James Deer, Co-Founder of GatherContentSurpassing 7,000 users and moving from beta into a paid service, GatherContent is gathering steam! On a mission to defeat content chaos in organizations, GatherContent simplifies how content is created, structured, and published. More importantly, GatherContent turns any high-level content strategy into simple, consistent, and executable steps that anyone within an organization can follow. Hailing from Aberdeen, Scotland, co-founder James Deer was kind enough to pop in for a Skype chat and talk to us about content issues that all organizations are wrestling with—and how to begin solving those issues.
What drove you to start GatherContent? What business need did you identify?
Over the past few years, my wife and I were building a digital agency in Aberdeen, Scotland. Aberdeen is the oil capital of Europe, so all of the big oil and gas companies are headquartered here. Working with these companies played a big part in shaping how we thought about content. At these large organizations, we noticed that the content management process (and not just the CMS) was a big headache.
That headache included rallying stakeholders, communicating the content strategy and approach to the entire company, and finding out who is responsible for providing content. Our clients would end up with hundreds of Word documents. These documents had owners, but they were passed around too much internally. Keeping a document structured when you’re working with 10-15 people gets very messy. Ownership and accountability falls by the wayside, and tracking changes in Word isn’t enough.
There had to be a better way to manage all of this content no matter who was providing it. For us, it got to a point where we were wasting so much time piecing Word documents, emails, CDs, PDFs, and other content together that we built GatherContent to solve our pain point. Nothing else in the marketplace offered a structured, centralized repository for content.
You’ve described the problem of content chaos (e.g. lack of overall structure, chaotic websites, email, Word documents). When it’s such a crucial part of a website, why is content so often neglected?
First, you often see a lack of communication and time. Communications professionals tend to understand the importance of content, but other professionals don't. And, dedicated "content time" often is not built into their schedules.
Second, technical people often underestimate the value of content—especially when they are needed as subject matter experts. We deal with a lot of engineers, and they often don’t care about the website and its content. It’s challenging to make these people understand that the information they’re giving up is going to help the company make more sales—which therefore keeps them in a job.
Third, a lack of transparency can hurt content. High-level management sometimes isn’t clear about content expectations with lower-level employees. That signifies a lack of commitment to content and keeps it a lower priority, even if a company supposedly has a content strategy.
GatherContent Project Dashboard
It sounds like part of the problem is also a clash of generations and different skill sets.
Yes, people have an incredible range of knowledge across generations and disciplines. We forget that some people have only basic technical abilities in using computers. Some engineers (especially older ones) we’ve worked with are in warehouses all day and just don’t use computers. Yet, they’ve got all of this knowledge inside their heads that is great for content.
Unfortunately, CMSs haven’t helped this situation. CMSs are generally designed to cater to the needs of a webmaster, but what people really need is a system that caters more toward the content team. You can take certain measures to make CMSs easy to use, but creating and structuring content should be as easy as firing up Microsoft Word or Google Docs. We see GatherContent as that tool.
What would you identify as the most common content planning and structure weaknesses or blind spots in companies today?
You can send a Word document by email and not really know what happens to it. Has the person received it? Are they going to look at it? Then, it unexpectedly comes back with about 1,000 tracked changes. I call this situation a content black hole. So many companies suffer from content black holes where there is no structure around creating, collaborating, and approving content. It also comes down to time. People have their own priorities. If someone is working on a seven-figure project, the website or content is not really a priority.
A subtler problem I see is that too many people combine marketing and communications. I firmly believe they are two separate disciplines. Many companies will have a MarComm department. Instead, companies need to specifically focus on developing content that then influences the marketing. If we can help clients create a foundation of content that has structure and consistency, then that would make marketing (and everyone’s jobs) a lot easier. When companies get to a certain size, especially over 10,000 employees, creating and maintaining this kind of structured content is a lot more difficult than it sounds.
In Part II of our interview, we'll talk to James about content templates, what to do about PDFs, and if "content strategy" is real or hype. In the meantime, you might want to check out GatherContent for yourself.