Content Management Organisation

Next ses­sion: How to ensure that con­tent is man­aged con­tin­u­ally.

How to lay out the man­age­ment struc­ture, what to present to con­tent edi­tors, con­tent cre­ators etc.

Not a hi-tech sub­ject. Which is inter­est­ing. CMS suc­cess rarely has to do with the sys­tem you’re using. Fail­ure might have, but at its core, con­tent man­age­ment is a prac­tice (as Byrne noted) — and that process should be managed.

Stan­dards for con­tent cre­ation. Don’t let it slide. Com­mon sense. What’s inter­est­ing is how CMS ven­dors can facil­i­tate best prac­tises. Con­text sen­si­tive help/link to guides? Dif­fer­ent imple­men­ta­tion processes, div­ing more into usabil­ity, writ­ing, ‘whole process’? Defi­nately worth a think.

Les­son: “The sys­tem will never do any­thing for you”

Advice: Set peo­ple up in con­fer­ence calls, meet­ings what­ever. Let them brag, get the com­pe­ti­tion and shar­ing of knowl­edge going. Can’t help to think about Flickr. It’s tan­gi­ble, play­ful, net­worked. What if con­tent edi­tors felt the same way about a site they man­age that they feel about keep­ing the inter­ac­tion and feed­back flow­ing on Flickr?

Aside: This (small) ses­sion has more women than men. And the men blog or rep­re­sent a ven­dor. Go figure.

Sec­ond in set:

Case study: DSB, Jenny Anneberg Ole­sen.

Web­site pur­pose (Dan­ish peo­ple, now you know): Ticket sale, prod­uct infor­ma­tion, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, press.

The usual big cor­po­ra­tion defend­ing: “We made lots of com­pro­mises, every­one wants to go on the front­page, the design i five years old but got imple­mented last year etc.” Not directly CMS-related, but it’s a shame to see all the big guys doing it — in some respects — the wrong way. At least, stop apol­o­giz­ing. If that’s how it will be fine. If not, fix it — and open up; let us know you’re work­ing on it.

On centralization/decentralization:

Only few peo­ple can add images etc. Super users have power. Pro-decentralization: Encour­age users by giv­ing them respon­si­bil­ity. For those of us not forced to work in larger organ­i­sa­tions, this is obvi­ous. Funny, how more peo­ple usu­ally means more hand­hold­ing… Inter­est­ingly, DSB doesn’t really use work­flow, rather they email back and forth from the cen­tral con­tent man­agers to the con­tent cre­ators in need of images, graph­ics etc.

Final advice: Build a strong organ­i­sa­tion around your CMS. Have sup­port at hand.

The case unfor­tu­nately turned out quite light. No real insights…