Web Content Management

Foreword

The web content management industry has evolved substantially over the past two decades. Today, CMS vendors and industry pundits put overarching emphasis on “customer experience management,” the idea that successful customer interactions should drive all your digital investments. This is a useful prioritization, inasmuch as we should all be thinking “screen first” (i.e., how do customers experience our digital incarnations?) After all, why produce digital content unless people actually want to consume it?

But this emphasis on experience management sometimes relegates the process of producing and publishing high-quality information to the backseat. We can all understand why marketers pay more attention to frontend design, mobile strategies, and social micromessaging, but in doing so they risk losing focus on deeper forms of information-based engagement.

Consider the nearly ubiquitous desire to create more personalized digital interactions. Many personalization strategies start with the premise, “assume suitable content for each interaction.” This begs many questions. Suitable content from where? How will it be managed? How will it get chunked? How will we vary it for each and every audience? How will it get assembled? How will we simulate all the permutations? Behind those questions lie some thorny content management challenges.

On the brighter side, the last few years have seen the rise of “content strategy” as an important digital discipline. What exactly people mean ...