Editor’s note: Jack’s article “Is Social Networking for You?” appeared in the June 2010 issue of Intercom.
By Jack Molisani | Fellow
In my first article on social media, I mentioned that your customers are going to talk about your products and your company, so why not give them a forum to monitor what they say and respond to customer concerns? And since your customers are going to talk about you, give them a positive experience to talk about.
In an effort to practice what I preach, I recently looked at how I could engage my customers. What topic could I ask my audience (past and future LavaCon attendees) about that was germane to them and beneficial to me? In short: content development.
The Campaign
I began a social media campaign with two objectives: Give my audience something to talk about, then listen to their answers and respond accordingly.
One of the challenges of being a conference planner is predicting what trends and topics will be hot six months to a year from now. Since I believe the industry will continue to move toward user-optimized content, I decided to use the content management lifecycle (CML) as the standard against which I’d judge speaker proposals. That is, if a session or workshop applies to some stage of the content management lifecycle, I’ll include it in the program. (This also helps to assure that each session in the program applies directly to each attendee’s day-to-day job.)
So I created a draft CML diagram and asked my audience for their input. One of the responses I received was from Scott Abel, who tactfully pointed out that both CM Pros and Metatorial Services, Inc. had already developed content management lifecycle posters (see figures at right and below). Why reinvent the wheel? See www.cmprofessionals.org/_data/global/images/CM%20Lifecycle%20Poster%20ECMplaza%20061012.pdf and http://metatorial.com/pagea.asp?id=poster.
So I studied both models. I liked the CM Pros poster, but the diagram was not what I needed to vet speaker proposals. For example, testing after translation isn’t represented, and they use “Manage” as a phase in the lifecycle, where I believe management applies to all phases of the lifecycle. The Metatorial poster, on the other hand, was just way too complicated for my needs.
So I rephrased my question and went back to my audience for feedback:
Given my draft diagram and the two other CML diagrams, what is the best way to represent the content development lifecycle for the purpose of ensuring that all sessions and workshops at the conference directly relate to some phase of real-world content development?
I wanted feedback, and boy, did I get feedback (see http://lavacon.org/program-history)! Not only did my audience offer valid comments on the diagram itself, but many people took the time to describe the challenges they were facing in their day-to-day jobs and asked for sessions on those issues as well. It was valuable feedback, indeed!
Listen to Your Customers
At this point, I had achieved the first of my objectives: Give my audience something to talk about. Now I had to accomplish the second objective, read what they had to say and roll the changes into the diagram.
On first blush I thought I would just add a step here, move a step there, etc. I discovered it wasn’t that easy.
First, I noticed that each of the CML diagrams in question (including mine) assumed that there is already a content management system (CMS) in place in which authors can develop content. This was clearly an assumption, since many of the comments and questions I received were about how to choose a CMS vendor or manage a CMS implementation.
By listening to my customers, I uncovered that the diagram had to address a platform acquisition phase in addition to the content development phase:
But using two adjoining lifecycle circles didn’t seem right as one does not does not continually go shopping for CMSs as an ongoing action. Instead, the platform acquisition phase creates an environment under which content development can occur:
But then I thought that the platform phase, while cyclical (plan, develop, maintain) has to start somewhere, so I thought a “track and field” track would best represent the lifecycle given there was a place to start on the diagram:
Let’s recap: So far we’ve discovered that there must be a platform development lifecycle (PDL) that precedes and establishes a content management system (CMS). The PDL is done mostly as one large acquisition, but it does repeat as modifications to the CMS are needed. So far our diagram is mirroring reality.
Content In, Content Out
There is an old acronym in the software engineering industry called GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out), meaning if you put poor quality data into a system, you are going to get poor quality data or results out of the system.
I was reminded of this at work one day while attempting to do a build/publish of a Flare help system where I used the wrong “conditional text” output settings and got completely different results from what I was expecting.
Suddenly, I realized there was a huge missing step on my draft content management lifecycle. While how to create content was clearly represented on my (and the other) CML diagrams, none of the diagrams addressed how to get the content out of the CMS once it was authored! And if it didn’t represent how to get content out of the CMS, it certainly didn’t address how to optimize the content for individual users (specific languages, publishing platforms, etc.). So a third section was needed in the diagram, one to address the process by which one builds/publishes the content that is then, in turn, consumed by the reader:
Complexity Grows Exponentially
Breaking the new CML diagram into three sections did make rolling feedback into the original diagram easier. However, I soon ran into another problem that for the life of me I couldn’t (at first) figure out: How to roll all the mini-lifecycles that occur within the overall content development lifecycle into the diagram without making the diagram so complex as to be unusable.
For example, there are three discrete phases of the content development lifecycle:
- Planning
- Development
- Deployment
But each of these phases has a lifecycle of its own, which also need to be added to the diagram if I want my speakers to identify which part of the CML their proposed sessions address:
- Planning
- Identify content needs
- Identify access points
- Create documentation plan
- Create test plan
- Create deployment plan
- Create plan for soliciting user feedback
- Content development
- Research
- Author
- Edit
- Test
- Localize
- Manage
- Deploy
- Build
- Publish
- Announce (that the doc is available)
- Solicit feedback
- Analyze feedback
- Incorporate changes
There didn’t seem to be a way to break each lifecycle in the diagram into sub-lifecycles without completely ruining the usability of the diagram, but I needed that level of detail in order to vet speaker proposals. I also had to decide at which point to stop “drilling down” into levels of detail, as there are steps in the lifecycle (such as “Author” and “Localize”) that have their own complete discrete lifecycles. And trying to create a usable diagram that shows a lifecycle inside a lifecycle inside yet another lifecycle made the level of complexity grow exponentially and I soon reached a point that made my brain hurt trying to conceptualize it.
The 3D Breakthrough
I kept mulling over how to present the level of detail I wanted and still keep the diagram usable. Finally, while thinking about how the “track and field” track sits on top of the content development circle, it occurred to me: I was right: there is no way to present the level of detail I needed … in two dimensions. Instead, a 3D diagram would enable the reader to zoom into the model, rotate various lifecycles, and then drill into the more detailed sub-lifecycles. So I started defining the layers and various steps in a 3D diagram, first modeling the content development phase as a data repository that had multiple sub-phases:
Next, I realized that rather that having the steps of the repository “float” in space, using a real-world object on which to anchor the steps would help depict the relationships between the various lifecycles and sub- lifecycles. The object would have to represent a repository of content and a way to output the content. I decided a coffee pot would be an apt model, as it shows raw materials going in, a process by which the input is converted to the final product, and an output channel by which one delivers the content (literally!):
And for the Platform and Tool Development phase? The handle of the coffee pot:
For strategic planning and project management? A steady and controlling hand. The consumption phase? User-optimized output (see next page):
Finally, one could drill down into the content development phase, which in turn divides into Plan, Develop, and Deploy, with each of those sub-phases having its own lifecycle:
3D Rendering
I sent the above specifications to a programmer to render the CAD drawing, dropped the .U3D file into a FrameMaker 10 document, and then saved it as PDF so it could be viewed online. The result is shown in the next column.
Lessons Learned
When I started this project, I never dreamed I would end up creating a 3D diagram on which to model the content management lifecycle. However, that’s one of the exciting aspects of our industry—it is constantly changing and you never know where it will take you.
In their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras state that the truly successful companies they studied all had one thing in common: they respond to market changes while staying true to their core values. The journey into social media should be no different for you or your company. I responded to market changes by asking my customers what they wanted and changing where I could.
Is there a customer problem you can find via social media and fix? Do your customers want user-optimized content when they wanted, where they want it, and in the format they want it? How can you know unless you ask?
Jack Molisani is the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing (www.ProspringStaffing.com), the executive director of The LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies (www.lavacon.org), and an STC Fellow. You can view and comment on the 3D model of the Content Management Lifecycle at http://lavacon.org/program.
