I’m a huge fan of structured content. However, I sometimes worry that structured content is my hammer and therefore all content problems look like nails.
To test this idea, I used the following definition of structured content: Content, whether in a textual, visual, or playable format, that conforms to structural and semantic rules that allow machine processing to meet specific business requirements. (source: The Language of Content Strategy, XML Press, 2014).
I divided the world of content into two categories: Enterprise Content and Everything Else. I then tried to identify types of content problems that cannot be solved by the principles, processes, or tools of structured content.
READ MORE: Writing for structured content in pharma – what you need to know
Enterprise Content
Enterprise content includes everything your company writes, draws, records, and produces. It ranges from learning materials and technical documentation to marketing, advertising, and customer support. It includes internal communications, such as the corporate wiki and standard operating procedures. In industries such as video games, online courseware, or health care publishing, enterprise content doesn’t just support the product. It is the product.
The most common challenge with enterprise content is scale. Here are some signs that your enterprise content ecosystem is not scaling up to meet business needs:
- Content is created and stored all over the place
- Content is redundant, hard to find, and difficult or impossible to reuse
- Review cycles occur by emailing documents
- Authors make the same updates to multiple instances of the same content
- Publishing requires manual layout, formatting, or post-production cleanup
Enterprises are under tremendous pressure to grow. To stay competitive, they add products regularly. They adjust their services as their customer base evolves or new technology becomes unavoidable. They update policies to stay compliant with regulations. If they go global, they adapt again, to ensure they meet regional requirements and expectations.
Content operations must be able to scale right alongside business growth. Structured content was designed to enable content to scale. Content reuse is one of the main reasons an enterprise moves to structure. It’s also one of the key metrics we use to measure the ROI of the structured content ecosystem. Without content reuse, you have content redundancy – the bane of humans and AI alike.
READ MORE: 7 ways to write for effective content reuse
Everything Else
Many content professionals have creative aspirations. They might be musicians, painters, photographers, filmmakers, poets, songwriters, authors, or creative nonfiction writers. They don’t produce enterprise content outside of their day jobs. They are not under the same level of pressure to scale as a corporation.
Still, to sell creative works, the artist must make it possible for customers to find the work. Artists can use various platforms for the commercial side of things, from CD Baby to Medium to Vimeo. These platforms often include:
- A way for artists to upload samples or provide content about their work
- A common taxonomy and metadata tags to help identify the artist and their work
- Marketing and advertising tools that help artists reuse their content in social media posts and ads
- Search and personalization algorithms that deliver the artist’s content to customers based on customer preferences and behavior
For customers to find the artist, the artist’s “meta” content — description, photographs, videos, recordings, metadata tags, etc. — must follow the structures inherent to the platform. They must be consistent and accurate.
In other words, structured content may not be necessary for producing independent creative work. But the principles of structured content underlie the business content of any creator attempting to sell their work online.
Structured Content Is a Toolbox
My conclusion is that not every content problem is a nail — sometimes, it’s a screw. And structured content is the solution for that too. Structured content is not a hammer. For enterprise content, it’s the entire toolbox.
Now more than ever, an enterprise needs the economies of scale that come from a well-planned, well-implemented structured content ecosystem. There is no other way to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time on the right channel in the language of their choice.
Today’s structured content toolboxes — including the principles, workflows, and systems that make up a successful structured content ecosystem — are mature enough to support just about everything an enterprise needs its content to do.
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This post was updated by the author 8/3/24.
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