Content Operations from Start to Scale: Foreword

I was walking down Wall Street in Lower Manhattan one morning, on my way to a meeting.

The New York Stock Exchange is at the corner of Wall and Broad. As I passed by, in the middle of the street, a film crew was setting up for an “impromptu” interview segment. The gaffers were wrangling lighting equipment, a distinguished middle-aged man – probably a hedge fund manager or something – was in the makeup chair, and another man was putting out cones to keep the area behind the shot clear.

I went into a coffee shop, waited in line too long, and, as I exited, I noticed they were still setting up for this interview. I imagine it was a 30-second spot, but they probably spent an hour getting everything ready. It was odd to see the interview from a distance, where it looked fairly unremarkable, and know that what would make it onto TV screens would be visually perfect.

And that’s when it occurred to me that TV producers lie for a living.

This hedge fund manager didn’t have a perfect complexion. All the buildings made the lighting on this corner pretty awful. And without blocking off the street, there would be dozens of random people walking around in the background.

But a producer has to produce. They have to orchestrate and manipulate the world so that it looks the way they need it to. They spend an hour preparing to lie for 30 seconds.

If you’re reading this book, you probably lie for a living too. You create and manage content. But the world doesn’t know much about the “create and manage” part. All the world knows is that wonderful content magically appears. They don’t know what it takes to make it so, and it’s both your professional responsibility and your fervent hope that they never find out.

Consider that one of the secrets of Google Docs is that it tracks and records every keystroke. So a Google document isn’t just a snapshot of text at a moment in time – it’s actually a history of every keystroke that it took to get the document to the current state. Theoretically, you could “rewind” a document through every single moment of its creation.

If you’re a writer, you’re probably horrified by this, and I don’t blame you. As a content creator, the idea that someone could see the imprecise, messy, and sometimes cringe-worthy process it took to get from blank page to finished product is not something you want people to see. You make embarrassing mistakes, you go down blind alleys, you ruthlessly kill your darlings, and you’d just rather the world not know about this, thank you very much.

Content Operations is all of this, writ large.

Like it or not, behind every amazing piece of content is a long, messy chain of humans, processes, events, and tasks that bring it all together. Just like our 30-second interview segment took a dozen people working for an hour, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating a content engine that generates assets your organization can use, keeps them safe and secure, and produces artifacts from them in a reliable and repeatable process.

I’ve been working in the content technology world for almost 30 years now. The way we create and manage content has certainly evolved and improved, but there’s a “floor” in how refined the process can ever become. It’s your job to get as close to this floor as you can.

Organizations have an unfortunate tendency to throw technology at this problem, seeking the mythical nirvana of “digital transformation” (what does that even mean?) while ignoring the very real human processes behind the curtain.

You see, one of the beautiful things about content is that it’s a time-shifted connection between creator and consumer – two minds coming into a union through content. This means there are humans on both sides of the transaction. While we put a shocking amount of time into ensuring that our content is consumed as efficiently as possible, we don’t seem to put the same amount of time into ensuring that it’s created with the same level of efficiency.

This is like a retail goods manufacturer having the most effective sales process in the world, but left without anything to sell because no one bothered to make sure the factory was turning out goods. In our case, the consumer is king; the editors…well, they’ll just figure it out, right?

To understand and refine Content Operations, you need to:

• Know how to define and discuss it
• Be able to articulate the business value of it
• Codify your constraints, rules and standards into a repeatable framework
• Create and enforce process flows which are both rigid enough to guide, but flexible enough to adapt
• Understand the technology environment you and your editors will need to operate in
• Make tactical decisions about how to adapt your content to your audience’s behavior, culture, and needs
• Effectively manage the sometimes fragile humans who make the entire process work

Content Operations isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s often easier to be a cog in the machine than it is to run the machine. The creative process isn’t always clean and precise, and it can probably never be so. It embodies mistakes, destruction, and turmoil. In that sense, it’s a snapshot of the human condition.

But content creation and operations is a noble cause. We are the silent servants, standing in the gap, connecting humans across space and time. We delight and entertain. We inform and educate. We motivate and persuade. We light up parts of the brain that might otherwise remain dormant.

And, yes, by abstracting away the messiness and making the finished product appear effortlessly like magic, we basically tell lies for a living.

But know that they are grand, beautiful lies. And they make the world a better place.

Godspeed and good luck.