B2B Content Marketing

Why a taxonomy?

A little background, when I started in IT, back in 1981, I worked with a reference librarian at a large global company, her system would allow us to pull data up on request, serve it and on to the next request.    I liked that, it was simple, there was process, it was repeatable and best of all it was labeled, cataloged, sorted.  It was manageable. Then what happened?

From 1986-1992, my wife and I had 4 children, if we did not implement and have a process and order, things would of gotten out of hands very quickly.  I think that is where we are now, everyone is in a race to get their content on the web but often apply no rhyme or reason to what content, where is it coming from, how to serve it, why someone needs it, who needs it and why they need it.

In the hopes of helping others bring order to a process, our taxonomy framework will adopt, modify and adjust 2 open source frameworks:  The APQC Process Classification Framework (PCF) and the component and tagging concepts of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).

What is the value a taxonomy?

Often times when I hear the word, “content inventory” mentioned it is not in the best of light.  It is not a fun or glamorous work, to wade through page after page of multi-format content types looking for valuable data to be included in the components of a content strategy.  It is hard work, tedious and boring.  Yet, there are functional commonalities and content components in business process across companies; it’s called SG&A. With standard components we can serve any content anywhere quicker and more efficiently.

Why SG&A?  Introducing the component frameworks:

As we know each business process function and process has content assets, we choose SG&A because SG&A is measurable, for public companies in the U.S.A., through GaaP and soon to be IFRS. SG&A allows us to evaluate cost variances and justify process and content optimization initiatives.

What’s next?

We are mapping the PCF into content components; each component will have content assets.  When complete we will have a standard list of content components across SG&A.  With a content taxonomy your content strategy will be easier to create, adopt, rollout and maintain.

Since this is an open source project many hands make short work.  If you are interested in participating or have subject matter expertise in a functional area we would love to hear from you.