Recently, I came across this tweet (a quote by Seth Godin), and it got me thinking:
“The world works too fast for centralized control.”
—Seth Godin
Does the content publishing process of your organization meet the expectations of today’s dynamic, real-time information driven world? Or are you experiencing a content delivery bottleneck?
Is the content on your corporate website stale? Are press releases from 2008 the freshest content that your users will encounter? Does it take so long to get content posted to the site that once it’s live it’s outdated? These are telltale signs of content delivery bottleneck syndrome.
The bottleneck is commonly caused by one or more of the following issues:
- The technology that publishes your content to the web is antiquated–not allowing for multiple administrators with a variety of publishing rights or approval workflows
- No one in your organization is specifically responsible for updating and maintaining content on the web
- The legal and regulatory review required to place content online is overly time consuming and prohibitive to regular updates
In an age of instant publishing via blogs, status updates, online video and photography, it can be frustrating for corporate website stakeholders to face internal publishing challenges like the ones mentioned above. Here are some steps to start incorporating more timely and dynamic content on your company website.
Four Steps to Break the Bottleneck
- Invest in content management – It’s surprising how many large businesses remain behind the times in terms of implementing a corporate content management system (CMS). There are several quality content management applications ranging in cost from free open source software to several thousand dollar enterprise tools. These tools facilitate content publishing by allowing for a number of different site administrators with a variety of publishing permissions and workflow approval processes. Rather than relying on a single webmaster or being dependent on an agency, a good CMS will offer a user-friendly administrative dashboard that allow just about anyone to modify content – no coding skills required.
- Appoint content creators – Everyone’s busy. Unless there are employees specifically responsible for populating the company website with new content, it’s unlikely to happen. Fresh content improves organic search rankings (you want people to be able to find your content via search engines, right?), gives website visitors a positive impression of your business and a reason to keep coming back. Make it someone’s job (ideally multiple people) to get new content on your site on a monthly basis at minimum.
- Make it a habit – The more you do anything, the better you get at it. Once you have employees responsible for getting the content online and a means of doing it, do it regularly. Set up a manageable schedule that will ensure content can be produced, go through any required review process and make it onto the website in a predictable and timely manner.
- BONUS social media tip: Incorporate RSS feeds – Instantly integrate dynamic content into your website by pulling in user generated content based RSS feeds. The RSS feeds can come from just about anywhere: your company blog, employee blogs, the blogs of thought leaders in your industry, the Twitter streams of users or keywords related to your field. You can even build custom feeds from Google News to build your own dynamic press room. Work with your internal legal, regulatory and marcomm teams to determine the parameters of incorporating the right feeds, and you’re website will instantly become more timely, topical (and search engine friendly).
Follow these steps, and your website will go from outdated and stale to dynamic and topical in no time.
Tags: cms, content, process, Social Media, workflow