The Crave
Weekly tips and stories that will help you do your job and make you smile (or groan).
By Julie Alexander June 2, 2022
What Content Managers can learn from the Winchester Mystery House
After the passing of her husband and her daughter, Sarah Winchester inherited today’s equivalent of $576 million. She also continued to collect an additional $28,000 a day from her shares of the Winchester Repeating Arms company. Racked with guilt and believing she’d received a message from her dead husband, Sarah was convinced it was her duty to build a home for the spirits of all those who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles. So in 1886, Sarah Winchester moved to California to build a house. And she kept building that house for the next 38 years. It would, in fact, go on to earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as longest continuous house construction. By the time Sarah passed away in 1922 — at which time construction immediately ceased — the house was out of control. In its final form, Winchester Mystery House had 160 rooms including 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 10,000 window panes, 2,000 doors, 52 skylights, 47 fireplaces, three elevators, two basements — and one shower. When I think of this story, I can’t help but draw parallels to what it can feel like to scale content production.
You and your team continue to create more content, hoping it will be impactful, and behind the scenes, the processes continue to proliferate.
Sometimes it seems there’s never enough content to keep everyone happy — whether it’s leadership, other departments, or the demanding SEO gods. So you get to work building. You create processes. The processes seem to work for a while (or at least give you some semblance of order and control) but they’re not quite right, or not quite enough, so you tweak them and create more. You and your team continue to create more content, hoping it will be impactful, and behind the scenes, the processes continue to proliferate. Before you know it, you’re sitting in a monstrous mansion with doors opening up to walls and staircases leading to ceilings. You’ve built yourself in and you’ve come so far that the only thing you can do is keep building. And then when you leave, it stops. Because no one else understands the processes. No one else can make sense of the madness, and everything you built becomes a mausoleum. Grim, no? Hopefully, if you’ve been there, you’ve only been there once and you’ve learned from it. I won’t come out and say I have all of the answers and that I’ve cracked the code to perfectly scaling content production. But I have certainly learned from my own Winchester Mystery House. You want to know the secret? It all rests on three pillars:
- Roles
- Governance
- Empowerment
Last Tuesday I hosted a webinar together with Jerry Virta, Foleon’s Content Operations Specialist and we dove into this 3-pillar content scale-up methodology. It’s an approach that’s gotten every department in our company involved in creating content — and it’s helped our Brand & Comms team produce more than ever before.
So, if you’re feeling a little like Sarah Winchester lately, give the on-demand version a gander. And remember: you don’t have to keep building. You can always stop, take stock, kill your darlings, and start fresh.
Let’s talk about it together!
Share your thoughts on LinkedIn using #thecravediscussion This week’s topic: How do you avoid creating a Winchester Mystery House of content?
Julie van der Weele
Head of Brand & Comms
About the author
When I’m not thinking up B2B marketing strategies and processes, you’ll find me in the kitchen, at the yoga studio, or in my favorite chair with a cat and a book.
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