relationships with partners and third parties involved
• Legal liability
• It just looks bad 

Customers can be misinformed.  They can realize that your website, and by extension, the experience and information you are providing for them is not a priority. Worse yet, they can go elsewhere.

Content Strategy Can Help

A solid content strategy has a clearly defined governance plan.  Once content is created, it cannot be neglected.

The content creation workflows in a content strategy will take into account the life cycle of the material created.  That life expectancy can be incorporated into the metadata to facilitate a certain degree of automation.  Even a modest CMS can lend a hand with managing content with a set expiration date.

Since outside factors are not on a set timetable, another approach may help.  Properly tagging content with keywords will grant you the option to search.  As current events warrant, these keyword searches may prove very valuable.  [Think "oil" or "spill," for example.]

Regular, scheduled reviews of tagged content will ensure that the end result is content that is non-duplicative, up-to-date, and relevant.

Gross, dude

You wouldn't intentionally serve your dinner guests rotten food as pictured above, right?  Neither should you serve content suffering from ROT to the lovely folks coming to your website.  Fresh content, like fresh food, will delight those that get to enjoy it.

["rotten apples" image via Flickr upload from maceolepage (cc: by-nc)]

Evergreen content not all that evergreen.

The ever-wise and observant Jennifer Kane, consultant at Kane Consulting sent this tweet yesterday, causing me to consider my past history with "evergreen content":

In the radio world, an episode of a program with date-neutral content is produced to fill air time should calamity strike [snapped tapes, sunspots, old-fashioned user error, etc.]  These episodes are called "evergreens," and are used only as a last resort to avoid the dreaded "dead air."

They are replaced often to keep things somewhat current, actually making them less "evergreen" than the name implies.

Evergreen content is thought to be a godsend to some content creators and publishers.  It was relevant before it was even published.  It will be relevant for all eternity.  It is EVER GREEN.

But what content is really evergreen?  What content does not require some degree of maintenance?  What content is not made out-of-date by SOMETHING?  Content that few will find really valuable or compelling.

What could possibly happen if content is dealt with in the RonCo Rotisserie method -- set it and forget it?  Lots of things.  Your content might:

• Become out-of-date
• Gain a new context
• Become unusable due to CMS updates
• Expire, from a legal or rights standpoint
• Confuse people with multiple versions
• And more, unfortunately

All of these can lead to a terrible user experience, and even worse, legal liabilities.

Publishers and content creators are strapped for time and resources. Many are too busy pushing the content out the door, leaving no time to put a proper content maintenance strategy in place.

Having a strategy in place that considers the lifespan and life cycle of content can help avoid these issues.  Good questions to ask when putting one together:

• Is the content good for 6 hours or 6 months?
• How do editorial considerations apply?
  
• Are different versions of content tracked properly?
• Should it be archived or deleted?
• What triggers activities like archiving and relocation?
• What stays on site, what shows up only in searches?
• Are legal contracts, rights, and obligations in sync with content?
• How are new contextual opportunities managed?
• How are new business opportunities applied to existing content?
• Plus many other considerations.

Plans take time.  Content maintenance strategies take time.  Workable content strategies take time.

Putting a strategy together may add more to existing workflows.  Editorial oversight requires staff resources.  Long-term CMS issues will be confronted.   But, a good maintenance strategy can also provide new opportunities as new business models and development pop up.  The final result will be better than evergreen. 

You will soon find out that your content can remain vibrant and relevant long after it has been published.

["Pine tree / 松(まつ" image by Flickr user TANAKA Juuyoh (田中十洋) (CC:at)]