Last week I was in Minneapolis rubbing hashtags (#Confab) with other word geeks who build and publish stuff online. About 500 of us glommed around the Hyatt for three days to talk about how to plan for content, how to sell it internally and to clients, how to test for good content, and how to work through a content development process. Good stuff, and more thoughts from sessions I attended will be shared here in the coming days. And yeah, there were a few tweets flying around.
But first I thought it would be fun to look at some reasons why some companies don't think content matters. From the hallway and lunch table conversations I noted, these issues are fairly commonplace.
- Your boss, or your boss's boss, is unfamiliar with the term Objectives and his friend, Goals. Look, squirrel!
- Internal politics is so wound up that content everybody's concern. And nobody's end-to-end responsibility.
- Code and programming are specialized skills. It's not necessary to hire someone to come in and write. Janis could probably handle it. Did you check with her?
- We spent a lot of money on the corporate brochure and web site a few years ago. Still waiting for that to pay off.
- Sure, a new website is on our list of priorities. It's just that everybody really needs to focus on sales right now.
- We have just the one website, and it only has a few pages. Anything more is overkill, really. Plus we're in the book and go to the major conferences.
- The company's been around a long time. Everybody knows us already.
- We're a manufacturing company (distributor/niche services provider/soup kitchen, whatever). We really don't have that much to say.
- There's no way to measure that.
- We spent the last of the marketing budget for this fiscal on these great thumb drives for Sales to hand out in the field.
- Pretty sure our competitors aren't worried about content.
- Our information changes so fast because of the industry and product development cycles. There's no practical way we could keep up.
Tongue-in-cheek, of course. Well-planned content that's clear, useful, and relevant is indeed important to business because of the myriad ways it (and the supporting values system) matters to customers.
What reasons would you add? What other excuses or fallacies have you heard that gave you a moment?