Organizing For Content

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How should organizations organize for content? Are brands really publishers? Very few have hired people with “content” or “editor” in their titles. Fewer still (read: almost none) have content departments or divisions within the marketing or other organizations.

Yet, more and more companies are producing content like crazy. Also, multiple websites. Large corporations have tens of millions of visitors to their dot-coms each month, perhaps five to 10 million email subscribers. Then, there are blogs, YouTube channels and multiple social media channels on social networks.

Like journalists, brands are challenged to “feed the beast,” often on a daily basis, sometimes in real time. All this content isn’t just written word. It’s images, videos, charts, infographics… Put all of this together and the process, workload, and workflow demands become truly staggering.

Yet, most companies have adopted content strategies that amount to little more than asking employees already juggling the demands of full-time jobs to please produce content, too, in addition to their day-to-day duties. Not only does this approach not scale, but these employees aren’t trained in either content marketing or content strategy.

Something’s got to give, and I’m currently conducting research to try to learn how companies are making room for the demands content is placing on marketing, communications, IT, customer service and CRM.

We’re analyzing our finding now and will publish our report in April. In the meantime, the questions we asked dozens of interview subjects may perhaps help organizations to assess their own content needs as they relate to workflow, process, technology and partnerships.

If you’re producing content, start asking yourself these questions. And, please let me know if we left anything important out you’d like to see included in future research.

General

• What’s your role? Where do you sit in your company’s org chart? 

• Do you have a dedicated content department or division? (Since when? What spawned it? How were buy-in and budget secured? )

• If you don’t have one, do you need one? If yes, how will this move forward?

• Which team determines the main messages or story line for products and initiatives? Is it a function of product marketing, corporate marketing, and/or do you collaborate across departments?

• Where does/should content sit in your company’s marketing org chart?

• Do you have a dedicated content staff? How many? Titles? Level of seniority?

• What content are you/your group responsible for creating?

• What target audience(s) or product group(s) does your team’s content serve?

 

Please read the rest of this post on MarketingLand, where it originally published.

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