Content Management, the Art of Form!

Content management is a service that is unknown to the general public and businesses, but that concerns us all on a daily basis! It is defined as the process of collecting and transcribing information in all formats, audio, video, or written.

This involves both the inspiring writing of product presentations, as well as videos or photos, a somewhat vague definition that an example will clarify!

| The Role of the Content Manager

A customer consults an online catalog with the idea of buying a particular object, a refrigerator for example. He has certain requirements, the freezer must be of sufficient size, have an ice dispenser, and have a vegetable drawer, all without exceeding one meter eighty-five in height.

Confined, he goes to the website of his usual supplier of household appliances but when he submits his criteria, he is faced with a list of six hundred refrigerators, scattered over twenty-two pages. Worse! He finds the desired device but its size is not mentioned.

He will then have to check these measurements on another website. He searches for the reference and lands on Amazon.fr, which provides him with all the necessary information along with a more attractive price. Darty has just lost a customer, an error that would not have occurred with good content management.

As you may have guessed, the content manager contributes to the development of an online sales space through a process of information search, sometimes creative writing, and content standardization. This objective extends from the description to product photos, including the creation of logos for small restaurateurs on platforms such as Just Eat.

It is a niche job, rarely perceived at its true value. Thus, we rarely perceive the amount of Sisyphean work done by these thousands of people (over 2,400 at Webhelp working in 25 different languages).

To quote Martin Le Bars, Product Owner at Webhelp: “It is the nature of a support activity, if it is lacking, the company sinks, but as long as it is functional, no one notices.” We too often underestimate the importance of this field in a period that is nevertheless conducive to the digitalization of businesses.

| Towards a Content Moderator

Like many areas of digital technology, content management is seeing its practice significantly impacted by the evolution of technological tools. Where men and women were faced with a daunting, tedious, and rarely fulfilling task, it is expected that artificial intelligence will take over.

They will allow humans to unload these repetitive tasks by automatically filling in product sheets, for example, without error or delay. The paradigm is thus overturned. The period where humans were assisted by machines is now being reversed. When advantageous, such as in this case, it will soon be the machine that acts, supervised by the human being.

The role of the content manager will continue to move closer to that of content moderator, two fields that are already closely related. Product sheets will be submitted to these new moderators, and it will be up to them to accept or modify certain elements as needed.

This freed-up time will encourage quality and creativity to ensure a better customer experience while improving the attractiveness of this profession.

Today, online sales, the only means of maintaining activity for many businesses, are standardizing. Each platform thus enters digital competition in an expanded market where proximity plays no role, strongly confirming the importance of a competitive digital catalog and therefore the intervention of a content manager.