Guest post by Ian Truscott

If you've read anything I've written, seen me speak or you know me at all--you'll know I am normally banging on about web engagement. But, while the cool kids are wondering who this visitor is and how do we serve them relevant content to their iPad, someone or something needs to be watching out for the quality of that experience. 

Making a good first impression

When I write and talk about web engagement, I often refer to the first impression--that your website meets all of your audience, prospects, customers or citizens. They don't all see your shiny headquarters building, meet the friendly receptionist or see that you have today's copy of The Times on the coffee table--but they do see your website. 

When people talk about engagement, they talk about consent and trust--a rare and delicate element that can easily evaporate. Lapses on your website, such as a misspelling, an errant brand color, an outdated page or a brand inconsistency all reflect badly on your attention to detail. The site visitor immediately associates that with the quality of your services, the reliability of your products and the attention you will pay to meeting their needs--tarnishing that trust. 

Complying with laws and regulations

That's aside from the big stick that compliance folks often wield--when those lapses are related to regulatory requirements and accessibility standards, they can be even more damaging, often resulting in financial penalties and a negative impact on reputation. This is especially true in this social media age where people are more than delighted to sound the big fog horn to highlight your embarrassment. 

Maintaining standards used to be relatively easy; a small group of folks in marketing, communications, public relations could be emailed everything--keeping you consistent, on-message, on-brand, grammatically correct and relevant. But most global companies, in the social media age can no longer operate like that and our audience demands we don't.

Can web content management save the day?

At this point you may be relaxing; you may even have clicked the back button to one of Ron's more entertaining posts, safe in the knowledge that you have this taken care of: Our CMS does all that, right? 

Well, interestingly, our experience says: Maybe not. Despite the best content management technologies and the most disciplined enterprise implementation, organizations still struggle with quality and compliance issues. When our clients scratch the surface of their web properties, they still find outdated content, inconsistencies and errors.

Why is that? Well, we've observed a number of reasons why this might be the case, but primarily it's about visibility. The analogy I am making with the keyhole, in the title of this post, is that we are often viewing content compliance through a narrow restricted view. 

When content falls through the cracks

Our view is restricted for a number of reasons. Firstly, how much content that your audience, and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) can see is not under central CMS management? (You know, that campaign website, the local business unit gone rogue or the new support team blog that have sneaked under your enterprise content management strategy radar.) The rush to engagement, to be agile, to respond, to innovate, to differentiate pushes digital marketers to tactical tools that are often outside of the server room. 

In this fractured environment, governance and compliance processes are frequently tied to the implementation of individual web initiatives--good practice and process is baked into the tool or implementation, rather than into holistic corporate content production processes. It is therefore difficult to leverage these same tools and processes as new digital marketing initiatives or communication media come online. 

Thirdly, our content management systems are simply not built to provide this level of reporting. Whilst a contemporary WCM might have a spell checker or be able to tell you that a single page or content snippet does not meet accessibility standards before you publish it, it will rarely tell you how many pages that have already been published fail accessibility, have spelling mistakes, don't follow brand guidelines, are out of date or mention the name of a recently deceased pop star. 

Finally, however you address these issues and whatever systems you have in place, mistakes happen; people understandably work around good practice in a bid to streamline the publishing process, to respond to a business imperative event. 

Your audience and Google doesn't look at your web properties through this keyhole and the important thing is to have a process in place to spot them, enabling you to pick them up, before you find you are trending on Twitter (for all the wrong reasons).  

Ian Truscott is a Senior Analyst for the Gilbane Group, a part of Outsell Inc. focusing on web content management. Ian has over fifteen years of enterprise software experience, over a decade of which focusing on WCM. He is active in the CMS community, serving on the board of CMPros  (the Content Management Professionals Association), is a blogger  and a frequent public speaker, appearing at various industry events and seminars. You can learn more about the subject of this post in this recently published Gilbane paper.

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