Benefits
Communicate and engage.
Don't wallow in spreadsheets.
We need to communicate and engage, including with stakeholders who do not spend much time thinking about the website. A spreadsheet will not communicate to most stakeholders. You need to provide a data-driven method of engaging with stakeholders, early. Ideally these are interactive rather than static methods. Also, if these take too long to put together or update then their value goes down.
Analyze coherently and quickly.
Don't do one-offs or line-by-line reviews.
In large digital presences, we need to analyze across multiple, disparate websites. These sites may even fit into logical groups. Content Chimera allows you to conduct analysis at multiple levels of the digital presence. Furthermore, rather than hacking together methods of processing and visualizing, Content Chimera allows you to analyze complex sites more efficiently.
Content Chimera allows you to bring in arbitrary data about your content, and then you can immediately analyze using that new information. This allows you to visualize relationships across systems as well.
Decide enterprise-wide.
Don't pass around spreadsheets.
A common method of "making decisions" about content is to pass around spreadsheets of individual sites to various owners. But we need to make organization-wide, strong, enduring decisions. To do that, we should be talking about rules about content rather than horse trading about specific content. Fundamentally we need to decide about every piece of content, but that doesn't mean we have to look at each piece of content to make that decision. In the end we want to know: 1) what the content is (the bucket), 2) what we're going to do with it (the disposition), and 3) who is going to make the transformation happen (the resourcing).
Uses
Tackle large, complex digital transformations
Let's stop pretending we can plan complex transformations effectively with spreadsheets. There are just too many people, teams, sites — and too much content.
For large scale analysis, seeing the patterns is crucial. But to get there we need a rationalized set of data (that can be compared across sites). In addition, we have to be able to conduct our analysis at different levels, for instance at either the organization level or at the site level.
For this you need:
- Analyze at the organization, group of sites, or specific site level.
- Visually see patterns across the entirety of the digital presence.
Run more efficient content analysis teams
Passing around spreadsheets is not a very efficent means of doing content analysis, nor is having people look at content line-by-line. Instead, Content Chimera allows you to have the analysis for all your clients in one place. Furthermore, more than one person can analyze the same site(s) at the same time, and you can save charts for easier handoff.
For this you need:
- One place where you can see the analysis for all your clients.
- Repeatable, saved charts.
- Multiple people working on the same analysis.
Get project buy-in
Spreadsheets dont' get project buy-in. We need to communicate the big picture of the current state as well as the desired state, and for the target state we need a clear justification (as well as the ability to tweak the target state definition over time).
Content Chimera generates charts that summarize complex digital presences. These charts can even be used in the uppermost executive meetings. In addition, by using rules to assign what we'll do with content, we're both able to explain the rationale behind the decisions as well as show the implications of those decisions.
For this you need:
- Use rules to make decisions.
- Define buckets (what the content is), dispositions (what to do with the content), and resourcing (what team will fix the content).
- Easy-to-understand charts.
Gain insights faster
Getting a list of URLs quickly is easy. But we want insights and not just a list of URLs.
We need to find patterns, which we generate by dynamically exploring our data (that may have been imported from a variety of tools) in dynamic charts. Also, we need to show the impact of decisions (and tentative decisions).
For this you need six things, including:
- Deduplicate URLs to generate lists of content
- Intelligently merge data from multiple sources
- Ad hoc charting
Work on large digital presences?
This is a tool for teams that deal with complex digital presences, especially teams that believe content is important and should be dealt with in a coherent and high-impact manner.
- Integrators and marketing agencies. Use Content Chimera when proposing work, both to better understand the project and to communicate to potential clients that you take content seriously. Of course, also use it to work with your clients to implement strong content transformations.
- Content strategy consultancies. If you are already helping large clients to develop content strategies, Content Chimera will help you provide even higher value, without having to get into a ton of technical details in Excel. And actually test for things like duplicates.
- Large digital presence owners. As of now, Content Chimera is optimized for professional services firms that work on lots of client sites. Except for extremely large organizations, it may not make sense to use Content Chimera directly. Please contact us to help you decide.
