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Zen and the Art of Web Content Management

[Note: This post originally appeared as exclusive content on LinkedIn. Click here to read the complete article.]

This is going to sound extremely off-topic but bear with me for a moment. How many of us remember our first cars fondly? How many of us also had to learn to love and live with plenty of the quirks and imperfections of those cars?  For all the idiosyncrasies we had to endure, the places you had to hit to get the radio to turn on, the way you had to roll down the window and open the door from the outside because the inside latch was broken, we loved those cars. They were literal representations of freedom to someone who’d never had that kind of autonomy before, and that was worth whatever we had to endure to get it.

Now, to scuff a bit of the nostalgic gleam, I want you to imagine yourself still using your first car today. With the busy adult lives we lead, it’s all that most of us can do to keep things running smoothly when we don’t have to give a second thought to our transportation. How effective would you be at what you do today if you also had to frequently top off a radiator, change a tire, or stand in a parking lot with a set of jumper cables, hoping to catch a good Samaritan walking out of the store?

CMS Nostalgia

I think the evolution in transportation is a very illustrative analogy for what’s happening in the digital marketing space right now, and within content management in particular. The first content management systems had all kinds of quirks, but what they represented was a similar kind of heady freedom that was intoxicating to marketers. With direct control over the message that users saw, over the last decade, the evolution of content management systems has been largely driven by these technical marketers and what they wanted from their platforms.

The Rise of a Multi-Channel World

However, now that there are now so many different ways and channels in which to distribute your content, it’s impossible to give all of them equal focus. This multi-channel world is changing the picture of the daily life of a digital marketer considerably…so what do you do? While letting go of CMS control may be a hard step to take, you're going to  need to embrace this CMS evolution. Here's how you can get started:...

Click here to read this full article on LinkedIn.