Groups that matter most:

1. The author of the content being generated. This includes producers and managers but also users who contribute to the development of your content.
2. The desired audience. These are the people who read, use, and perhaps generate some of your content.
3. Machines with the capability to “read” your content.

1. Authors

Ultimately content managers and authors are responsible for your content. Like the general web public their use and expectation of tools has changed significantly of the past number of decades and the tools that they now use has expanded to include new tools including Blackberry phones and other mobile browsers and applications such as RSS readers.

However if CMS do not address the desires of your target audience, content can potentially suffer. There are a number of things to consider:

Trust

One has to consider whether it is better to have undesirable content on display for a short period of time or restrictions imposed preventing users from posting something useful. The old adage of “trust but verify” is applicable in these situations.

The User Experience

Essentially this boils down to the Web 2.0 experience. Applications which support AJAX improve the user’s experience. New CMS provide interfaces which are rich and usable and are more rewarding for the user to use.

Immediacy

Traditional CMS place restrictions on users. Typically a user needed permission to perform a function and had to wait for permission to be granted before continuing with their task. If a piece of work can be done in one sitting then it is far more likely to be completed.

Simplicity

It is important to reduce clutter. Companies such as Google have hid the complexity of their software to the delight of their users.

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2. The Audience

Your audience, traditionally just lay people, have now become participants. New CMS must have the ability to integrate your audience as participants and deliver quality Web 2.0 tools that users expect.

Ways to do this include:

Flexibility

Look for systems that are flexible and do not lock you into top-down information. Innovative systems have a rich tagging system and a query based navigation.

Social Bookmarking

This allows users to create resources that identify assets and categorise them in a manner that is useful to the external world.

Multi Device

Most phones are now web enabled. For some a Blackberry is a computer. Publishing to different devices such as phones where screen sizes are smaller requires content to be laid out and structured in a manner that is manageable.

3. Machines

Supporting formats such as RSS allows your community to easily have access to your content and ultimately to add value to your service. Ignoring the growing number of machines and software that who can read your content is a costly oversight. Some things to consider are:

Public API

Google Maps spread quickly because of a simple API and a low barrier to use them. API’s have the potential to create partnerships.

Syndicating

Syndicating your content in machine readable formats such as RSS allows your community to stay informed without regularly visiting your website. Syndicating also allows your content to be displayed in high traffic resources such as Yahoo, MSN and Google.

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