Content vs Data

Who owns Content within your organisation? Is content treated differently to data?

Why is Localization separated from data or content strategies?

With increased focus on data, we are seeing the emergence of the role of Chief Data Officers. Their priorities are naturally looking to prevent data problems such as data management projects including data architecture, governance, and quality. Content and data often go hand in hand, but you will often find that analytics are looking at the numbers rather than the effectiveness of the content.

Often a data strategy is separated from content and localization which are significant assets that are often overlooked. If content is not viewed as an asset to the business, it will be an ever-increasing cost, with limited efficacy and carry risk to the business.

We also must reiterate that content should be viewed differently to documents, in the same way a document management solution is different to a content management solution. Content is a component that effectively gets authored, approved, distributed, measured, retired, or reused, as a golden source in a Create Once Publish Everywhere (COPE) scenario.

A marketing content strategy is very different to a content strategy, as is marketing analytics compared to content analytics.

Clients tend to focus on their marketing content where we generally see a lot more maturity than in other types of content. Outside of Marketing where we focus digital production, industries still seem to be stuck in a world of MS Office and PDF production for sales, legal, reporting, and regulatory materials. This causes significant costs and inefficiencies when it comes to localization and measurement. Why are we still working in this world of PDFs and MS offices files???

When outsourcing documents (rather than content) to third parties you will undoubtedly be incurring significant “file formatting” inefficiencies, which are often not automated and will thus add significant risk to your content production.

When clients focus on document production processes, by default they will lose the ability to measure the content intelligence. If you are sending documents by email, then you automatically lose intelligence, but even if a document is downloaded from a website, the best you can expect is download/click rates.

To make content truly intelligent it needs to be componentised and distributed digitally. This is not to say that all printed content should be ceased, but omnichannel distribution needs to be built into your content and localization strategies.