I would argue that, depsite the perception that websites consist of marketing content, for many sites, the marketing content is only the top layer – the icing on the cake, and what supports that top layer is a substantial amount of technical content – the cake itself. 

Layers of content on a website

That technical content is often far more valuable to the corporate or product brand than the persuasive content. In doing user research for one client in particular, a manufacturer of power generators and inverters, I saw how guys used their site. Consistently, they would bypass all of the marketing material and go right for the specs. (Of course, before the site revamp, a lot of the specs were missing or buried in a PDF in some obscure area of the site, but that’s a whole other story.) They knew what inverters did, and what to look for, and went directly to find what was, to them, the important piece of information.

In effect, the technical specifications were the marketing material; if the inverter had the right oomph to it, that’s what the users wanted to know. And had the content been wrong, had the inverter been used with some disastrous results, then the ensuing fall-out would have become a marketing problem. The artificial siloing of content between organizational departments – marketing, techdocs, training, support, engineering – is reminiscent of the discussions we had about information arhcitecture, some 8-10 years ago. The difference is that for many organizations, these larger silos have become de facto standards in which they bucket their information for consumers. They assume that when a content consumer arrives on their site, they want to see a certain type of content. They try to funnel the user through their site navigation or constrain the path to the cash register. But if you look at the way consumers actually use a site, you can see that they will not be constrained. In this case study, Jakob Neilsen reveals that consumers will breeze past the feel-good content and head right for the techincal information, product reviews, and other information pertinent to their decision-making process.

The content that was sought out by the consumer, in this example, is probably produced by a department that publishes to multiple channels, not just the Web. Their content strategy likely has to take into account single-sourcing for print as well as Web, and other channels such as training materials (possibly print, e-learning, and a Web output), manuals, product data sheets, and other end products. The Web is but a slice of a greater strategy. When we talk about content strategy, then, my contention is that the type of content we include in the definition needs to broaden beyond Web content, as does the recognition that the content, even if just for the Web, includes not only persuasive content, but instructive/informative, user-generated, and even entertainment content.

The idea of looking at trends in our profession speak directly to the idea of content strategy. It’s a “beyond the document” look at how we create and deliver content to various audiences. It’s about content re-use and single-sourcing, about content management, about filtering content, about creating better ways to serve content consumers. It’s also about how social media has raised the bar, and how consumers will take matters into their own hands if we don’t step up to the plate.

STC Summit attendees will eventually be able to hear the entire presentation along with the slide show. If you didn’t attend, you can see a slightly more concise version of the slides here. Comments encouraged – I’m truly interested in your impressions and feedback.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

Other times, the mid-stream transformation is done by humans, and ingested back into the system for further transformation. Localized content fits in this area, and the implications can be far-reaching. The drive to package content into neat little bundles, so that they can be re-used in multiple contexts, is difficult enough to carry out for a single language or homogeneous market. Writing to satisfy the complexities of multiple languages or localized markets creates exponential challenges. Further complicating the situation is the fact that the people charged with transforming your content are usually outsiders, and probably haven’t been included in the sessions that taught the concepts and developed the architecture for the new content order within your organization. Not only do your translators have to figure out how your content convergence strategy is intended to work for you, they have to figure out how to retain the accuracy and flavor of your intent across languages and cultures. It’s a tall order, and an aspect of content convergence often overlooked.

There’s an article, Anticipating the Impact of Content Convergence, in the January/February 2009 issue of Multilingual Computing that elaborates on some of the things translation professionals, and their clients, need to consider as the nature of content undergoes a profound change.

The main thrust is that content can’t be produced and consumed in silos any more. It’s no longer practical, on a number of levels.  First, organizations cannot afford to produce unique content for multiple products and product lines. Second, as consumers get used to engaging with social networking applications, the bar is raised; users demand more and better information to be delivered faster. Third, the type of strategy makes all the difference in an organization’s success; a too-timid strategies may do enough to get noticed but not enough to really satisfy requirements. Or, worse, a mal-adapted strategy may backfire if the outcome delivers the wrong content (or format) to the wrong users, in inappropriate channels or at the wrong time.

The feedback from the conference was: talk about this more – we need to further this discussion! Therefore, this autumn I’m taking my content convergence message on the road.

First stop: DocTrain East 2008 in Burlington, MA (just outside of Boston), where I’ll present Content Convergence: Trends in the Creation, Production, and Maintenance of Technical Content
Second stop: LavaCon in Honolulu, HI, where the program shows Content Convergence: The Future is Closer than You Think is followed by It’s the Content, Not the Tool: Making Project Decisions to Ensure Smooth CMS Adoptions
Third stop: STC Central New York in Syracuse, NY where I’ll talk about the principles of content convergence in the context of technical communication

You can see the slides, which I’ve posted to SlideShare, or read more about Content Convergence and Integration in TechCom Manager or in the Data Conversion Laboratory newsletter.

As well, if you’re already integrating and converging content, let me know. I’m interested in knowing about organizations who are using content convergence principles in interesting and effective ways.

Joe Pulizzi, Chief Content Officer for Junta 42, understands the value of content, that it is an asset that serves as the “good stuff” of marketing campaigns. Without content, the technology has nothing of interest to deliver. Customers and prospects will be drawn in by the quality and usefulness of the content, not the potential of the technology behind the scenes. He recently blogged about this phenomenon and trends in content marketing. As marketers move money to areas where it can be more effective, the role of content is facing a significant increase.

Hear more about this trend, particularly about the dos and don’ts of content marketing, in Joe’s presentation, Please Stop Talking about Yourself: Is Your Web Content Killing Your Brand and What to Do about It, at Web Content 2009.