As new technologies expand omni-channel publishing requirements and companies extend the global reach of their products, services, and content marketing, the role of editor becomes both more critical and more strategic. Effective editorial, governance, and change management processes directly impact a company’s bottom line.
An estimated 70% of the buying decision is based on reviewing the product documentation (Riley and Ames, 2013; https://www.stc.org/intercom/2013/05/telling-the-right-story-proving-the-business-value-of-content/) . This means that public-facing content must not only be well-written and well-edited, it also must be both useful and usable. At the same time, structured authoring and component-based content management systems (CCMSes) make ensuring effectiveness and consistency more imperative and more challenging. The editing team must grow beyond examining the content as individual projects toward taking a more strategic and holistic approach to the entire content ecosystem.
There are five areas where editors influence the quality and success of the content in a structured environment:
- Content Strategy and Architecture
- Content Model, Structure, and Re-use
- Governance, Style Guides, and Controlled Language Initiatives
- Content Audits and Measuring Quality
- Author Management and Training
Content Strategy and Architecture
Because editors often work across project teams and product lines, you often have a deeper and broader view of the content than most of the content team. When moving to a CCMS and structured authoring environment, you can be a valuable resource to the Content Strategist and Content Architect by identifying these content areas to prepare for content migration and implementation:
- Opportunities for re-use
- Expired content
- Logical structures
- Existing and planned output formats and channels
- Operations and process issues
- Consistency and quality
These data are invaluable for establishing a baseline and for determining how to effectively create content relationships and structure. Implementing a CCMS is an opportunity to clean up the strategy, processes, and structure, while improving the quality and efficiency. In addition, most CCMSes have workflows, reviews, versioning, and other tasks built in. You have the opportunity to ensure policy and style guide enforcement, while setting the content creators up for success. One of your goals should be to make it easy to do the right thing in the CCMS and difficult to do the wrong thing.
Content and Semantic Models, Structure, and Re-use
When implementing a CCMS, the models and structure, as well as the re-use strategy, enforce the organizational and developmental edits previously done manually, and provide a framework for authors to create more robust and effective content. In a CCMS, these models and structures require maintenance and periodic review to ensure that they meet the needs of the audience. In some cases, the editor becomes the Content Architect or Content Manager.
In addition, the semantic model (metadata, keywords, taxonomy, etc.) becomes more important because you want to make it easy to find and re-use existing content, as well as improving the overall authoring and customer experiences.
Governance, Style Guides, and Controlled Language Initiatives
When you have a team of multiple authors contributing content components that later get compiled into a larger whole, it becomes critical to have strong governance, so that all the content has one voice and is consistent, and gets archived properly when the content expires. Controlled language initiatives, style guides, and support tools, such as HyperSTE™ or Acrolinx™, can help authors improve consistency at a copyedit level, and templates help enforce the content model and structure. However, an editorial board needs to make the decisions about configuring the tools, determine what vocabulary should be included, and review requests for changes to governance.
These decisions should be made at least at the product-line level, but preferably at the business unit or higher level so that the customer experience is consistent regardless of the customer’s entry point. Localization teams also need to be involved in the implementation and maintenance to ensure consistent translations for preferred terms. The editorial board needs to look strategically at the content’s global readiness when making decisions. Remember, governance is intended to facilitate work by improving efficiency and consistency; it should not get in the way of get in the way of getting work done.
Content Audits and Measuring Quality
It is inevitable when many people are working in a system that issues begin to arise over time as volume increases, legacy content is re-purposed, and so on. The editor can alleviate this challenge by conducting periodic content audits and developing appropriate quality metrics and KPIs for the team. Reviewing the data and conducting periodic audits helps reduce any divergence from the quality standards, and provides insight into what training the team needs.
Author Management and Training
In a CCMS environment, authors create content components that then get compiled into larger deliverables. These authors are often subject matter experts, not professional writers. Tools such as HyperSTE and Acrolinx, can enforce style guide rules, grammar, and copyediting issues, and templates can enforce structure. These tools allow editors to focus on the more important editorial decisions, such as the development and organization of deliverables, decisions about governance, and perhaps most importantly, working with authors to improve their skills.
Conclusion
In a structured CCMS environment, editors have the opportunity to grow beyond focusing on one project or deliverable at a time to guiding the strategy, structure, and governance of the entire content ecosystem. To do so requires applying existing skills in organizational and developmental editing in new ways, and managing the tools that support copyediting the content.