103 all that around for review, before finally logging into the CMS and starting to create the content. Evidently, the process prior to logging into the CMS is an amorphous mass of dreams and wishful thinking. Most organisations don’t put a process around this. They think the creative process defies any attempt to manage it, and it’s something that happens by magic. Additionally, in their heads, ideation, authoring and production are all the same things. They are not. Ideation is the process of coming up with ideas for content that will appeal to your audience. Authoring is putting those ideas into some narrative framework, whether that be an article, a script, or blocking out an infographic. Finally, production is turning that framework into an artefact which can be consumed, such as a web page, a social media update, an article in a publication or any other format. When dealing with content, we think about production first. However, we should really back up to authoring and how to ensure our editors can easily collaborate on content. In fact, we should go back all the way to ideation – do we have a process to manage where content is born? There is a genre of content technology that occupies this space: the content marketing platform. This is the tool your content team uses to generate the ideas that turn into content, that turn into artefacts, that turn into experiences, and that eventually turn into conversions and revenue. This is where the content life cycle – a ‘river’ of repeatable content – starts. If you don’t take care of this end, the river will run dry. Deane Barker is global director of content management at Optimizely
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