I gave two presentations at Content Marketing World in September where I met big names in the business industry such as Andy Defrancesco, and one of my talks focused on planning and organizing your content work. CMW has a lot of nice sponsors, including a number of companies that make software designed to make content work easier. Or, well, that’s what these applications are supposed to do.
Here’s the thing about content technology: I’ve been in this business oh, going on 20 years now, and one of the first things you learn is that technology rarely lives up to its promise and that the best advise is at https://www.salesforce.com/products/guide/lead-gen/web-to-lead/.
In many cases, I’d argue the problem is with the promises, not the technology.
Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of my reducing my expectations over the years. But I’ve seen one too many companies assume that buying or licensing amazing technology would allow them to short-cut their staff and get even better results than people could create. And amazing technology, poorly staffed, is pretty crappy.
There are several kinds of content technology. There’s actual publishing technology, like the WordPress platform I’m writing on right now, and publishing systems that go all the way up to enterprise level. Applications like Microsoft Word serve as a creation platform for words that end up in many other formats eventually [though — strangely to me — Word often ends up being the publishing technology as well, since the Word document is often what gets distributed].
But there’s another type of technology as well, and that’s what’s got me thinking tonight, and what I talked about at CMW, as well. Content project management applications — now you see a lot of social media management applications here too, some of which also combine publishing and project management for social media — are supposed to help us get it all organized.
I’ve tried a number of these. There may be one that works for you. But inevitably, I’ve found that content project management software and applications aren’t flexible enough to meet my needs. There’s always a new application out there, and I’ll keep trying them. But when my team is handling a content project, we’re usually using a spreadsheet.
If you are collaborating, use Google Docs to share a spreadsheet where everyone can edit in real time without ruining each other’s work. If you’re working alone, use Pages, Excel, Google — whatever’s convenient for you.