Content Governance - Looking Beyond Your CMS

Your website needs content - engaging, brand-consistent creations to build trust in your users. But before you launch a plan to produce streams of highly-targeted, engaging content across multiple channels, you’ll need a solid process in place to keep you sane. Specifically, you’ll need to have content governance.

Content governance is, in the simplest of terms, the strategizing and delivery of a content strategy, alongside the daily management of content optimization, delivery and style. This encompasses:

• The prioritizing of different content.
• The guidelines and policies on how your content should be presented to the end users.
• And the ownership of different pieces of content to internal stakeholders that can carve out the direction of each content.

Content governance is central to a site’s success because it ensures that the content strategy is consistent in all aspects of delivery. It is especially important for larger sites, as the scale of their content production can evolve into a wild beast of its own where various content creators take their own artistic license on things, and clear standards are lost in translation. This leaves room for errors, brand inconsistencies, legislation violations, and a confusing customer journey. Content governance tames the process, preventing the overproduction of redundant content and sets a clear structure for an organization’s internal goals.

A common mistake that most make is equating content governance with content management. Under this idea, the governance of content would be executed through the platform where the content is held, namely the content management system (CMS).

If only it were that simple.

Your CMS holds all the content of your website and perhaps even content from other channels, so it does, to a certain extent, provide an overview of all the content you have produced. It also has other functionalities such as assigning content, adding/removing items and demonstrate the performance of pages. Unfortunately, your CMS doesn’t offer the workflow capabilities to structure content. Consider a scenario where you could set policies and standards for your content and scan your website for any violations of them; or imagine if you went through a rebranding process and you had to find, update, and remove old content to ensure that your site falls in line with your new identity. It would be painstakingly difficult, if not impossible to execute this via a CMS, not to mention it would have to be done manually!

What your CMS can do for content governance is:

• Offer a platform for the production, editing, and publishing of content
• Provide reporting for content performance
• Provide some content optimization options through plugins or applications for SEO, QA, and accessibility.

What your CMS can’t do in terms of governance:

• Make content across all platforms and applications visible, especially for relatively larger organizations with a lot of web properties.
• Find violations of an organizations writing, content or style guides
• Find pages that have outdated content
• Find content that violates industry regulation or branding
• Learning where gaps in content lie in the creation of new content

This presents a specific problem that can drastically affect a site’s performance. CMSs hold content but they do nothing for the improvement of it. They cannot help you detect when errors or inconsistencies occur, presenting the danger of having those issues lie hidden as they slowly degrade your site.

So how do you provide a clear and sustainable content governance process? With your CMS lacking in certain capabilities, there is the need to pair it with external resources that can automate the detection and adherence to content guidelines. One that can automate the enforcement of policies and seek out errors in content, like the tools that Monsido offers. By pairing such a tool with your CMS capabilities, you can hop back in the driver’s seat with and take control of your content governance.

At Monsido, we have created a solution to help your content governance work with your CMS. Our solution allows you to customize and remediate content policies, all in one platform. Significantly transform your content governance by automatically detecting mistakes within content and brand policies with our Policy tool. We also have PageCorrect, a remediation tool that allows you to fix issues immediately on the Monsido platform without having to manually edit it in your CMS.