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Home > Data management / BI News > Content analytics takes the guesswork out of content lifecycle management |
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BOSTON -- Most companies take for granted employee handbooks, monthly marketing reports and other corporate-related digital content, but few realize the sheer volume of content being produced, how much it costs or how effective that content is, according to a speaker at this week's AIIM Conference. Content analytics, applying business intelligence practices to digital content, can help companies better manage their content lifecycle chains by creating relevant cost and consumption metrics, according to Guy Creese, a Burton Group vice president and research director. With metrics in place, companies can identify which digital content is most cost-effective and adjust their investment accordingly. "You're probably running a mini-publishing business [as a result of all the digital content being created]," Creese said. "And you ought to be running it like a business." For example, content analytics could measure the effectiveness of an expensive Flash-based product demo on a corporate website. The resulting metrics might confirm that the costly demo is generating lots of hits but not many sales, prompting the marketing manager to take a new tack, Creese said. Within a company, content analytics could identify an internal RSS feed whose auditing best practices-related content is popular among a team of finance workers. Human resources could then make that feed easily available to new employees within that department.
Most companies simply have no idea of the amount of content they're producing because that knowledge is often siloed within departments, Creese said. A department head probably knows who on the team best creates certain types of content and delegates tasks accordingly, but that knowledge rarely gets shared with the rest of the company. As a result, measuring the cost of content creation throughout the enterprise is difficult. When it comes to consumption, though most companies gather basic information on who is accessing their digital content, it is often limited in scope. It is one thing to know that a customer enjoys reading articles about sports, Creese said, but quite another to know that he specifically likes to read about Tiger Woods. A company with only limited knowledge of its content consumers probably wastes time creating and updating irrelevant content, like writing articles about college basketball for that reader who is really interested in Woods, or, within a financial services organization, for example, publishing consumer insurance statistics for an agent who covers the retail sector. Even companies that do collect such detailed information often fail to put it in the hands of the relevant content creators, who could then make adjustments to better suit content consumers, Creese said. To overcome these and other obstacles, he offered the following suggestions to companies embarking on a content analytics project:
Creese also urged companies initiating a content analytics program to educate their employees. Let workers know they're being monitored not for any nefarious, Big Brother-type reasons, but to improve efficiency and eliminate wasted effort. Also, when collecting data on content consumers, especially customers, be sure to follow applicable privacy laws. One obstacle that can't be immediately overcome, however, is the lack of content analytics tools currently on the market. All the technology pieces for content analytics are there, Creese said, but vendors have yet to pull them together, and he doesn't expect them to do so for at least two years. Companies that undertake content analytics today will instead have to make do with customized processes built on top of existing business intelligence systems. Conference attendee Mark Livingstone, a senior IT manager at San Diego-based Qualcomm, said his company is just starting to experiment with content analytics, understanding who is accessing its content management system and what content they're downloading. Livingstone said he definitely sees the value in content analytics, "but we're still at least a few years away from getting there."
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