Someone on your team is tearing their hair out

They’re constantly frustrated by the endless rounds of revisions that every dang page has to go through. Or by the ever-expanding number of people who just have to have a say about which photo to run with tomorrow’s blog post. Or by the endless reproachments blasted off in Slack when someone on the Board doesn’t get the tweet that went out from the organization’s account.

Maybe this is you.

Maybe the thought has crossed your mind once or twice that everyone should just leave you alone and let you get shit done.

The cold, hard truth

People are messy. We have feelings. We maneuver around office politics. We let our egos drive our decisions. We get busy. We take shortcuts.  The more we pretend that people are always rational and consistent, the more likely we are to sabotage the content we work so hard to produce.

But there’s another way.

Content governance is your insurance policy

Against what? It’s your insurance policy against people being human. Content governance is a set of shared policies, systems, and definitions that articulate how content gets created, what it should look like, and who is responsible for each step of the process. It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.

Of course, it often is.

It’s easy to do content governance wrong

Putting a bunch of rules in place and hoping everyone follows them ain’t gonna cut it. How you develop and roll out those rules is as important as the rules themselves. It’s not always easy; it requires an organization to be honest with itself. It requires bringing your research team together with your creative team (and your—gasp—leadership team), to actually talk to each other. It requires experimentation and a willingness to mess up, then adjust and try again. All of these things are hard for organizations to do. Why?

Because people are messy.

A content course for the real world

I know just how messy people can be because I’ve been through it more than once. I’ve banged my head against the wall, felt ignored, played good cop and bad cop—and grizzled career cop who just wants his lieutenants to fill out the reports properly just this one time, Booker!

So I’m putting together a free email course that outlines the foundational lessons I’ve learned over the past decade-plus. Some of the fundamentals we’ll cover include:

• Roles and responsibilities
• Content workflows
• Content governance tools
• Juggling stakeholders
• And probably a bunch of other critical stuff

If it goes well, I’ll put together a more in-depth advanced version. I think you might be surprised at how common your content dysfunction is.

And I’d like to think I’ve learned these lessons the hard way—so you don’t have to.