During the last couple of pitches we’ve done a thought has been coalescing in my mind...
Most content management systems concern themselves with managing the production and publication of content – getting stuff written and published. But as we now believe that content is just something to talk about (see item#6) surely content management tools should also help manage the conversation around each piece of content and the impact of that conversation on the content?
So I believe a full lifecycle CMS should include tools that:
- show the content creator/owner how many people have used the content
- show them what the users’ intensions were when the used the content (what they searched for to get to it, what else they looked at, what the last page of their visit was, etc)
- where the content was shared and how many people responded to the sharing
- any other information about the shared responses such as time and location info (see a bit.ly example)
- what the context of the sharing was i.e. ‘this is a really insightful article’ or ‘lies, damn lies #fail’
- when the content was shared in a commentable forum (a blog, a forum, twitter, etc), what the comments to the original message were
- opt to re-aggregate the conversation (comments) from a forum where the content was shared back into the comments on the CMS
Much of this information is already available in our analytics reports, but it does not seem to be joined up to the content and presented to the content author in a way that allows them to adapt, amend and improve the content. Surely this is how content management should be in a world where content has a life after publication?
This last point overlaps with the Salmon-protocol a little, but I’ve a feeling that Salmon is going to take a while to get adoption.
There is a great service available from backtweet that could do much of the heavy lifting around tracking the sharing and commenting of the content for us, but the available plugins and widgets seem to be aimed at showing the conversation to users rather than content creators/managers.
I think there might be some justification for a Google Analytics/Backtweet/Lucene based mashup to bring this information into the content creation interface.
How much value would tools that help manage the conversation add value to the CMS?
Your thoughts are welcomed.
