In my previous post "Are Your Merchants and Marketers Fighting? The Real Reasons Why", I touched on the concept of product content as a strategic asset vs. a production expense.
It's a big deal that deserves more airtime.
Do you think about product content as a production expense? Sure, it's a topic of conversation in every annual budget discussion - all of those images, chunks of copy, video clips. Someone has to produce those and they cost money. But all that content is probably worthy of a more interesting conversation.
Is there someone in your company who is:
- Building and valuing the content as a strategic asset?
- Developing a cohesive content strategy to drive specific business results?
- Analyzing visitors' content consumption and its' impact on customer engagement and sales?
- Collecting and monitoring user generated content as a source of valuable insight about product strategy?
- Developing, managing and leveraging the content efficiently across channels, international sites and other initiatives?
- Monetizing the content through sponsorships, advertorial, licensing and viral opportunities?
- Thinking about what it will take to scale the content tsunami operationally as Web 2.0 becomes even more pervasive?
When you look at the critical team members you need to hire in the coming year, is there someone on the list that will be responsible for this stuff? Call them a Content Strategist, a Product Media Specialist, a Director of Content Development, whatever title gets people to raise an eyebrow and listen. But you probably need one. Really fast.
I was a merchant in the hot seat in the early days of e-commerce ('96-'97). We were giddy just to get a product image to look decent online and cut and paste a sentence of copy from the catalog. Color swatches were squished to the size of fruit flies - which was actually good, since customers couldn't possibly expect it to be a realistic representation. If everything happened to go live on the right date with no errors, we bought beer.
Inside of the last couple of years, guess what? All of the sudden we're all "media companies" in addition to being retailers. That sounds sexy, but we have no idea what that means.
Look at what's happened: customer reviews have moved from a novelty to "what do you mean you don't have them???" (Thanks to Bazaarvoice, they're easy to implement)
Product images can turn, flip, change color and magnify without a second thought (thanks to Scene 7) and even appear personalized with the customer's name in an email or personalized site page.
Product demos and video are no longer just an annual event.
Tagging product attributes has become so ubiquitous that we're letting customers do it for us and justifying it as a full time job to optimize on site search, SEO and targeting. We're importing product content from vendors, and our customers are writing about our products better than we are.
And we're not just doing all of this because our competition's doing it. We're doing it because customers are demanding it and in many cases doing it for us.
All of this is a champagne party (we've moved on from beer) compared to 10 years ago. But do we have our act together in terms of the production, management, and monetization opportunities associated with our exploding content asset?
Might be a good time to nail down what you're trying to achieve with all of this content (or better yet, what your customers are trying to achieve), how you're going to measure the effectiveness of it and who's going to be accountable. And I would bet that there are plenty of ace players itching to be the one accountable.
For some great related reading on the topic of content's impact on the future of your e-commerce business, here are a couple of places to start:
A Bazaarvoice interview with Kelly Mooney from Resource Interactive
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