Ahava Leibtag - The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us. Ralph Waldo Edison

As toddlers, they keep us safe: dont touch the stove. Look both ways before you cross the street. Dessert comes after broccoli.

In school, they keep us orderly: Raise your hand. Get to class on time. No running in the hallways.

And the older we get, the more we have to remember: Pay your bills on time. Use your turn signal. Dont wear white before Memorial Day. Call your mother.

To be honest, I dont spend a whole lot of time thinking about rules, at least not when it comes to my work. As Thomas Edison once said, Hell, there are no rules herewere trying to accomplish something!

And yet, when it comes to content, I think the main problem we face is that we dont have enough rules. Or, in many cases, any at all.

Why? Is it that, like me, we often find them unnecessarily restrictiveas in, These shouldnt apply to me, because I am a unique snowflake? Is it just too hard to fight the battle, so we stay with the status quo? Or is it simply that we dont know where to start?

Over the past ten years, Ive worked with clients of all shapes and sizes, from small startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. But no matter where I go or who I talk to, time and time again, I hear the same woeful complaints:

We have too much content.

We dont have enough content.

Our content is off-brand/inconsistent/out-of-date/inaccurate.

We dont know where all our content is or where its coming from.

Content is being produced in silos.

No one is in charge of the content.

The technology we use/dont use to manage our content doesnt work the way we want it to.

We cant keep up with the [fill in a scary number] digital properties weve launched over the past [fill in a scary number] of years.

This, my friend, is what we call chaos.

Ill tell you what, though. The one that always breaks my heart is when people say:

This is all so very embarrassing.

There is no need to feel embarrassed, dear reader. Visit any website and do a little digging, and you quickly realize that you are not the only one whose content could use some help. And although you may be in caught in a quagmire of content ickiness, its important to understand that most likely, you, personally, havent done anything wrong. You are a simply working for a company that lacks the infrastructure that supports the ongoing creation, delivery, and governance of content people actually care about.

But, really. Why would we expect your companyany companyto have that in place? Thats what a publisher does. You are not a publisher. You are a service or product provider. Thats where your core competencies lie.

Except, of course, the minute you launched a website the minute you put up a Facebook page, or started a video channel, or signed up for Twitter you assumed the mantle of publisher. Youre creating content. Youre curating it. You've started a conversation people expect you to continue for as long as that digital property lives on.

Welcome to your new reality.

Heres something to consider. The more work I do with organizations, the more convinced I become that there is, in fact, a finite set of content problems to be solved. This implies that, perhaps, there are some common solutions that might be shared among anyone who deals with content. Weve been sold on a variety of silver bulletsbuy this expensive CMS! Let your users create all the content!but, frankly, nothing has really, truly addressed one of the core problems that exists within organizations: when it comes to content, people often either dont get it or dont care.

The Digital Crown will go a long way in changing that. By offering seven hard-and-fast rules for delivering valuable content to your core audiences, Ahava has provided you with an extraordinarily valuable framework to build sustainable,