Keep Your Content Health in Check

Keeping Content Health in Check

Keeping Content Health in CheckOr

Have It Simply Walk To The Light

Housekeeping

• This Session Is Being Recorded• Ask Questions At Anytime• Feel Free To Use The Chat Window• There Will Be A “Brief Look” At A Couple Of Automation Solutions

• Q&A At End Of Session

Tom Aldous SVP of Global Operations— Acrolinx Former Director of TechComm Business

Development and Evangelism— Adobe Systems, Inc.

Former Managing Partner (20 yrs)— Integrated Technologies, Inc.

Frequent speaker at industry conferences worldwide

FrameMaker/XML (including DITA) enthusiast

Single source champion Blog — tmaldous.com Twitter —@tmaldous Let’s LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/tmaldous

Jason KaufmanPresident & Founder, Irrevo

Over 15 years experience helping global enterprises • Implement knowledge programs and Systems• Best practices to reduce support costs• Improve overall customer experience• Drive online support success

Irrevo’s mission is to “optimize support content to enhance customer and user experiences.”

© 2003-2012 Irrevo, All Rights Reserved.© 2003 – 2013 Irrevo, All Rights Reserved.

Keeping Content Health in CheckJuly 24, 2013

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”


• Measuring Content Health

• Determining Content Utility: What is valid and valuable?

• Tracking & Improving Overall Content Health

Keeping Content Health in Check


Content Challenge: Change ManagementChange is the only constant:

• Your team members change: Agents, authors, experts, managers, coaches, trainers, etc.

• Your systems change.

• Your products and services change.

• Your market and customers change.

Possible impacts of change:• Content value, validity, and overall health suffers.

• Practices are not handed off appropriately.

• Guidelines are lost in the shuffle.

• New content is layered on top of old content, without revision.

• Content begins to fail; search relevancy declines.

• Customer satisfaction is impacted.

Perception: The software has failed.

Reality: Your content management program needs attention.


Elements of a Strong Content Management Program• Steering Committee: Form a Steering Committee comprised of stakeholders

across your organization.

• Mission & Principles: Develop and Communicate your Mission Statement and Guiding Principles.

• Guidelines: Identify best practices and guidelines that support the vision for your content, mission statement, and Guiding Principles.

• Roles & Responsibilities: Outline the various roles of teams/individuals who participate in the content management process.

• Checklists: From the guidelines, develop checklists foreach of the roles for them to leverage when doing their part.

• Track & Trend: Track and trend the overall contenthealth and areas for improvement on an ongoing basis.

• Optimize: Formalize plans to ensure communications,training, and coaching is focused on the areas ofgreatest return.

• Ongoing Dialog: Discuss stats regularly as part of yourSteering Committee, refine guidelines, principles,communications, priorities.


Should be defined by your company to fit your unique environment.

Our Definition: Healthy Content is valid, useful, clear, timely, and consistent information that is easily accessible by the intendedaudience via the most intuitive channel(s) possible.

Define these for your organization…• “Validity” • “Clarity” • “Timeliness” • “Consistency”• “Ease of Access”• “Proper Audience”• “Proper Channel(s)”

Defining “Healthy Content”


Facilitate a project to assess a sample of the site content to determine whether the information adheres to your Content Health Guidelines.

This establishes the Article Quality Index (AQI) for your site and helps determine the biggest problem areas that need to be addressed.

Measuring Article Health: Article Quality Index


Facilitate targeted clean-up initiatives to improve content health in the most impactful areas.

• Track your quality index on an ongoing basis.

• Perform peer reviews to keep your team aligned.

• Provide immediate feedback and coaching to contributors so they can learn from their missteps.

Article Health Clean-up: Article Quality Index


Facilitate a project whereby Subject Matter Experts quickly assess each Document (or a sample) to determine whether the information is “Valid” and “Useful”.

Caution: Avoid “Rabbit Holes”

This establishes the Article Utility Index (AUI) for your site and sets the stage for future clean-up tasks.

Measuring Utility: Perform a Utility Baseline


• Archive “Not Valid/Not Useful” Content• Refine “Useful/Not Valid” Content• Refine or Archive “Valid/Not Useful”

Article Utility Clean-up: Acting on Findings


Archival Process/ThresholdBased on your users, content types, usage stats, etc., determine your formula and process for archiving invalid, outdated, low-priority content.

If reporting is available, consider an archival process informed by usage.

Examples might include:

• Items that were created over 3 years ago and not viewed for the last six months.

• Pages/Documents that have been viewed an average of 10 or fewer times per month for the last three months.

• Pages that receive user ratings of 20% or lower for the past three months.

• Items that appear in common searches that are not relevant.

Some people can be afraid of deleting something that is important. Be sure to embrace a culture where it is okay to archive content. Ensure there is a process for searching the archives.


Keep people coming back.

Two main levers

• Make it sticky through increased:

• Awareness

• Participation

• Trust

• Improve utility:

• Create an ongoing Content Management Program (Steering Committee)

• Put checkpoints in place to continually revise, create, and archive content

• Content follows clear guidelines for presentation and meta-tagging

• Enhance and simplify the infrastructure for improved performance

• Ensure tools, such as search, are optimally supported and maintained

• Create and leverage reports to measure success in these critical areas


• Improve content health. • Keep your teams aligned.• Provide real-time feedback to content

contributors.• Apply guiding principles where they

make sense.• Improve customer satisfaction.• Manage checklists.• Manage clean-up projects.


• Content Strategy Consulting• Knowledge Health Checks • Technical Writing and Editing• Content Project Management

We make content beautiful.


Thank You!

Jason [email protected]: @irrevoSkype: Jason_M_Kaufman

Feel free to reach out any time!

Keeping Your Content Health in

CheckWITH ACROLINX

Sampling Of Acrolinx CustomersMedicalSoftware Aerospace

Industrial & Engineering

High Tech

Acrolinx Checking

Style Terminology SEO

GrammarSpelling

Immediate Feedback

Build SkillsReporting and Metrics

How We Help

People-ready

MarketingProduct Dev.

Web Dev. User GuidesTraining

Customer Service

Your Customers

Search-ready Global-ready

People-ready



Customer Service

Your Customers


People-ready



Customer Service

Your Customers


Healthy Content Speaks with One Voice

KEYWORD PLACEMENT

REPORTING AND METRICS

Healthy Content

Contact Information

24

InformationThomas AldousAcrolinxSVP, Global Operations

Blog tmaldous.com Twitter @tmaldousEmail [email protected] Web www.acrolinx.comLinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/tmaldousFacebook As Tom Aldous

Jason Kaufman IrrevoPresident & Founder

Twitter IrrevoEmail [email protected] http://www.irrevo.comLinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmkaufmanTelephone 206-229-1032Skype Jason_M_Kaufman

Up Incoming And Recorded Webinar: http://www.acrolinx.com/webinars_en.html

Keep Your Content Health in Check

Technology

content value

content utility

content challenge

old content

new content

content management process

overall health

mission principles