The Crave
Monthly tips and stories that will help you do your job and make you smile (or groan).
By Jerry Virta January 31, 2023
All I want for 2023 is (more) content collaboration
We’re all familiar with the “new year, new me” ideology. We promise to eat more green and learn how to knit. We buy a 2-year gym membership just to show up three times in the first half of January.
Here’s an idea: why not set a resolution to collaborate more and better with your colleagues? It is a resolution you can tackle together.
Content creation sometimes feels like running a marathon: you drag yourself to the finish line after hours of focusing on telling yourself, “you’ve got this.” (Running a marathon is a great new year’s resolution that you can sign up for, by the way.) But what if you see content creation as a team sport instead?
Learning how to collaborate with your content creators can take time, but it is worth the effort.
It takes the right processes, people, and tech to hit the content collaboration home run—my sports references are on fire today. Here’s an example of a content workflow built around team collaboration you can work(out) with:
🧠 Ideation
Throw a cross-departmental (well-structured and thought-out) brainstorming extravaganza. It takes an hour or two, and you have more than enough material to start crafting the content. Often, there’s so much valuable insight left over that you end up creating multiple content pieces.
You get a piece, and you get a piece, and you get a piece. 😉
🎨 Creation
Empower subject-matter experts to write or at least be directly involved in the content creation process for their needs. To ensure top-notch grammar and spelling, I advise using a spell-checker or proofreading tool. I use Grammarly (and it’s great).
Once the content is there, all you need is a brand check, and ta-da, you have another expert piece to share with the world.
🔍 Review
Set clear expectations for stakeholders: how many iteration rounds are offered and the deadline for feedback. It’s not always easy setting boundaries, but it’s necessary. You can’t spend your time chasing others for feedback. Commitment to collaboration is a two-way street.
Find tech that allows you to collaborate seamlessly on this. Find a content creation platform that enables you to review and comment directly on the piece.
🚀 QA and publishing
One thing I swear by is a pre-publishing QA checklist that anyone can use. We use a step-by-step form that guides you through all the necessary checks. You can check it out here.
This way, you can let more people in the company publish content without you losing sleep over the quality of it.
Letting more cooks in the kitchen (yes, I perceive cooking as a sport) enriches your content and gives it flavors you haven’t experienced before.
Let’s talk about it together!
Share your thoughts on LinkedIn using #TheCraveDiscussion This week’s topic: How many marketers does it take to knit a jumper? 🧶
Jerry Virta
Content Operations Specialist
About the author
I’m Foleon’s content governance police and quality gatekeeper. Besides telling people what to do, I enjoy creating written and visual content, wandering in nature, and consuming trash tv.
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