Future-Friendly Content
As brands scramble to adapt to each new device and platform – watches, refrigerators, Snapchat – countless hours are spent rewriting and redesigning content to meet new requirements and realities. In addition to the money spent adapting content, each new database has to be managed for consistency and accuracy, creating new brand governance challenges and pitfalls.
So how do you avoid the cost of creating and managing content for the growing universe of channels? Future-friendly content!
1. Be Device and Channel Agnostic
Future-friendly content isn’t created for a specific device, channel app or website. It’s created under the assumption that it’ll be reused, remixed and repurposed for any platform – even those that haven’t been created yet. This can be as simple as creating three different versions of a product description (short, medium and long) to be used as needed.
2. Structure Semantically
Future-friendly content isn’t organized into ‘web pages.’ It’s broken up into component parts (e.g. author, publish date, teaser description, hero image, etc.) and stored as separate entities in an intelligent content management system. It’s semantically labeled so it can be read and interpreted by both humans and machines.
3. Separate from Presentation
Future-friendly content isn’t created in a WYSIWYG editor (Google it, Millennials). It doesn’t live in a static webpage wrapped in inline styling. To be truly ‘free,’ your content needs to live independently of design and user interface elements. When content lives as independent data, instead of embedded as ‘pages,’ you have flexibility to design content experiences for different users in different contexts without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
4. Free Your Content
It’s time to merge content for your mobile site, app, and website. With media queries and cloudbased ‘headless’ content management systems, you don’t need to waste time managing multiple content databases. Since it isn’t linked to a specific design or platform, the same data can be used to populate multiple interfaces.
