It took the Web, where content is the front door to products and services, where reputation is based on reviews, and where it turns out that accuracy and quality of content regularly sways reviewers, to turn the tides on content. The idea that content contributes to the bottom line is no longer a novel idea. I can’t really blame management for their skepticism; after all, what has been rather thin in public discourse about the benefits of content is the actual ROI.

It’s easy to understand that discussing the ROI of content can be a little fuzzy. Content comes in many forms, and affects the bottom line in complex ways. Also, ROI can different things in different industries. In the private sector, the ROI of content may mean its contribution to profitability. In the public sector, the ROI of content likely means efficiency of delivering services. In both cases, content projects may be measured against IRR (Internal Rate of Return) – the amount of savings realized by investing in content processes.

Key Performance Indicators

To understand how to measure content ROI, we need to discuss in a general way what content is intended to do. The common goal of any content is to change behaviour. Here are a few ways that content can accomplish that:

• Persuade consumers to purchase a product, through a description of benefits and explanation of features.
• Persuade constituents to respond to issues in a particular way, by explaining the issues and offering suggested responses.
• Reduce service calls by anticipating queries and ensuring that sufficient and accurate content is available.
• Allow the public to get answers to questions or problems in a self-serve  way, by providing helpful information.
• Increase engagement, whether that is constituent engagement or customer engagement.

In each of these examples, the behavioural change resulted in a benefit to the organization, whether it is to sell more products and reduce service calls, or by helping constituents be better informed or fulfill their civic obligations.

Business Drivers

The most common motivations or business drivers, expressed in very general terms, are:

• Increased revenue. Does the content help generate sales?
• Brand loyalty. Does the content help manage organizational desirability – whether that be to increase corporate trust in the private sector, or public trust  in the public sector.
• Risk management. Can accurate, quality content minimize inadvertent product misuse or minimize risk of lawsuit?
• Extension of market. Does the content allow the organization to extend to new markets?
• Operational efficiencies. Does the content reduce the number of customer support calls or make some operational aspect more efficient?
• Process efficiencies. Does a particular publishing process reduce the cost of content production?

Examples of ROI

How does this play out in terms of hard costs? Measuring ROI can be tricky because there is not always a direct cause-and-effect relationship between publishing information and seeing results, so figuring out how the benefits are manifested takes keen observation and a willingness to look at all types of content and multiple types of benefits. Take a look at some examples that I’ve come across in the last year or so.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was cited by the Content Marketing Institute as reducing costs drastically by changing the way that they presented content to consumers. This organization noticed that an average of 30% of their 4 million annual service calls were about a single problem: customers could not figure out their monthly bills. The average customer service call costs $25 (the range is from $5 to $50), so reducing the number of calls  means reducing 1,200,000 calls. Even after calculating the investment to rework the content, presenting it to customers in a way that increases their comprehension could mean a significant cost savings – a modest estimate would be upward of half-a-million dollars.

A company that creates processing solutions for community banks calculated that a change to their publishing processes, which allowed them to promote collaborative authoring by a number of authors, track content use across multiple products lines, and to re-use content more efficiently, saved them over $100,000 within the first year, and allowed them to significantly increase their production capacity.

A company that manufactures small utility vehicles reported that at least once a year, someone would misuse one of their vehicles in a way that would result in a lawsuit. The average lawsuit was $4 million, with 25% of that automatically involving the manufacturer.  These lawsuits happened no matter what content they produced – there will always be someone who is determined to drive a vehicle recklessly – but because of the quality of their documentation and fanaticism about accuracy, the manufacturer had never lost a lawsuit, for an estimated $1 million savings annually.

When a municipality offers leisure courses, they find themselves competing with the private sector for popular offerings, such as fitness classes, sports sessions, and children’s activities. It reasons, then, that they stand to lose more revenue if they don’t offer up content – descriptions, prices, locations, schedules, and so on – that ranks high in search engines, and allows people to find the leisure activity according to their particular criteria: the course they want, in the location they want, at the time of day they prefer, at the price they find acceptable. The ROI is highly situational here, and depends on a wide range of factors, but the potential for revenue – or loss of revenue – makes a direct link between content and ROI.

The performance that organizations gets from their content continues to be affected by the amount of effort they put into its production. The effort begins with a content strategy; the success is in its implementation.

It was interesting to me to see how Lean has made it into this area because at first glance, Lean is all about production line efficiencies, and here it’s being applied to a discipline that is far from production line, and couldn’t be effective without a certain amount of creativity. And creativity is hard to streamline in terms of “reducing waste.”

The idea of applying Lean principles to a service environment isn’t new, however. In 2004, Lean was just starting to be adapted to areas beyond manufacturing. I worked on a project where we applied Lean principles to the production of content, where the savings were great and the ROI was stunning (though as Scott Abel always warns: your mileage may vary).

My client and I turned our success story into a presentation. As the question of ROI comes up continuously, I thought I’d post the presentation to show how a rigorous examination of even a small area of content production can yield significant results.

How Far to Lean (goes to Slideshare.net) or view below:

CMS Myth asked if I’d do an interview in advance of the conference, and the result was an interview called Good Content Means Good Business. Enjoy.

This deliverable is The Pitch. It is what makes clients – external or internal – understand why they need it, what it is, how it brings benefit, who will benefit, who will bring the benefit and how, and what the mechanics are of what needs to be done in order bring those benefits.

Marketing communicators turned content strategists are pretty good at the pitch; justifying the benefits of efforts spent is part of the job. For other communicators, this way of thinking may not come naturally. In the technical communication realm, for example, there have traditionally been clear delineations about the work produced: a manual, help files, and perhaps text to the translators.  Making the case for content strategy is entirely new territory. For content strategists with a more technical bent, it’s hard to move away from explaining benefit in tactical terms – “the output will be interoperable with other XML schemas,” for example – and expressing ROI in terms that management will understand.

There have been numerous articles, presentations, and other resources produced on the ROI of content strategy, but it all comes down to the same core thesis. Making the case for content strategy is all about demonstrating the value it will bring, to help organizations meet their business objectives.

“Our IT department gave us VSS and we can’t figure out how to get components out of that. How do you do that?”

“We’re tearing our hair out with Sharepoint and versioning; what is the workaround?”

“Our website uses Documentum and it won’t do what we want. What do we do?”

“We have Interwoven and the interface is awful, so our staff won’t use it. What should we replace it with?”

Each set of circumstances was unique, yet eerily alike.  Each instance involved the acquisition of a software product which was then implemented for an operational unit, without regard to whether the software was suited to the task. The mismatch, in some cases, was painfully obvious; in other cases, the mismatch was more subtle. In many cases, certainly all the instances above, the software is popular, thriving software that has been implemented without a proper strategy. The results: generally some sort of fail.

Bad strategy or no strategy?

During the past decade, acceptance of content management has drastically increased. The idea that managing any significant volume of content requires some technology assistance has been demonstrated a multitude of times, and the adoption of a CMS (content management systems)  is no longer a novelty. Yet the instances of the tail wagging the dog – buying the software before determining the operational needs – continue to be far too familiar to ignore.

When I would encounter an audience member at a later event, I’d ask if they’d ever gotten the problem sorted out. Overwhelmingly, they would sheepishly admit that they had not. They continued to produce and publish content in ways that they acknowledged were highly inefficient and prone to operational risks <link> because they couldn’t convince their organizations of the need to make the changes that, to them, were obviously needed. So what went wrong?

Go cheap or go home. This “strategy” is when the technology group either already has some software – collaboration software, source code control software, or a Web CMS – that they insist be put to use because “we already own the software” or “the software is free.” Not only does this dooms a project to failure, but anecdotal reports show that the operational team is then blamed for the failure. The technology group refuses to take responsibility for having foisted upon them an inappropriate tool. In this case, a stalemate ensues, and everyone goes back to their previous kludgy way of work, with no movement forward, and the technologists smug in their political win.

Don’t get it, don’t care; just do it. This “strategy” is in play when a group has heavily invested in a software application, and is reluctant to investment more time or money to make it work for a different operational purpose. There is equal resistance to bringing in additional software that complements the original uber-application, and no impetus to understand why it is needed. There may have been a strategy developed for the initial implementation, but there is no acknowledgement that different operational needs will require further customization of the software. The idea is that the software should be one-size-fits-all, and if the customization has worked from one department, it should work for all departments. The department whose operational needs aren’t being met is sure to find inventive work-arounds, sometimes taking pains not to let on what is going on for fear of sanctions from the powers that be. Generally, the situation comes to light when a serious breach of protocol comes to light that can be traced back to a work-around that failed.

Connecting strategy to technology

The idea that technology can be implemented without strategy is naïve, at best. The idea that technology or strategy can be implemented without a deep understanding of the content lifecycle is a wanton mismanagement of corporate assets.

Understand your content. The entire CMS implementation is to support, with technology, the production, processing, and publishing of content. It is imperative to understand what the content needs are throughout the entire content lifecycle. Without this understanding, a technology implementation is sure to go wrong at some point because there will be a mismatch between the content requirements and the software assigned to support it.

Know your standards. For any technology to be effective, there needs to be an understanding of how the content can be leveraged. This generally involves connecting systems, whether that is as simple as providing an RSS feed or using microformats, to more robust standards such as implementing DITA <link> to make content system-agnostic or integrating content from one system into another through the magic of XSL transformations.

Understand pertinent technologies. The decision-makers who, with much eye-rolling, confess with some pride that they don’t even know how to use styles in their word processing are who allow bad software implementations to thrive. Get with the program or get someone who can, because the lack of understanding about how to leverage content through technology, more often than not, shortchanges the project or leads to disastrous results. The complexity of systems has grown exponentially over the past decade; it is imperative to understand, at least at a high level, what the various technologies can do and how that can benefit – or harm – your content and, ultimately, your brand.

The concepts I’ve articulated here are not entirely new, nor are they particularly rocket science. Consultants, software vendors, and their savvy clients have produced many case studies demonstrating successful implementations and the derived organizational value. Invariably, their successes all share a common denominator: a strong strategy.

So when it came time to changing the answering machine greeting message, I followed the instructions only to discover that there is no option to select. I tried all the little tricks to see if the option got hidden elsewhere in the menu tree, but it was definitely missing. Well, that’s fine; I will tough out the pain of contacting customer support, through the phone number in the back of the book. The phone number works in Canada – always an iffy question – so that’s encouraging, and after listening to all the preambles, I press 1 for English, enter my product number, and go through the various menus but there is no option for “menu items are missing”. It seems that all the options end up the same way, leading to an end point of “visit our website at …”.

Now, gigantic corporations all have us trained to despise having to call in; in other words: Don’t you think I’d have checked the website first if I thought I could find the answer on your website? It would have been so much easier: go to the site, choose the model number, and  But of course, the user experience was quite painful. Here is an encapsulation of the frustration points:

1. After doing a Google search for AT&T 84209 (the model number) phone, I kept getting routed to the att.com site, which was obviously US-based, and geared to telephone service subscribers.
2. I redialed the number from the instruction book and was given www.telephones.att.com as the URL. Typing in 84209 got me to a shopping area. Do I want to buy a replacement cordless battery? I must say that if I happened to know the model number of a phone I wanted to buy, I’d be in luck because the second shopping option is to buy the very phone that I’m getting annoyed over.
3. There are links to the manual and Quick Start guide, which I consulted and had the same incorrect information.
4. Filling in the Contact Us form field promises to net a response within – depending on which of the messages you believe – 72 hours (on website), 2 days (on-screen auto-reply message), or 3 days (auto-reply email) but I doubt that I’ll get a meaningful answer. It may be too late anyhow, as I’ve run about the house, disconnecting telephone bits and bobs and tossing them into a bag to return to the store.

Now, I admit that my question is not one of the top ten questions, and it might be embarrassing to put it on the automated reply options (Press 8 if the interface  doesn’t work as per instructions.) but surely someone has asked this question before, and somewhere, a content developer has tackled this discrepancy. The point is that there needs to be a strategy around content that goes beyond the basics. Now that I’ve calmed down and revisited the situation with an industry insider’s eye, the support site is lovely – beautiful colours and the navigation to the FAQs is quite simple. But when a customer is searching content, and can’t find it, then all the other niceties fall away. The laser beam focus on finding the content, which is needed to complete their task, overrides all other aspects of the user experience. Task-based analysis at its best.

So to AT&T, I would ask: if one of your questions is “Who is Charlie Johnson and why is his name displayed on my phone?” surely the question of missing menu items could be addressed, as well? This site is a classic example of focusing resources on the usability side of the support site, but not having a content strategy befitting such a site.  In this case, I did receive an email a few days later, referring me to a “real person” in another department, but by that time, my answer was, “Thanks, but too little too late. I’ve exchanged the phone for another brand.”

Seeing as how returns of electronic consumer products is a multi-billion dollar problem in North America, companies could definitely benefit from having strong content strategies, not just on their website, but across the product line, from instructions to training to their support site.

• Do you re-use a lot of the same content in difference manuals, or in different types of material?
• If so, do you cut and paste the content to get the content from one place to another?
• Do you translate the content into at least a couple of languages?
• Do you have diverse groups of end users that could benefit from personalized content?
• Are you in a regulated industry where audit trails matter?
• Are you susceptible to lawsuits if your content doesn’t remain accurate across all content channels?

If you’ve answered yes to two or more of these questions, you should be wondering if a component content management is right for you.

5 Top Business Benefits of Content Re-Use

1. Process Efficiency.Content developers are knowledge workers, and an efficiency goal is to create more time that can be spent on the important tasks associated with content creation. Using a CCMS to produce content supports efficient processes by reducing, and sometimes eliminating, rote tasks such as searching, cutting and pasting, checking for identical changes in multiple places, and repetitive set-ups for generating content output.
2. Scope Extension. When staff isn’t spending time on the rote tasks, they can concentrate on the activities that add value to the organization. The gain in process efficiency allows staff to re-allocate their efforts, perhaps creating material that had previously been beyond their reach, or responding to requests for materials that didn’t fit within the product schedule. Or, it could mean the difference between having the resources to enter a new market. or taking a pass.
3. Risk Management . Inaccurate content, or content that inconsistent across publishing media – documents, websites, and product packaging – can lead to lawsuits. One content developer estimated that her company successfully avoided one lawsuit per year, at approximately $1 million per lawsuit, by demonstrating content accuracy. The only way they could maintain accuracy across all their product lines, given the amount of content and time-pressured publishing schedule, was through a CCMS.
4. Customer Trust. In markets where the difference between you and competitors is a better user experience, getting good information out to your customers quickly can be a distinct advantage. With a CCMS , you can publish content sooner, be confident of its accuracy, and, when it makes business sense, easily create more variations of your material for specific audiences. When customers have better instructions, more personalized content, or targeted translations, it all adds up to increased consumer confidence in your products and your organization.
5. Increased Revenue . Whether the support takes the form of better material for sales reps, better training material, more translated material to allow your product into a new market, or real-time sharing of content with other groups such as customer support, the ability to manipulate content quickly, easily, and accurately translates into more sales.

What a great concept. I’m going to make 2009 my own year of creating unexpected value. What better way to create a great user experience for those who deal with me in a professional capacity?