Scott Abel, aka “The Content Wrangler,” is a well-respected content strategist. He’s also a lively presenter, able to draw crowds for industry events including Content Marketing World, Localization World London, Adobe Day, and LavaCon. If you’d like to pick up a little Wrangler Vision without having to book a flight or stand in line, here’s your chance: Wednesday, January 8th, Scott’s doing a forward-looking webinar: “Five Technologies Content Marketers Can’t Ignore” – showcasing five powerful information technology innovations that, when harnessed by professional content marketers, can help us future-proof our content marketing efforts and ensure we’re meeting – even exceeding – our goals.
Getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right format, and in the right language is the goal of every professional content marketer. But, the pace of change is fast, and each and every step forward is often accompanied by two steps back. That’s because the speed of technological change is outstripping our ability to keep up. It seems we’re always playing catch up. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Scott covers:
1. Automated Translation
We live in a new world of instant global communications. Content is written for both machines and humans, and the machines are the gatekeepers of content (such as for searches). And … 96% of consumers don’t live in the U.S., and less than 6% of consumers understand English well. We need to examine our content from the vantage point of a rules-processing engine and ensure it’s optimized for machine translation.
2. Automated Transcription
Automated transcription is a process that uses software to translate speech to text. This is important for many of the same reasons automated translation is needed AND the fact that video content is not keyword searchable without a transcription.
3. Terminology Management
Terminology management is the process of controlling the words you use by organizing them in a central repository that contains a list of approved terms and rules for their usage. The benefit of using terminology management is to ensure that the words that are most closely associated with your products, services, and branding are used consistently, and are accessible to all who need it across your organization, as well as partners and service providers. This helps ensure consistency throughout your content assets in both your source and your translated documents.
4. Adaptive content
Adaptive content is content that is structured and designed to adapt to the needs of your customer. It changes not just cosmetically (as responsive content does), but also in substance and in capability. For example, an instruction like “click” written to be read on a laptop would be automatically adapted to “touchʼ” on a smartphone and “say” in an automobile GPS. Customers are ever-changing; they demand exceptional experiences and they expect you to change and adapt to their needs. Adaptive content is content separated from, formatting information, allowing authors to focus on what they do best.
5. Component Content Management
Component content management is the creation, administration, organization and governance of small, discrete, re-usable components of content (not files). It focuses on the storing of content components that are used to assemble documents. These come in various sizes and types and can be as small as a single word or as large as many paragraphs; they could be graphics, hyperlinks or other repurposable content. Structured content, combined with component content management, puts you in control of your content and can help you save lots of money on translation.
For content marketing to mature as a discipline, we need content craftspeople, content designers, and content engineers to help us shape, refine and grow digital content so we can provide different types of content to different types of prospects and customers; reuse content without copying and pasting; ensure consistency; and translate content once and have it automatically reflected wherever it’s used.