Content Strategy and Library

[Melissa Abraham Smith]

Hi guys, we have a mountain of content that we want to add to confluence so we can:

- create a library of content that is searchable by topic, type, author etc

- see all content in one place with visible tags, where it's been published, dates, edits

- create a content strategy and calendar for all channels

The Orderly Database app seems like a good solution but I'm not sure when this will be available. In the meantime, does anyone have any ideas of how to structure this and what templates/apps are best to use?

Thanks,

Melissa

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Hey @Melissa Abraham Smith, 

As part of a marketing team that builds an enormous content load, I know your struggle. Most times, we don't have 3rd party apps to support us, and we try to be as creative as possible with the built-in features of Confluence.

The basic principles my team uses are:

1. Keeping our content organized by destination, theme, and type. For example:

Website blog (destination) -> Agile/ITSM/Product A/Product B(theme) -> How-to articles/Use cases/Announcements (type)

The parent page is always structured like an index page, having all page trees and table of contents in one place so they are easily reachable (the content design template is very good for that)

2. Keeping the same page tree structure and layout.

Once you find the sweet spot for your page structure, you definitely want to replicate it everywhere. It will make navigation much easier for the users.

3. Enroll everyone in the process.

That's often the most critical part of the journey - probing for feedback and asking people how they search for content. Sometimes, the answers are unbelievable :D 
With minor customizations, the marketing templates are handy when you want to shape your content in a certain way.

Anchors are very powerful tools for linking pieces of content or handling heavy navigations, but they do require some hard work.

An app I may recommend is Content Formatting Macros for Confluence. It allows you to have banners, buttons, labels, footnotes, and other valuable features for your library.

This may sound too simple, but for our content/social calendar, I made a table for each month of the year (we are not on Confluence Premium, so we don't have team calendars :( ), and my team uses it to plan and schedule the social posts for the month. 

My life mantra is "If it works, it ain't stupid," so ... I guess it works :))

Hope these points may help you with your initial thoughts. Feel free to ask any questions; I would be happy to share more!

[Stu Lees ️ REVYZ]

We have been working on one part of that challenge today inside Jira.  We're using tickets to plan out our content calendar and then using boards for individuals to manage their workloads around the calendar.  

I'm loving the ability to clone tickets that have sub-tasks in them for multiparticipant tasks such as webinars and blog campaigns and also the flexiblity of being able to categorize my content calendar in a way that works for us.

We have a single content calendar for all forms of content and then the tickets themselves have owners. 

As a leader in the team, I was forever being asked to do reviews by our team and that is now taken care of with workflows and (soon) automations so that every morning I can go into my own tickets and work through them.

One cool feature that we're about to test in a Canva plugin enabling creators to add the canva project link to the ticket and then the content image appearing inside Jira, which should be great for review/approve effciencies there as well. 

As mentioned already by Teodora, a key factor is making sure that we are getting ALL of our global team of creators, editors and writers completely on board with Jira.  

On your point about tagging content itself and libraries, we also have this challenge and are just trying to be very organized with our Canva Folders and Google Drives for now so that we can keep refining our workflows.  Our feeling is that once our workflows are nailed down, we will be in a better place to deal with organization of our content.

Hope this helps!!