How do you handle content governance?

Content governance is the set of policies, processes, and roles that ensure the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of your content. It covers everything from content creation and approval to content maintenance and archiving. Content governance is crucial for any organization that wants to deliver relevant, engaging, and trustworthy content to its audience. But how do you handle content governance in practice? Here are some tips to help you.

1 Assess your current situation

Before you can implement or improve your content governance, you need to understand your current state. This means conducting a content audit to evaluate the quantity, quality, and performance of your existing content. You also need to identify the stakeholders, tools, and workflows involved in your content production and management. A content audit will help you uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy, as well as the gaps and opportunities for improvement.

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Ellen Cresswell

Business writer | Content strategy & design | Ghostwriter | Proofreader & editor | Host & facilitator
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A content audit can be an overwhelming task for large digital properties. Sometimes it's useful to audit a sample of the overall digital asset to identify recurring themes or issues that governance will need to address. In-depth surveys or discussions with the primary consumers/users of the digital asset as well as the content creation and publishing team will also surface opportunities for governance recommendations.

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Catherine Hinchley

Associate Director GOAT, GroupM Nexus | Influencer, social and content specialist
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Use insights and data to your advantage when doing an audit but also speak to the channel teams. They know so much about what works and what doesn’t that can help support and give context to the data.

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2 Define your goals and standards

Once you have a clear picture of your current situation, you need to define your goals and standards for your content. Your goals should align with your organizational objectives and your audience needs. Your standards should include guidelines for content quality, consistency, and accessibility. For example, you may want to establish a content style guide, a content calendar, a content metadata schema, and a content accessibility checklist. These documents will help you ensure that your content meets your expectations and complies with best practices.

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Ellen Cresswell

Business writer | Content strategy & design | Ghostwriter | Proofreader & editor | Host & facilitator
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Content governance should comprise policies, standards and practices, and many of these will be outlined in separate documents. A good content governance policy is the 'parent' to several child policies and principles. Accessibility, style guidelines, tone of voice standards, regulatory/legal requirements, SEO practices, metadata and content creation, revision and retirement policies are all essential aspects of good content governance.

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3 Assign roles and responsibilities

Content governance requires clear roles and responsibilities for everyone involved in your content lifecycle. You need to define who is responsible for creating, reviewing, approving, publishing, updating, and archiving your content. You also need to specify who has the authority to make decisions, resolve conflicts, and enforce policies. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, you may want to create a content governance team or committee that oversees and coordinates your content activities.

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Catherine Hinchley

Associate Director GOAT, GroupM Nexus | Influencer, social and content specialist
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Get your RACI right. Communicate it well. Too many opinions lead to poor content. Make sure teams know who has a say and who has the final say.

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4 Implement processes and tools

Content governance also requires efficient and effective processes and tools that support your content operations. You need to design and document your content workflows, from ideation and creation to distribution and evaluation. You also need to choose and implement the tools that enable your content workflows, such as content management systems, content collaboration platforms, content analytics tools, and content automation tools. These processes and tools will help you streamline your content production and management, as well as measure and optimize your content performance.

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5 Monitor and evaluate your content governance

Finally, content governance is not a one-time project, but an ongoing practice. You need to monitor and evaluate your content governance regularly, to ensure that it is working as intended and delivering the desired results. You can use various methods and metrics to assess your content governance, such as content audits, content reviews, content surveys, content KPIs, and content ROI. You should also collect and analyze feedback from your stakeholders, users, and customers, to identify any issues or opportunities for improvement.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Saravanakumar Ramesh

Helping Professionals Transform Their Potential Into Possibilities!
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Content governance is important when you believe that a screwed up content published would really burn down a brand completely, irrespective of the size and popularity of the brand! That’s said, content governance requires a whole lot of prerequisites about the brand and it’s values set in order already. Once that’s in place the audience for whom the brand is catering to needs to be clearly identified. Then finally comes the levers for governance being setup and put into motion to minimize missteps to almost zero!

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How do you handle content governance?

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2

3

4

5

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1 Assess your current situation

2 Define your goals and standards

3 Assign roles and responsibilities

4 Implement processes and tools

5 Monitor and evaluate your content governance

6 Here’s what else to consider

Content Management

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How do you handle content governance?

1

2

3

4

5

6

1 Assess your current situation

2 Define your goals and standards

3 Assign roles and responsibilities

4 Implement processes and tools

5 Monitor and evaluate your content governance

6 Here’s what else to consider

Content Management

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