Too often, content creators work in isolation from one another. This separation is especially problematic in large companies, many of which separate content creators into discrete working units for organizational purposes. Departmental silos erected between marketing, technical, training, support and product information developers make it impossible for anyone to have a single, consolidated view of the content landscape. Without an overarching view, customers are likely to encounter inconsistent, incongruent, and incorrect content. We call this The Content Silo Trap™. Content silos can have detrimental effects on organizations, resulting in increased costs, reduced quality, and potentially ineffective materials. A unified content strategy can help your organization avoid these and other costly challenges, reducing the costs of creating, managing, and distributing content, and ensuring that your content supports both organizational and customer needs. Learn how to develop a unified content strategy—a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customers’ needs. A unified content strategy is a coherent plan of attack that ensures your content is the same wherever it appears, providing customers a consistent experience every time. On brand. The right content. At the right time. In the right language and format. On the devices of your customers’ choosing. This presentation was given at Information Development World on May 16, 2017 Don’t miss our upcoming event, Information Development World: Creating Machine-Ready Content to be held on November 28-30, 2017. http://www.informationdevelopmentworld.com

1. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
Ann Rockley, CEO
The Rockley Group, Inc.

3. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• 28+ years in the industry
• Corporate
• Promotional
• Instructional
• Industry Experts
• Intelligent content strategies
• Content reuse strategies
• Structured content management
• Content creation and management in
a regulated world

4. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com

5. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• Known as the “mother of content strategy”
• Creator of the concept of intelligent content
and founder of the Intelligent Content
Conference.
• Passionately committed to defining and
sharing industry best practices
• Master of Information Science
• Fellow of the Society for Technical
Communication
• Adjunct Professor, MSc in Information
Design and Development, Cork Institute of
Technology

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Explore Buy Use Maintain
Upsell/
New Sell

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• Determine your corporate personas
• Identify content needs at each point in the entire customer
content lifecycle
• Identify hand-offs between phases

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• Agree on a common set of terminology
• How do you refer to things
• Avoidance of acronyms
• Agreed upon names for your functionality or services

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• Define the terms that customers will use to retrieve your content
• Agree on common metadata
• Each group will have some unique metadata to support their content,
but you should have a common set that everyone can use

29. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• Write once, use many
• What content can be reused within a content set and across
a content set
• Determine who creates and maintains common reusable content
• Educate everyone on when and how to reuse content

30. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• Develop content models to support each content set
• Ensure the content models support reuse
• Where possible build a core set of component models that can be used
by everyone and unique component models where necessary
• Determine how content models will be centrally maintained for
optimum access and use

31. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• Content should be designed to be delivered in any channel
• Ensure content is designed to be separate from format
• Only format neutral content can be delivered anywhere, anytime, and
on any device

32. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• Develop ways to “hand-off” content between technologies
• Base hand-offs on your common models and technology
• Use the right technology for the right need

33. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• That oversees the unified content strategy
• Maintains a corporate-wide understanding of content
• Helps to identify opportunities to work together
• Manages standardization
• Supports continuous improvement
• Addresses concerns and conflicting needs

34. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
• A unified content strategy—a repeatable method of identifying all
content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content
for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling
content on demand to meet your customers’ needs.
• It provides a coherent plan of attack that ensures your content is the
same wherever it appears, providing customers a consistent experience
every time. On brand. The right content. At the right time. In the right
language and format. On the devices of your customers’ choosing.

35. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
1. Reach out across the silos
2. Build corporate personas and identify content needs at every point in
the customer journey
3. Standardize terminology
4. Create an enterprise taxonomy
5. Create a reuse strategy
6. Develop content models
7. Ensure content is format neutral
8. Create an oversight committee

36. @arockley | #IDW2017 | rockley@rockley.com
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