Content Wishes for the New Year

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Rachel Lovinger   December 22, 2012

If stars could grant wishes (photo by Andrew Rose)

For our last post of the year, we’d like to make some content wishes for all of our readers, our colleagues, our clients, and the content-consuming public. Ok, and maybe some of these are a little bit for ourselves, too. If we could wave a magic wand and solve a content problem for everyone, here’s what we’d wish for. Happy holidays everyone!

Michael Betts: May you stay content nimble

In today’s world, speed to market can mean the difference between owning a customer segment and being an also ran. In the world of websites, it’s often content that stands in the way of the agility required to stay ahead of the competition. With that in mind, we wish for everyone to achieve a state of content nimbleness.

Robert Stribley: Metadata for all

I wish everyone would truly embrace the consistent application of meaningful metadata to content. One day, someone’s going to create a cheap, reliable out-of-box tool, which engages artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to analyze content and tag it effectively, so it can be displayed, aggregated, disseminated, searched on and generally enjoyed. Until then, we need human beings not just generating content, but tagging it properly, so it isn’t just created and immediately flushed down the memory hole. I am not talking about diabolically skewed marketing SEO either!

Erin Scime: Content operations

I wish that every business would realize how important content operations are and create a job for a content czar – someone who heads up and sees through long term content strategy. I also wish that we could destroy all klugy CMSs in the world!

Allison Zell: Truly agnostic

For the children of the world, I’d like to wave my magic content strategy wand on Santa Claus’ headquarters.  The new content vision allows him to deliver his content (gifts) not just to Christian children with parents who can afford them, but to all children all over in the world, even the “naughty” ones. The strategy also includes a nomenclature proposition: replace Santa Claus with Special Sauce.

Michael Barnwell: Lifecycle aware

I wish for all clients to have content that self-archives. As relevance dwindles due to lack of interest (as measured by clicks and hovering and downloads), content removes itself from the presentation limelight and slides into the inactive bin, accessible still but no longer taking up prime space.

Mary Butler: Content first design

In 2012, many of our clients started asking for “mobile first” digital experiences. In 2013, I would love to have them ask us for “content first” experiences. This will allow us to create experiences that start with the content, not the device.

Rachel Lovinger: New business models

I wish for people and organizations to adopt new and interesting ways for their content to pay for itself – whether this be by making the content so valuable that their audience is happy to pay for it, developing new product partnerships, or creating novel, non-disruptive advertising. Or maybe something entirely new that we haven’t thought of yet.

Jake Keyes: Better filters

In 2013, as publishing becomes ever simpler, I wish for us all to consider that sometimes it’s better to limit the amount of content we publish, and better to thoughtfully put a constraint on access to content, if this will provide a better content experience.

And one final wish, from the whole S/G editorial board:

We’d like to welcome the new son of Liz Bennett, one of our NYC Content Strategy team members and a regular contributor to Scatter/Gather. We wish him a lifetime of delightful, meaningful, useful content; accessible whenever and wherever he wants it.