LavaCon 2012: Content Strategy and Content Management Track
Presenter: Noz Urbina, Mekon Ltd
Noz Urbina advocates a strong link between innovation and great experience throughout the customer lifecycle via content management. His Lavacon 2012 session focused on providing specific audiences the customer experience they want by mapping deliverables to the customer lifecycle. This makes it easier to show how the deliverables impact the customer experience because content is both cyclical and evolutionary, not linear. Noz cautioned that there is no one size fits all solution, suggesting that companies should consider implementing three management systems:
- WCMS (Web Component Management System): web pages, medical files, downloadable docs
- CCMS (Component Content Management System): Source Materials (building blocks and media ready for reuse in any document/format/output)
- DMS (Document Management System): Whole formatted documents (library)
All three systems provide metadata, search, versioning, and user account management. Consistent tagging in all three systems fosters ease of use.
Embedded User Assistance and the Customer Lifecycle
Embedded user assistance goes by many names, Noz referred to four during his presentation:
- eUA
- EmHelp
- UAP
- mini-help
Noz defined embedded user assistance as being designed as an integral part of the application, but owned by authors. A software application has limited real estate and the customer wants to be able to consume it at a glance. Noz demonstrated the embedded user assistance with an example of Ableton Live – he opened the program and showed how the help provides the video lesson, and loads the files necessary for the user to proceed with the video lesson.
Two key features of aligning embedded user assistance with the customer lifecyle concern the user context and proactivity. He emphasized that embedded user assistance doesn’t break the user context and is proactive in giving help by not waiting for the user to be frustrated. The speed of embedded user assistance allows the user to continue to do their job almost immediately. eUA also provides measurements (analytics) for the writer.
The biggest reason that companies don’t do embedded user assistance is because business remains in a silo. Noz gave a five-step plan for how to provide embedded user assistance:
- Map the customer journey
- Map the content model and assets to the journey
- Gap analysis
- Build a modular model to address gaps
- Build cross-silo strategy to fill the gaps
Curation-ready content must be defined and sold differently for audiences. Make sure you do your research and provide the content strategy as driven by the corporate strategy and formal user/task analysis. Provide a visual diagram to management that maps content to the development life cycle.
Noz detailed a case study on Elekta, a medical devices manufacturer, that is in the new 2nd edition of Ann Rockley’s Managing Enterprise Content.
Slideshare link: http://www.slideshare.net/nozurbina/2012-10-lava-conintegratingwiththecustomerlifecycledisti
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