YOUR CONTENT isn’t going to take care of itself.

Multi-channel publishing will expose the cracks and fault lines in your organization. A publishing workflow that’s adequate for your desktop site (at least, most of the time) will start to crack and crumble when you begin publishing adaptive content to other channels.

You know what? That’s terrific. As with so many other aspects of content strategy outlined in this book, mobile can be a catalyst to make your entire publishing process more efficient and more effective. By forcing you to focus on how you’re going to get your content on mobile, you can make sure that all your content has clear ownership, is reviewed regularly, and is doing what it’s supposed to for your readers and your business.

If you want to deliver great content, on whichever device or platform your customer wants to consume it, then you’re going to need to clean house within your organization first. Here’s what needs to change:

• People: defining leadership principles and clarifying people’s roles and responsibilities has way more influence on your content’s success than the technology you use for your CMS, or whether you deliver it via a mobile website or native app. Content touches every corner of your organization—mobile can force you to define who does what.
• Process: you’ll need new metrics and measurement processes to evaluate whether your content is doing its job. Your review and approval processes will also need to change now that you’re publishing your content to different platforms and devices. Don’t wait until you’re ready to launch a new mobile website or iPad app to define how those processes will work.

PEOPLE

Publishing to mobile means new tasks. New decisions to be accountable for. New problems to worry about.

Defining who does what, when, and why is the most important thing you can do to ensure your content delivers on every platform.

Leadership

Remember the bad old days of the web, when everyone’s homepage and main navigation bar reflected the turf battles going on within the company? Your website structure shouldn’t map to your org chart—it should map to how users think about their tasks and goals.

That goes double for mobile. Your users don’t think they’ll get different content or functionality from you just because they’re using a mobile device. So don’t build that distinction into your org chart.

All change requires leadership from people who are aligned on the what, why, and how. Your leaders should be able to:

• Evangelize and promote why mobile is important to executives and business owners.
• Conduct research and analyze data about how your customers use mobile—today, and in the future.
• Assemble cross-functional teams to tackle problems in mobile content delivery.
• Assign budget for investing in new mobile initiatives.
• Break through inter-departmental conflicts in terms of who “gets credit” for mobile success or failure.

Organizational structure

While the org chart is not destiny, setting up silos within your company is a risk. When planning for how to staff and deliver your mobile initiatives, you should guard against giving people incentives to think of mobile as a totally separate experience.

Your customer doesn’t expect your company to be different just because they visit you on a device with a smaller screen. They know you’re supposed to be all one company. So don’t build conflict between mobile and your other digital channels into your org chart. Instead, figure out how to encourage your teams to create a great experience for your customer—regardless of channel, platform, or device.

Make sure there are clear lines of responsibility and reporting relationships between the mobile team and the people responsible for the desktop web. Give your team incentives to think holistically about the experience.

Don’t tell your team to get a mobile site or app up quickly, without a plan for how to manage and maintain its content over time. If you do that, you run the risk of forking your content and creating an experience that’s distinct from the desktop, with no plan for how you’re going to keep it going.

Roles and responsibilities

Who is responsible for content in your organization? Truth be told, it’s lots of different people. Representatives from “the business,” IT, user experience, brand and marketing, legal, HR, PR, and communications all contribute to content on the web.

Does adding in mobile mean a whole new set of people, roles, permissions, and responsibilities? Hopefully not. Instead, your goal should be to educate and empower everyone in your organization who’s currently contributing content to understand and deliver great content for mobile.

If your organization is like most others, “everyone in your organization who’s currently contributing content” might be many people—even more than you expect. As with so many other examples in this book, mobile forces you to track these people down and have those conversations. If you have product owners who describe the features and benefits of their product, marketers who ask for landing pages to support their latest campaign, or social media managers who promote your company on Facebook or Twitter, then you need to align all these content creators around what you’re doing on mobile. After all—if everyone is working together, everyone’s job is easier.

Defining roles and responsibilities around mobile may require you to look at some or all of the following:

Content package creation

If you’re planning to develop new content structures so you have more flexibility in mobile, someone needs to create them. What works for many companies is to have business content owners contribute product or marketing content as they always have—often, this is an offline process managed via Word documents, PDFs, and email. Then a dedicated editor or content strategist goes in to write new headlines, summaries, and navigation text. Mobile makes it even more critical to have an editor with a birds-eye view go over all the content systematically. In some organizations, a separate content producer is responsible for entering the content into the CMS.

Taxonomy and metadata

You need someone in your organization to maintain and review the taxonomy, tags, and other metadata used to power the site. Any changes you make can have a ripple effect across platforms, and so someone needs to understand the entire puzzle. Many organizations find that having one person to oversee the entire taxonomy and metadata means that content becomes easier to search and browse.

Media production

If you will need additional crop sizes for photos and graphics, that may be a large undertaking. Your organization will most likely need to define a project to do that, and task your creative services team (or freelancers) with getting it done.

Same goes for other media types, like Flash data visualizations or videos—someone within your team must develop fallbacks for different media types. That person or persons’ role should also include making sure all your content creators know which formats they should avoid since they’ll require duplicate effort for mobile.

Mobile editor

If you have a separate mobile website, or you get to the point where you want to feature or prioritize different content on mobile, consider creating a mobile editor role within your organization who programs mobile content. Keep in mind this person will also need to have different permissions with your CMS.

Having this role defined is especially important if you ever publish emergency content, or you have content that must be updated for legal reasons. In a crisis situation, the last thing you need is to have someone forget to update the mobile site.

PROCESS

The ongoing care and feeding of your content may get more complicated, as you’ve got more moving pieces. Let’s take a look at some content aspects that you’ll need to monitor as part of a regular oversight process.

Analytics

You can’t do mobile content strategy correctly until you define how you’re going to measure and optimize performance. Marko Hurst of Content Analytics told me this requires two things. First, you need to choose the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure. Second, you need the right process for getting this data—and using it to make decisions.

Measurement

You know you want to use data to inform your decisions about what to do on mobile. But which data? At the basic level, you need to track observable changes in how people are using your content on mobile. But there are lots of changes you can track, and not everything you can measure is actually useful.

Figure out what you can measure that actually reflects a change in your users’ behavior—a change in behavior that would tell you to do something different within your business. At this point in your mobile content strategy, you’re probably looking for changes in the way people interact with your content on both the desktop and mobile devices:

• Do you see an increase in the number of users accessing your site through mobile devices? Have you seen a corresponding decrease in visits from the desktop? This can help you determine if your customers are using mobile and the desktop interchangeably, or if you’re reaching mobile-mostly users.
• Examine how your device and platform usage may vary by time of day, level of engagement, time on site, and other usage metrics. Some businesses believe that they should prioritize content differently on different platforms, or at different times of day—this data can help inform those decisions.
• Similarly, look at what type of content people are searching or browsing for from different devices. Don’t rush to judgement here—make sure you have a large enough base of content and users on different devices before you make conclusions about what people want and how it varies by platform.
• Review search queries (both internal searches and external referrers) that come from mobile browsers. Focus particularly on search queries on mobile that get redirected to the mobile homepage, if you haven’t optimized that content for mobile.
• If you offer a “full desktop website” link, look at exit pages where mobile users abandon your mobile site for the desktop site.

These examples are only general guidelines for what you might want to track. You need to figure out which measurements are unique to your business. Jared Spool says, “Generic KPIs produce generic results. If we really want something that touches the core of what makes our business special, it should be a metric that only applies to what we're doing,” (http://bkaprt.com/csm/67).

Decision-making process

Marko Hurst told me that having the right process to evaluate the data and use it to make decisions within your organization is crucial to success. There’s no point in gathering data if it doesn’t help you actually do something different on mobile.

The right metrics areessential, but are only a part of the solution. You need a proven, repeatable, andrigorousprocess for collecting, analyzing, and acting on the data, which will allow forconstantsuccess, not random chance. Even with the right metrics, if you don't follow and refine your process forsuccess,your “right metrics” won't matter and your level of success will be limited to little more than luck.

Too often, data like page views or unique visitors doesn’t tell you anything that you can act on—this is true on the desktop web, and it’s true for mobile too. Even “engagement metrics” like time on page or page bounces don’t necessarily tell you anything, unless you’ve figured out what changes in this measurement mean to your business, and how you’ll act on it when it does change.

Finally, don’t think your analytics data will answer all of your questions about what people want and expect from mobile. Make sure your content governance includes a plan for user research too.

SEO

About thirty percent of global search queries come from mobile devices, and analysts estimate that by 2016, a majority of searches will be mobile searches (http://bkaprt.com/csm/68). Your content strategy for mobile needs to include search engine optimization.

But how? Standards and practices for publishing content to the mobile web are still relatively young, and SEO for mobile is still in its infancy. How should your content governance and SEO practices change?

Not at all

One compelling strategy is not to change your strategy at all. (Hooray for laziness!) Like with other recommendations in this book, it’s not wise to jump into doing anything different for mobile until you understand the parameters better. Instead of trying to develop a different approach for mobile search, it’s totally okay to treat desktop and mobile the same.

In fact, this seems to be the approach that Google prefers. They’ve indicated their preference for using responsive web design to serve the same content to all users (http://bkaprt.com/csm/69). A content strategy for mobile that doesn’t distinguish between desktop content, mobile content, and tablet content—it’s all just your content—may be the best SEO strategy, too.

Mobile ≠ local

If you’re bugging out in disbelief that you shouldn’t optimize mobile searches differently, remember one key point: just because a search is from mobile doesn’t mean it’s a local search. Local searches may disproportionately come from mobile devices, but one doesn’t necessarily imply the other.

You may need to focus on optimizing your search queries for searches that include location information, but that approach would still benefit both mobile and desktop users.

Keyword research

As part of your ongoing maintenance and governance processes, you can start evaluating whether mobile search queries use different keywords from other searches. For example:

• Are mobile searches shorter than desktop searches?
• Do mobile searches have more typos and errors than desktop searches?
• Are mobile users searching for different keywords or using different search terms?

Mobile users may use language differently. Understanding how their keyword and search term use changes might tell you that you need to assign different SEO keywords, or even modify the labels and ordering within your navigation system. As with everything else, those decisions are best made with actual data.

Approval processes

Approval processes are the “hard review” steps—the approvals built into the system that must take place before content can go live. The approval workflow needs to balance security with usability. As Jeff Eaton told me, “Everyone wants one-click publish, no one wants one-click embarrassment.”

Legal review

Adaptive content creates all kinds of new challenges for legal review. Is your legal team looking at a PDF screenshot of the desktop page (or worse, a print-out) as part of their review and commenting system? What happens when they need to consider different content objects appearing in different channels?

Jeff Gladchun, J.D., Director, Digital Design Review at Fidelity Investments, told me in an email that legal review needs to move away from looking at the final presentation and into the CMS:

For many financial services firms, adaptive content poses unique and novel issues with respect to legal review standards and processes. In the broker-dealer context, regulations generally assume that electronic advertising can be reduced to singular communication and packaged neatly as a blob—typically a web or mobile screenshot (in PDF format, please)—for review, approval, and record keeping. Legal review systems are structured around this framework.

Adaptive content challenges the status quo, enabling the blob to fragment into chunks which can be consumed not only by your computer or mobile device, but by your car, your refrigerator, your whatever. How do I take a screenshot of your refrigerator? I can't. So in the future, the legal review process will need to move upstream to the CMS, where the chunks can be captured in their captive state in the form of metadata before they are unleashed for public consumption.

Business preview and QA

Many content creation processes rely on the preview function in the CMS to show the work in context. It won’t be enough to rely on previewing the desktop site in the future, so put a plan in place now for how your team can preview and perform a QA review on your content in different form factors. Will it be possible to review every possible device, screen size, and platform out there? No way. But you can identify a few of the most popular ones. Your tech team may be able to help manage this process—keep in mind that it’s going to add some extra steps beyond just clicking that preview button.