With a few exceptions, enterprise web strategies are owned and executed by multiple operating units – lines of business, country marketing teams, product support teams, and IT departments, to name a few. The result is often a fractured user experience with inconsistent brand messaging, siloed content, and duplicative IT infrastructure and processes. While enterprises seem to unanimously recognize and reap value from their web platform and content investments, they have also suffered entropy within the system. Those who have invested in unifying (and simplifying) their web presence after they’ve let a thousand flowers bloom will testify that herding cats from corporate communications, channel marketing, sales, product teams, fulfillment, and geographies is at least half the battle.

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve wished your business had the foresight ten years ago to organize operations and define processes with the now ubiquitous web platform in mind. Perhaps you’ve also observed the tectonics of the web begin to nudge, jolt, break apart, and now move about freely in the realm of mediated user experiences. One of the lubricants has been technologically simple techniques for delivering content anytime, anyplace – content syndication with RSS and other industry or specialized standards. Rare is an enterprise web site without an RSS feeds page. Uncommitted is a user who is not familiar with at least one content aggregator such as Yahoo!, NexTag, and Bloglines.

But there’s more to syndication than RSS subscriptions to editorial content. The traditional content syndication paradigm is now being applied to article marketing, product placement, and customer alerts – that is, syndication is a means to provide compelling but unintrusive anytime/anyplace communication with customers and partners throughout the lifecycle of the relationship. Focus on an enterprise syndication strategy today will keep your company afloat in the fluid world of digital experiences and information resources. It will also keep you out of the internal log jam where content publishers cross purposes and mix messages as they extend their content assets beyond the enterprise web site boundaries.

In this discussion, I will present an approach to develop an enterprise content syndication strategy, the corresponding roadmap to execute, and relevant case studies.

Primer on content syndication

Business models: The content supply chain – creator, syndicator, aggregator, consumer
End-users: Modes of consuming syndicated content
Capabilities: Methods of syndicating content
Key service providers today

Defining your enterprise content syndication strategy

Understanding the current situation – Who is syndicating content in your company today? What methods and capabilities are employed?
Coming together around a unified strategy – One size fits most, or a little something for everyone?
The relationship to your media plan – Is syndicated content information or advertising?
Defining your target content syndication network: A disciplined approach to managing your message reach
Establishing processes and governance
Measuring success

Case studies

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