Best Practices: E-Business and Online Marketing

Implementing Content Management Solutions: Best Practices

Here's a 12-step approach that can help:

1. Recognize your pain points. This means pinpointing where manual content management processes have been overwhelmed and are no longer efficient and identifying and prioritizing stakeholders and their needs (if possible, observe users in their working environments).
2. Assess your content: what types? how is it used? what content management practices are currently in place? what management problems do users face?
3. Classify your content by establishing a clear structure and developing content metadata to improve content searchability and access.
4. Develop organizational consensus about goals, such as improving workflow, more consistent look-and-feel, easier content creation for non-technical producers, while using key performance indicators (KPIs) to define and measure goal achievement.
5. Use templates and style guides to enforce content consistency.
6. Define and enforce content standards and procedures, including workflow, approvals, access control, quality control, and version control.
7. Establish well-defined roles regarding content creation, deployment, updating, removal, and backup/retention.
8. Develop a strategic implementation plan that will (eventually) capture all content, but implement in small increments with pilot projects.
9. Educate everyone in your organization about the need to understand that content management is part of their job.
10. Create a content audit function that captures and stores version snapshots of key content (e.g., your website).
11. Define your content lifecycle(s) and devise appropriate measures for updating content as needed and "retiring" content when it's out-of-date.
12. Don't forget about security!