Publishers are beginning to warm up to the idea of organizing their content. Carl Robinson, a senior consultant at Ixxus, has identified five questions to help with the process.

Where is your content?

To start organizing, you first need to find where your content is in the first place. Most content exists on hard drives or in databases, but there are some in spreadsheets as well.

Are you being effective?

Sometimes, you may find it more effective to just rebuy your content instead of devoting resources to finding it. In short, you need to keep track of your time, money and employees.

Are you aware of how many people are consuming your content? 

Too many publishers think that content is just the literal content of printed books. In today’s digital world, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of focusing on the format, publishers should focus on getting it to as many people as possible.

Are you protecting your content?

Intellectual property is important, since that’s how publishers make money! Creating an ECM solution helps protect it. Publishers often work with third parties, which is risky because there’s not a lot of transparency. With an ECM system, you can introduce a lot of control into the situation.

Are you using metadata?

Using metadata has a lot of advantages, because you can easily introduce consistent results to content management. When searching for something, you often find things you didn’t know you were looking for that ended up being useful. Metadata helps make that a consistent thing.

Source: “Kondo-ing Your Content”, Carl Robinson, London Show Daily, P.11