A 3-Part Guide to Content Strategy - Part 1: Publish and Don’t be Damned

We talk a lot about community and community management, blogging and content-sharing, but while the sexy stuff is important, don’t forget the old-fashioned arts of editing and publishing when you’re planning and developing the inhouse parts of your website.

Content management systems normally offer two friendly buttons at the bottom of the page, one marked Preview, the other Publish. Of course, your access rights to those buttons will have been set by the site manager, but if you are using a CMS and can see them, you know that pressing the second of those makes your copy live, putting it online for all to see. You may not have direct access to a further button marked Unpublish, but you probably know you there is one, and you can take down – or update – your copy if absolutely necessary.

In fact, the Publish button can seem less irrevocable than the Send button in an email programme. Remember the embarrassment of heated emails you’ve written and sent without quite checking who’s going to receive it? Once an email has gone, it’s gone, and all you can do is grovel to anyone you’ve upset by your outpourings. With Publish, you can still often change your mind and withdraw.

This means that publishing has become rather easy: today, almost anyone can do it, and it’s not quite permanent. Those may sound like important benefits of the new technology, and mostly they are; but it’s worth asking whether anything is lost as well.

Importing old-world values into your site

In the old days, there were clear distinctions between authors, editors and publishers. We all know what authors do – they write stuff. It may be stuff that comes out of the author’s own head, or it may be stuff written in response to a commission. That’s the way it was in the pre-internet age, when an author wrote but someone else normally published. That’s still mostly the way it happens in the world of print – even if electronic distribution, online bookstores and print-on-demand mean that self-publishing is becoming a bit more common.

But not everyone appreciates what editors and publishers do. You might think that editing is just a matter of running a spell- and grammar-check, and getting passionate about semi-colons. That publishing is just a matter of arranging cosy deals with agents over boozy lunches. Editors and publishers themselves will tell you that both roles involve a lot of subject knowledge and that they are professional intellectuals more than businessmen.

While that’s often true, one thing all editors and publishers have to do, is present their products to the marketplace. Publishers create and build brands (their imprints, titles or even individual authors), and ensure customer engagement and loyalty: what today we call establishing a content strategy. Editors maintain overall quality, secure the relationships with the key suppliers (authors) and project-manage the publications: they deliver the content that the strategy requires.

Those are all vital skills, and they may be skills your contributors may be missing – or performing amateurishly – each time they press the Publish button on your CMS. They are certainly skills you need to pay attention to, as you launch your new site and its community, into the noisy, time-poor world of Web 2.0.

Doing it your way

If you’re not an experienced publisher, how do you plan your site to make sure it really carries the stuff you want and your customers need? How do you make sure that it’s all really doing the job you planned for it? Once the buzz of planning your new Information Architecture has died away, you are left with a mundane – but quite daunting – task of ‘populating’ it with ‘content’ that is ‘fit for purpose’. How exactly? That’s what an old-fashioned publisher did (though probably not in just those terms). You may need to think about importing some of the old skills.

You probably don’t want to go back to the bad old days when every piece of copy (as it was then called) was submitted for painstaking checking, editing and publication. Other processes that allow for dispersed publishing are possible with your CMS. But to get the best results, you must be able to communicate your vision for the site, its objectives, its opportunities, its tone and its language, to each and every inhouse contributor. Each page has to be seen as part of a complex whole.

Think of the site like a symphony, and your inhouse team like an orchestra, which needs a conductor who to decide what to play, and how it should sound. While you’re not going to be (or, I hope, want to be) one of those autocratic maestros of popular myth, you may well need to borrow some of their larger-than-life qualities to get every internal department engaged, and helping you make your site a rounded, top-quality offering to your audience.

Making your site work for you is not just a matter of widgets and retweets; it requires you to get all your internal team actively and appropriately involved.  I’ll explore just how you might do that, and what the related but distinct role of your editor might be, in my next two posts.