LAYING A FRAMEWORK
FOR CONTENT GOVERNANCE
"Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals."
- Neil Gaiman
By Cathy McKnight, Vice President, Strategy
TCA
millions of dollars for a new content technology and strategy. A scalable, strategic, and well understood content governance model is what enables a content team – centralize, decentralized or a little bit of both, no matter where they sit in the organization – to focus on content quality. Successful content teams understand that a content governance model is the foundational piece to an optimized digital content marketing strategy.
ADDRESSING THE ELEPHANT
As mentioned earlier, setting up, or revising, a content model can be not only daunting, but also difficult to “sell” to those who you want to involve in executing the plan. Structuring the model with the following information can help get the “what’s in it for me” message through at all levels of the organization.
It is everywhere. And while content is prolific, it is not simple — it is a complex, multi-faceted effort that if not managed properly can mean the difference between success and getting sued.
The content – images, text, audio, video – that fill our digital channels does not appear out of nowhere. Success in digital and content marketing comes from the quality of the content being managed. This success requires supporting content strategy. A large part of that strategy has little to do with the content itself, and everything to do with people; the people involved in creating, managing, and regulating the content. In other words, the people involve with content governance.
DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE ELEPHANT
Content governance is often the elephant in the content team room -
everyone knows it’s important and should get attention, but no one’s quite sure how best to go about it, because it’s really big, and a bit scary, so they avoid it, or worse, actively ignore it. Content governance can be daunting because when set up properly is relational to tasks, not defined roles, and often does not align neatly to the existing org structure. Thus, requiring at least some organizational change management, which is almost always complicated and messy.
But that mess and complexity is worth it. Trust me.
Traditionally companies simply try to take the same approach to creating content that they’ve always taken – and wind up with the same results of unengaging, inconsistent content, perhaps, if they are lucky, it ends up in a more visually attractive package (think lipstick on a pig), after spending
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