Content Management Demystified

With today’s fast-paced exchange of information, corporations create and disseminate huge amounts of content both internally and externally. From correspondence and memoranda, to operational updates and policies, employees are bombarded with messaging on an average of 200 times per day from a variety of corporate sources. Externally, clients are presented with billing, advertisements, promotions, social media and blog content on a continual basis. With all of this information, prioritizing, protecting, archiving and properly distributing content can become cumbersome and confusing for both internal and external audiences.

In the early 2000s, content management became a hot topic. A poorly understood and even more poorly executed concept, it generally referred to digitizing and archiving data from paper files onto compact disks. This system proved largely inaccessible, with data being difficult tess and lacking appropriate security against theft or destruction. Now, content management has evolved into elegant cross-platform systems that can incorporate almost any type of text data or OCR readable data into searchable, indexed files.Two primary forms of content management exist today: enterprise content management and customer communication management platforms. These function in fundamentally different ways to achieve similar goals.

Enterprise Content Management.

Enterprise content management (ECM) almost exclusively refers to the data and content exchanged from business to employee or employee to employee. ECM at its most basic design seeks to simplify the storage, security, retention and accessibility of various document types.

ECM software permits the digital capture of content and uses common search term, custom taxonomies and pathways to enable the search and networking of documents. These technologies promote collaboration, increase productivity and decrease costs related to labor-intensive, error prone workflows.

These technologies seek to capture existing data in digitized form from diverse paper and electronic formats, including spreadsheets, databases and image files. ECM software is generally not intended for the creation of original content.

Customer Communication Management Platform

The Customer communications management platform seeks, conversely to ECM which imports content, to take data feeds from client databases, billing systems and sales schedules to create content within the platform and deliver that content via a variety of channels including websites, email, social media, mobile applications, text message, automated phone calls and even print mail.

In a similar fashion to ECM, content in customer communication management tools is archived, fully searchable, and open to collaboration. These platforms have proven invaluable for sales and marketing, customer relationship management, billing and collections. In these systems, all contact with a client is documented, may be scheduled, and passes through specific quality control standards set by the administrator. These controls may include specific verbiage or branding, time of day for delivery, multi-source verification, and other criteria.