The 4 Ways Your Website Can Channel Content

Whether you’re running a blog, a shop, a forum, or anything else on the web, you’ve made several hundred decisions to set it up & keep it running. But one big decision that’s often just passed by is the ‘content communication strategy’: You know the type of content you want on the site, but you may not even consider that there are several totally different options for getting that content on there.
In this article we’ll talk about the 4 most common ‘content communication strategies’, with a few pros and cons of each, plus a few examples of sites that use each strategy.

The strategies we’ll talk about are:

1. The Central Controller
2. The Group Effort
3. The Multi-Way Conversation
4. Of The People, By The People (For the People!)

Warning – this will be a long post! Don’t worry though – I’ll make it as scannable as possible & fill it with pictures to illustrate.

Strategy 1: The Central Controller

Here we can see the company (‘ACME Inc’) has a UK website. In the example, a guy called Sid puts all of the content onto the site, which he gathers from various places within the company. From there, the site is read by Search Engines, Shareholders, Clients & other ACME divisions.

In other words – Sid is the central hub for the website. Sid could be a single person, or a department within a company: The point is, all content is controlled centrally. Usually this means the whole site will speak in one of three ways: Third-person-anonymous; The voice of the central author (it could be Sid, in the example above); A contrived character.

A Few Good Things About This Approach:

• Tight control over what makes it onto the site
• Central point of accountability (if there are errors on the site, it’s Sid’s fault; if the content is great, it’s because of Sid)
• ‘Holistic Integrity’ (everything on the site agrees with everything else, because Sid has a good picture of the whole puzzle. If you were to pitch this in a presentation you might say “Everything’s on-brand”)
• No policing costs (nobody has to go round checking anything on the site, because Sid does that while he’s adding the content)

A Few Bad Things About This Approach:

• Everything depends on the person/team in the middle – all of your eggs are in their basket. If he’s great, you’re great. If he’s not so great, neither are you. If he takes the week off work, your site stands still.
• Things get lost in translation (if Sid doesn’t understand it, how can he communicate it effectively? If Sid doesn’t think it’s important, he can bury it or push it to the back of the queue)
• The bottleneck. If every department in the company wants to get something onto the site all at once, they’ll have to wait.
• Jumping ship. If Sid ever leaves, the entire knowledge & direction of the site leaves with him.

Who Uses This Approach?

• Seth Godin’s blog more-or-less follows this: no guest posters; no comments – all of the content (other than trackback notes) is straight from Seth.
• Innocent Drinks follow this. The site is narrated by a nice contrived character which sits nicely with their brand. All of the content is spoken by this one central narrator.

Strategy 2: The Group Effort

So this diagram looks a little more messy, but what’s going on? Well – Sid has set up the website so that the other departments in the company can speak direct via the website. Gary in Sales can put his content straight on there, the CEO can put his content straight on there too; each of them speaks directly to all of their Clients, Shareholders & every other site visitor (including search engines). You’ll notice the arrows only go one way. This means (for example) the Shareholders can’t post direct to the website themselves.
This generally works in one of a few ways: Individuals in the group/organisation might be given tools to publish directly. Perhaps they’re given little one-way blogs to communicate, or their put in charge of a new section for their category. Another popular version of this is when a central website is split into smaller sub-websites, each with their own ‘editorial team’.

A Few Pros Of This Approach:

• Easy way to get extra ‘expert’ content onto the site
• Nothing gets lost in translation – if the CEO wants to put out a message, he just goes ahead & puts it out
• Everybody buys into the site
• Greater granularity. If one person wants to go into real depth in their section, they don’t have to rely on someone else having time available to publish it all
• The Human Element. This one really deserves a discussion of its own: The positive aspects of putting some humanity into a website just can’t be overstated. People love hearing from real humans. Allowing people to broadcast direct via the web is almost usually better than utting a bland facade between the people inside a company & the people outside.

A Few Cons Of This Approach

• People leave. If your content is built around your people, you have to figure out what to do when they leave.
• People may be unreliable. Again, if your content is built around people, you have to make sure they continue to produce it (reward it), or put a system in place so that it doesn’t have a negative effect if/when they don’t.
• No central knowledge/management/point of accountability.
• Potential for conflicting messages from different authors.
• This is sort of a halfway house: The facade of a conversation with the site’s audience, without actually any mechanism for the audience to speak back.

Who Uses This Approach?

• Most media organisations use an approach along these lines – it’s very similar to the setup of a conventional magazine/newspaper. The BBC News, for example, posts dozens of items a day, some by anonymous staff, some by named writers.
• Many corporate blogs also follow this route: They allow internal staff to publish direct to the web, but disable comments so that all content is from their staff only. The Google Health Ads Blog is a good example of this.

Strategy 3: The Multi-Way Conversation

Here you’ll see the arrows go both ways. Content comes from inside ACME corp, but content also comes from the site audience. This could be in the form of comments, a threaded forum, user-populated blogs.

What’s Great About This Approach?

• User-involvement/user-buy-in. Those both sound horrible, don’t they? Letting your ‘readers’ become ‘participants’ can be great for you & great for your site. Turning your site into a community, or allowing it to engage with an existing community, not only increases traffic, retention, & stickiness, it can turn an otherwise boring site into something that people want to visit & talk about. In other words – it can bring new people to your site, can keep them coming back, and can vastly improve their feelings toward your brand.
• Free (‘keyword-rich’) content. Let’s say you have a team of 3 in-house, and an audience of 3000 readers. ‘Flipping the funnel’ and allowing your readers to do some of your shouting for you vastly increases the amount of content you can produce.
• Instant feedback. When you do something your audience/readers/buyers don’t like – it’s better to know about it than to hide under a rock. Giving them the mechanism to just say straight out “I don’t like that” can cut a lot of time and badly-placed effort.
• A two-way conversation. The clichéd saying ’2+2=5′ is all about building on other peoples ideas. Building on the ideas of yourself, your staff, and your readers.
• A genuine relationship. Big brands often speak about ‘customer relationship management’. Too often, it’s only the brand that believes this relationship exists. Conversing with readers/customers offers the possibility of a genuine relationship between them and the brand.

What’s Not So Great About This Approach?

Many people worry about opening up access to their audience (large organisations especially). A few of the key worries are:

• ‘Off-brand messages’ (readers posting comments that don’t relate to what the company is trying to do, or how it wants to be perceived)
• Copyright violation/defamation/other legal issues. If outsiders can post on your website, there’s always the potential (no matter how slim) that someone can break the law using your site.
• For example, Shoemoney was once subpoenaed over comments posted by one of his blog readers.
• Aaron Wall was famously sued as a result of comments over on SEOBook.com (the case was eventually dismissed & Aaron came out of it really well).
• Policing costs. “we asked them for content. now how do we make sure it’s the content we want?!”

Who Uses This Approach?

• Many larger blogs use this approach, for example Copyblogger now uses several content creators (bloggers), and each article allows comments from readers – no matter who they are.
• SEOMoz is another good example here: Content is often created by the SEOMoz staff (again, anyone can comment by signing up to the site for free). Additionally, users can post their own content, which all other users can then comment on (& rate).
• Most other blogs use a cut-down version of this: A single central author posts original content, the larger audience is able to post comments only. For example, the fantastic ChrisG.com and Skelliewag both follow this format.

Strategy 4: Of The People, By The People

In this example, you’ll notice the company is greyed out. Why is that? That’s because the staff of the company don’t post or create any content themselves. They set up the mechanisms for users to post content, and then all content comes from the users (totally powered by the ubiquitous ‘UGC’/'User-Generated Content’).

What’s good about this?

• Minimal/zero cost content. Though it may be worth rewarding the audience for content, this is hugely less costly than creating content in-house.
• Huge scaleability – held back only by the chosen niche, the quality of the idea, the usability of the site, and the ability of the servers to cope
• Huge permission assets – a large audience, all of which have been recruited by friends/family, offers a huge permission asset.

What’s bad about this?

• Legalities. The Youtube legal issues highlight what can happen.
• Wandering direction. If you have a firm direction for the site, it’s tough to keep a firm hold of that when all content is driven by your users.
• Totally at the mercy of the audience. If the audience moves on, there’s little you can do about it. Friendster, Orkut (and arguably Yahoo!) are famous cases of this.

Who uses this approach?

• Many of the biggest sites in the world use this format. You could say that Google’s search engine runs using this format (though their spiders trawl for the content, rather than users posting it directly).
• Forum websites are usually centred around this.
• Threadless (a T-shirt company) puts a very nice spin on this: Not only is their site content produced using this format, each of the t-shirts they produce is designed & voted for by their users.
• Directories are often built around this idea too. Seth Godin‘s Squidoo is a great use of this concept: Expert content, largely driven by users, pulls in piles of traffic. Site costs are covered by AdWords, and there’s a gigantic chunk left over for charity (and for the experts themselves if they wish).
• MySpace (oh yeah – other than Tom), Youtube, and – to an extent – TripAdvisor have all followed this format to fantastic success
• Facebook took this a step further: Not only do users post content, developers can also create applications for the site, allowing users to interact in different ways.

So there you have it: the four basic ‘content communication strategies’.

Which are you currently using? Could you combine elements of others to improve your site?