Ways to Manage Online Content

Content management, broadly defined, covers everything from a legal pad to a library to YouTube — all the many ways of organizing information to make it useful. The rise of computing and the Internet, in particular, have brought forth vast new quantities of information as well as new ways of sharing and managing it.

What are content management systems?

By content management system (CMS), we mean software that enables users to organize, store, search, and retrieve different kinds of information online. The information can exist in varied formats — straight text or hyperlinks, sound files or graphics, videos or flash animations — and the online delivery platforms can include Web pages, blogs, wikis, videos, social media and other online outlets.

Managing a static Web page and a blog or two is pretty easy. But companies today have opportunities to leverage their knowledge much more effectively, and to do so they require more robust systems to create and manage content — continuously, at any time, as the organization changes.

Knowledge lies within

How can a company get great timely content onto its sites? One of the best ways is by tapping the experience and wisdom of employees. A business leverages that human capital when it enables employees to create content and publish it directly.

A well-designed CMS permits virtually anyone to manage online content in ways that once required advanced design and technical skills. This distributed content creation is something new in business, allowing companies to enlist wider layers of employees in developing and publishing information. Some examples:

• After a new product gets the green light, the project manager uses a CMS to publish the news on the company’s Web sites. In a matter of minutes he uploads a press release, screen shots, products sheets and a video, and then updates the company’s pay-per-click ads.

• A company wins a big contract on the eve of a trade show. The marketing director writes an article, posts it to the Web site, and runs down his CMS list. With a few keystrokes he changes an obsolete phone number on one page, adds an address field to another, updates a graphic elsewhere, and even sends the news article out for translation to French and Spanish.

• “Hello, IT? Is there a mistake here?” The east-coast plant manager says he’ll run short of frames if his scheduler follows the online manual. Other plants will be calling tomorrow —  but the programmers rewrite a sentence and post the revision. Notifications and version control flags flow automatically, and production lines keep humming.

• The new-hire admin in HR knows Word but no HTML. On his first day, he uses a CMS to build a Web site for the blood drive — a multipager with graphics and flash, drop-downs and forms, a video from the CEO. And with his knowledge of Word, he gives the site a noticeably professional look.

What these employees have in common is the ability to strengthen their companies’ online impact quickly and directly. Some work internally, others externally, but in each case the content they post draws visitors, directly and through search engines. And these visitors use the content they find to advance the company’s goals.

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