October 28, 2002 New Thinking:
Treat your content as an asset

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• Content can help you make the sale.
• Content can support the delivery of after-sales service.
• Content can enhance your brand by getting your message out.
• Content can improve staff productivity by allowing people to quickly access necessary information.
• Content can improve staff morale by keeping people more informed.
• Content can reduce costs by creating self-service processes.

Many managers see content as a cost because before the Web that's what much content was. In the traditional organization, value was created by making a product, and by getting out and selling it. That was 'real' work. Content, on the other hand, was an overhead.

Sales people hated writing up sales reports. Consultants hated writing up reports on projects. Programmers just wanted to program and hated describing their programs. Managers rarely allocated sufficient time for their staff to do such writing. You weren't seen as productive unless you were on a job.

Again and again, I come across organizations who fail to recognize content as an asset. They have public websites out of a herd instinct. Their intranets get little support and less funding. Inevitably, these web projects don't deliver much value.

A senior manager in a very large consultancy boasted to me about how little money he was spending on his public website. His intranet was a total disaster and he had no intention of doing anything about it. This was despite the fact that his staff were telling him that they weren't getting important information quickly enough.

Again and again, I come across managers like this. Managers who refuse to even entertain the idea of paying or otherwise rewarding their staff for creating quality content. Managers who port print content to the Web, knowing that it won't be read; and basically not caring whether it is read or not.

Then, there are managers who do 'get it.' They recognize that quality content can make them more productive, more competitive and more profitable. These managers know that content is a major asset and they are frustrated that they are not getting the funding and support to put this asset to work.

Recently, I asked a roomful of 40 such managers if they had ways to measure the value their content creates. I said to ignore such basic measures as page views or website visitors. I wanted to know if they could put a financial figure on how much value their website was delivering to the organization. I asked for a show of hands.

One person raised their hand.

How can you convince a skeptical organization that content has value if you can't show that value? Over the coming issues, I'll present some ways of establishing a value model for your content.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Measuring the value of your content
Previous issue: Your website needs a subscription strategy

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