Content the "Elephant in the Room"

The content management community is filled with various "debates" about how to manage content.  For example, Tony Byrne of CMS Watch had this very interesting post about use of tags and categorization vs. raw full text searching.  It's a great debate and my first reaction was to dive right in.  I was going to blog about our experiences with content structure and what users will and won't realistically do.  But before I got to my blog, I was interrupted with a different yet increasingly common problem - not the structure of content, how it was stored, how hard it was to find and retrieve, or whether it was targeting me correctly.  My problem?  The content itself.

Somewhere along the line we've all just assumed that today content is like "truth" in the X-Files - "its out there."  All we had to do was find it, expose it, target it, make it relevant, or even, reign it in.  Stats are constantly tossed around showing how much time workers spend trying to find a document or article, or how much time content is re-created needlessly, or how deluged we all are in content, usually our inboxes.  The conventional wisdom says "its the information age, of course the content exists."  If you can't find it, it's buried somewhere and just needs to be "managed" better.

To that I say, do you ever use the internet?  I mean, for something you REALLY care about?  Not work related content either, because we get paid for that and have a higher tolerance.  Think to those leisure pursuits, where you have little patience and lots of passion.  Do you pretty much get the level of information you want when you go to site these days?  I almost never do.

My passion happens to be the sport of football (the American variety). Last week, I happened to be recuperating at home, and being a bit tired I decided to explore my passion first rather than blog about work.  Over on the NFL.com site, there was a pretty interesting video review of a play involving a fairly obscure rule of the game. They had a full video breakdown of it, great use of media and so on.  But of course, that got me thinking about all sorts of other plays like it, and the rules about those.  I searched, and eventually, found a whole section on rules on the site.  They probably could have made that search easier (search vs. tags even?)  But that wasn't really the problem.  The problem was that the rules content just wasn't there except as a digest.  Really, it was a section of rules for those new the game, not obsessed types like me who were lost in thought over this new video.  There simply was nothing with the kind of detail I wanted to find.  Sure, I found a place where I could buy the rule book (at least from 2005) but I doubt the NFL is posting a rules digest purely so as not to undercut the lucrative market in Official Rules book sales. And I wasn't about to actually spend money on it anyway.  So what did I do? I left. Visit over.

The point of the story is, the content wasn't buried, it wasn't sorted wrong, it wasn't that the NFL was treating me poorly (it remembered fully well which is my favorite team).  It was simply that, for some reason, they hadn't posted the actual content that I wanted.  Was it too expensive to get it out there?  Too difficult to keep it updated?  Or just ignored?  I don't know.

Content is often the proverbial "elephant in the room."  We're so close to it, we don't see it as the problem.  We just assume that it's there and all we need to do is dress it up with tags or search, add dynamic presentation modes or better manage "the chaos of it all."  But at the end of the day, the people visiting your site are like patrons at a restaurant.  Sure, the service and decor matter, but it's the food - your content - that keeps them coming back.