Creative Content and Reuse

Over the last few posts, a lot has been said about maximizing Return on Content, going multi-channel, and generally putting your content to use more effectively in front of customers, partners, employees, and constituents.  Keeping content across all those different channels in synch naturally suggests strong content reuse.  But much of this outbound or "customer-centric" content is very creative in nature.  It includes rich media, graphic imagery, highly targeted messages and brand.  Getting the graphic designers and marketing types who generate a lot of this content to buy into reuse can be a challenge.  Given the different form factors involved, for example between Web pages, mobile devices, and printed materials, does it even make sense to strongly reuse content?  But if not, how does an organization ensure consistency?

Like everything with content, the best approach is often a blend of structured with unstructured, control with freedom.  With creative content, the first step is often determining what part of the content needs to be consistent.  Often it's just a few key words or images that need to be consistent, such as those required for brand or message consistency.  In many cases it is the aggregate list or collection of content that must be consistent.  For example, the same top ten articles for your "executive reader" customer segment need to appear in all the channels, but the contents of each article may vary widely once they are opened -- text summary for mobile devices, graphic rich for Web site, full text for news feeds, and so on.  What matters here is that the "top ten" ranking for that target audience is consistent.

Once you have separated out the things that need to be consistently applied, you can then separate those elements out for reuse.  A good content management system (and its underlying content model) should allow you this flexibility to relate and then track where common elements have been used or applied.  For example, the content management system could give an editor complete control over what ten articles are in the "top ten" list - by relating them together into some reusable list.  But then the actual formatting of any related article in that list might depend on someone else more familiar with the destination channel.  The key is that they all stay related together.  If a change is made, if an article is removed from the top ten list for example, it's removed from all the different channels without having to go and manually remove each of them.  Other types of reuse, such as inline reuse, or what Ann Rockley has called "derivative reuse" also are ways to marry creativity with control. We'll explore some of these in future posts.