Web Content Management Governance Even a Marketer Could Love

Governance as it relates to digital content management can seem to marketing professionals to be a tool of choice of IT and management for keeping their department in line with pre-established procedures and guidelines.

In fact, governance can be a surprisingly powerful factor in reaping the benefits for which a CMS or WCM were chosen in the first place, such as:

• Consistent brand, product, and service messaging
• Automation of repetitive processes
• Empowerment of creative teams to do more of their own publishing, testing, and targeting without IT involvement.

These benefits are tougher to achieve when marketing is neither involved in the governance policy planning nor on board with the idea of governance in the first place.

Where Governance Can Help Marketing Most

Let’s take a look at a few scenarios where a well-thought-out governance policy makes the lives of those in marketing easier—and tangentially improve the lives of IT and other related groups at the same time.

• User Interface: Traditionally a battleground for IT and creative teams, UI-related governance policy can lower the heat when addressing questions such as, “”Who decides what search analytics is telling us about how our visitors really need to have navigation set up on our site?”
• “Hot Tech” Adoption: With a policy in place, marketing may wield more clout than in the past when dealing with issues like, “Why can’t we just redo the microsites in HTML5?”
• Social Media “Ownership”: As Facebook business pages function today, whichever member of marketing or PR creates the page for your product, service, or business “owns” that page as linked to his or her own Facebook identity and can modify or delete it at will. What is the process for changing ownership if that team member moves on to another group or even another company? What if Twitter “content” created by a team member doesn’t meet your brand/style/conventional standards? What’s the process for realigning that once it’s “out there”?
• User-generated Content: Consider the vulnerabilities inherent in user-generated content. With bad apples a given in any group of a certain size, what will be the methods for addressing and containing any unsavory or brand-damaging messages that arise from that content? Good governance policies include steps to take and escalation paths.

For some first steps on creating a governance policy for your organization, see Ensure WCM Success with Good Governance.