Do you still think content is king? How you can shoot yourself in the marketing foot with decoupled content.

The subliminal debate about decoupled content or form-free content is never-ending. What an effort we have all made in the CMS industry in recent years to teach customers to think in terms of structures rather than views. We have preached reusability, channel independence and versatility. This was a thoroughly noble endeavor. But has it reached the customers and the broad masses of content editors? Unfortunately not. In the end, it’s all about how content is packaged. And that has a concept, because it is not “content” that is king, but “context”.

(Reading time 5 minutes)

Academized debate vs. actual doing

I often find that content editors and authors get into somewhat academic discussions when it comes to decoupled content. There is sometimes a slightly euphoric, visionary mood. We all know the basic concept and we think, as do I, that it is conceptually the right one. However, what is discussed and said differs considerably from what is actually implemented on a daily basis. There is a lot of production for views.

Because the same content, especially if it is text, does not work equally well 1:1 in all channels. It is the context in which it is used that is decisive for the (qualitative) success of a piece of content.

Delivery to various channels – old hat

I can speak for many CMSs when I say that delivering content to different channels is usually not that difficult or is available “by design”. I can say this for TYPO3 in particular: I have been involved in dozens of projects in which content was stored centrally and then output to various channels on other systems. We have been doing this with TYPO3, and others with other systems, for over 10 years.

Context – an example

Take, for example, my short article from yesterday about dealing with developers. Although it is aimed at “business people”, it was written with the target group “developers” in mind. The success of the article was ok – especially because quite a lot of developers read along on T3N.

In order to get this article to work similarly well on LinkedIn, for example, where there are far more “business people”, I would have to rewrite it in essential parts. Not that I would have to change the core content and core statements. No, I would just have to adapt it to the context of the platform on which I am publishing it. And therein lies the crux of the matter. The adapted text with the same content works better. It’s usually about little things, such as the fact that I would rather use the first name on LinkedIn.

Environmental context and temporal context

What also has an impact is the time component. When we publish content, we therefore have to think carefully about when the content makes the most sense for our users. And so different channels have different good times. It is also important to refer to current events. We all know the classic example when a tragic event makes a piece of advertising seem macabre. Without the reference to the tragic event, we would actually find this content funny.

Slightly modified content for different channels

And that is what “context” does to the content: it changes the perception, the experience of the content. The customer experience. So if we really want to take care of the customer or user experience, we have to think about the context of the content. And we can only conclude that we need to produce slightly modified content.

It would be more important to be able to manage content core and characteristics

Now, the handling of this type of content is only implemented to a very limited extent in the market-leading content management systems. And dear customers, don’t be fooled. Just because a few vendors are keen to get rid of the label “CMS” and are creating new, euphonious names for their “platforms” in the direction of “experience” does not mean that they can act in context. Au contraire!

“Context Management System”, baby!

So what we need is a content system that can manage this context better. That automatically creates suggestions for different context situations. But before we create a monster product in our minds, it would actually be enough to implement proper tagging/categorization and give the content editor a workflow that works. Even that is not so easy.

Micro-content agencies as a role model

I think micro-content agencies are leading the way in terms of context. They can’t help but deal with it intensively. Unfortunately, there are none in Europe that really do this on a large scale (yes, it’s a nice gap in the market) – in the US there are already one or two. Gary Vaynerchuck (yes, the wine guy) is well known for his start-up Vaynermedia, which focuses precisely on this type of content. You may not think much of Gary Vaynerchuck for various reasons, but in a talk last year he really got to the heart of the matter in terms of context. I think the video is a must-watch for anyone working in content today. Even if the language is really at the lowest level and he gets bogged down in different areas…