Content governance covers a lot of topics. The general idea is to implement a system, a hierarchy of sorts, to ensure your organization can:
• Satisfy the demands of multiple departments.
• Deliver a wealth of content in a timely manner.
• Keep things on brand.
• Maintain your sanity.
Where to start? Here are three key ways to maintain order and avoid burnout.
Tip #1: Encourage Blanket Participation.
Bill Nye once said, “Every person you meet knows something you don’t.” Everyone in your organization possesses a wealth of knowledge and the potential to provide valuable, relevant content.
Siphon from your team’s pool of experience. Learn what they know. Invite them to share. Reward them for taking the time to tell their stories. Too often, organizations shy away from including influential individuals when it comes to content creation. The reason is usually because these individuals aren’t natural writers. Good! Instead of honing written communication skills, these folks are mastering their craft and developing tried-and-true techniques, which will genuinely help readers solve the challenges they face. Coax them to contribute.
Tip #2: Enlist Someone to Polish.
If your content initiators spend their days doing things other than writing, it’s important to bring in a person (or crew) capable of refining the raw content.
The “Person Who Polishes” should also wield a skillset that involves how to transition a Word doc into strategic online content. Optimize content for SEO. And attract readers through best practices in headline and description writing.
Lastly, this person should be somewhere between an editor and a ghostwriter. This is more than proofreading. It’s about identifying the most important aspects of the raw information and molding it into something that will be relevant to readers, easy to read and on brand.
Tip #3: Establish the Overall Owner.
It’s a privilege to post, or at least it should be. And with great power comes great responsibility. Choose one person in your organization to have the final say in what gets posted. There are a number of benefits to establishing an editor-in-chief. For starters:
- The content owner supreme will likely have established the overall content strategy for your organization, including a content calendar. So the owner will be able to select polished content from “in-the-trenches” experts and disseminate that content when appropriate.
- This person will also be the switchboard who fields numerous requests across departments – appeasing internal audiences without jeopardizing the overall content plan.
- And ultimately, the owner is the final set of eyes. This provides an extra filter to catch any mistakes or inaccuracies. As authors, our brains naturally fill in gaps – and not just in terms of spelling and grammar. The importance of someone who understands content and can review posts from a fresh perspective cannot be overstated.
Once your content calendar is in place, follow these three steps. Solicit experts across your organization to provide raw information on the topics you need. Utilize the skills of a seasoned writer to improve that core content. Send polished content “up the ladder” to a single person who will publish that information online.
It’s easier said than done. But it’s much easier to manage than the alternative. Happy writing!
