I know, I’m using the definition of “content” to play rather freely with the scope of my work’s jurisdiction. I do so on purpose. To explain, I must again return to the past.
I employed the title of my first post, “Hello world!,” to kick off a contrast between the first simple days of blogging and the noisy, crowded internet of the current day. Perhaps an even more critical fulcrum I lived through has been the shift from print to digital communications.
I will never forget joining the marketing and communications department of a small, liberal arts college where the staff was divided into two groups: the print group and the web team. In staff meetings, the print group leader – panty-hose and hairspray, heels and wool suit – crowed about billboard sightings and print runs of brochures in the resentful tones of a competitor trying to one-up an opponent. She didn’t spit out a “Ha!” but you could tell she wanted to.
The web team never responded with much enthusiasm. Our leader wore pumpkin-covered toe socks and jeans. She reported on web data in an understated, blase manner, secure in the fact that our ROIs and KPIs exceeded those of the print campaigns, mostly because they existed. The friction came to a head one day when print lady accused us of mocking the 10-pound dictionary she had displayed in the office on what looked like a religious pulpit. The supervisor chided us to be more sensitive.
While never as entertaining or as dramatic as that situation, I’ve seen this repeat, over and over. Administrators struggle with managing print and digital media within one organizational chart. Most maintain a nonporous barrier between the efforts and the people who deliver them. Never have I seen evidence of an integrated organization that leverages the strengths of each platform in a complementary fashion. I put this down to a lack of an understanding of the content environment, that is, a lack of user-centric empathy and modelling. I also blame a fear of loss and change that prevents the kind of innovative strategies that would foster a mutually beneficial relationship between print and digital realms.
The key principle that gets lost in these kinds of battles is the needs, experience, and behavior of the user. If, instead of expending energy and resources on creating job descriptions and org charts that reflect known definitions of the profession, we focused instead on serving the user?
Stay tuned for ideas on what that would entail.
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