In my last post on thriving in the content tornado, I explored several examples of the content tornado engulfing marketers today and started sharing tips to help manage and even thrive in this environment. Today I’ll cover more tips. Assuming you’ve committed to putting content at the center of your business, how do you get everyone on board?
Let’s start by talking about the 9x change management rule that people often forget or ignore. Everyone knows that adopting a new product requires the Digital Asset Management benefits of the new to outweigh the costs of switching. But don’t forget that as a change agent, you see what could be more clearly and value it more highly, relative to the status quo. Your colleagues often see the situation in reverse, with the status quo as the point of reference, and fear what they may lose much more than what they may gain.
A great deal of psychology research has shown that change agents overvalue new benefits by 3x and others overvalue status quo benefits by 3x, for a total gap of 9x between innovators and those they must convince. So how do you reduce or overcome this aversion to loss?
One key way is by letting people continue to use the tools they are familiar with, reducing the actual change required. So for example, that means letting creatives work within Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign and connect directly to approved content from within those creative applications. And on top of that, ensuring that when that content is updated, people are notified, right within the app.
A lot of folks have caught on to the value of these creative connections, and put them in the top 3 success drivers they’re looking for when buying content systems. Another way to get people on board is to give them something extra, like the ability to see content they don’t have the applications for. So while creatives love working in Photoshop, most people in the organization don’t even have it, but there might be the perfect PSD file…if only they could see it, and download it in a standard image format. So here’s an example of a photoshop file in a preview mode right in the browser, and someone could download it in the image format they prefer.
A third key way to make it easy for people is by surfacing the content that is relevant to them. This extends beyond your immediate organization. Here’s an example of a brand portal that Rainier sports – a made up company – has made available to its retail partners so they can get approved assets for in- store campaigns.
More generally, your system should be able to surface the most relevant content for any kind of user, depending on their role or other contextual information like the timing of an upcoming campaign, a new partnership agreement, or changing rights tied to an piece of content. And once people start using new tools, they’ve got to have a delightful, irresistible experience to keep them coming back. That means as good, or better than, a stock photo library, with advanced search like
1. Facets
2. Full-text search
3. Colors
4. Synonyms
5. Misspellings
6. Multilingual interface and results All wrapped in a beautiful and intuitive experience like you see below.
So those are 3 key ways to get people on board more easily: First, minimize the change required by letting them use the tools they like; Second, give them capabilities they didn’t have before; and third, make it easy, intuitive, and delightful.