James Deer, Co-Founder of GatherContentIn Part I of our interview with James Deer, GatherContent’s co-founder, we discussed the problem of content chaos in organizations and how to spot the most common content strategy weaknesses. In Part II, we talk to James about content templates, what to do about PDFs, and whether "content strategy" is real or hype.
You mentioned in a blog post that you were worried about spamming versus sending legitimate notifications. Talk about how you balance those concerns in your product.
Let’s say you’re normally supposed to get three notification emails in the space of a minute. Rather than sending you three emails, what we do is wait a certain period of time and then (based on the context of the emails) group them into one. It doesn’t sound like rocket science or a revolutionary feature, but it is a common concern. People don’t want their content management tool to spam them all day.
Another great advance in evolving the art of notifications is how they’re automated. Normally, if someone isn’t delivering the content you need on time, you have to nag them for it. With automatic notifications, the “nagging” is done for you. If a machine is nagging you, it helps takes some of the manual burden of project management off of a person’s back.
How do you handle the issues that arise with global templates versus local/individualized/customized templates?
At the moment, the way we handle global structures is simple. You set up the structure on the page (see screenshot below), save that structure, and apply it to any other pages you wish. We’re getting feedback now where people are saying, “I want certain elements to be carried across certain pages. And when I update them in one place, they update in all places.” Or, “I wish I could group fields and copy those fields onto pages that all do the same thing. And those changes update across all content.” These are complex problems to figure out.
My view is that these problems will be solved similarly to how object oriented programming solved specific programming problems. Rather than having pages, you set up your "content object," and then you can set up another structure somewhere that governs the way that these particular objects are structured. For example, you might have a widget on a 10,000 page website that comes up on maybe 2,000 of those pages. Being able to update the widget once but then having parts of that widget contextual to the page that it’s displaying on is a big challenge. If we can "objectify" this content somehow so that there are groups and ways to set structures but also flexibility in specific scenarios, then I think we’ll have made some major progress toward solving these problems.
GatherContent Sample Page
As you know, PDFs are a necessary evil. What recommendations do you have for companies who have a lot of PDF content?
From my experience, communications professionals instinctively fire up InDesign and start designing PDFs. Instead, people should use a tool like GatherContent or a CMS to generate these PDFs by first creating a standard template (with headers and footers). Then you can generate PDFs faster and quicker using HTML.
From a higher level content strategy perspective, when a company makes an organizational change you won’t have to go back and change 1,000 InDesign files. Instead, just go into GatherContent and update the templates. Then when people download PDFs from the website, they’re rapidly generated on the fly (using HTML) and they’ll be a much more up to date version than if the PDFs are created manually. I think we’ll be seeing more companies generating PDFs this way in the future.
What’s your take on the very hot “content strategy” space right? Hype or the real deal?
Personally, I don’t like the term “content marketing.” In my mind, “content marketing”should be a natural subset of “content strategy.” In fact, popular content marketing books and articles talk about how to develop the best content strategy for your marketing. In my mind, content strategy is a core business function, which is very different from how “content marketing” thinks of itself.
So, “content strategy” is not hype. But “content marketing” is hype. Marketers have tried to take away a lot of the theory and simplify it to: “Produce content and you will get leads.” What most people call “content marketing,” we call “developing quality, targeted content.”
Over the next five years, bigger organizations will have their own internal content organizations. Depending on the volume of content or the company’s needs, the content organization will definitely become the core of company communications— both internally and externally. The way society is headed right now, everyone is becoming more connected and everyone has access to a lot of information. From a business point of view, we’re making it easier for people to create content. But without content strategy, it’s a bad thing. I think more people will eventually realize that...especially if companies need a unified voice, consistency, and a way to centralize content that makes sense for everybody in the organization.
Content is the only thing fluid enough to touch everybody within an organization. Content is the lifeblood of so many things in a business. The second that people start to value it more, their businesses will improve.