The Stanford Prison Experiment looked at what happened psychologically when you placed some people in positions of power and other’s in positions of vulnerability (wardens and prisoners). Irrespective of their previous internal moral ‘clock’ – how would they behave?

The simulation carried out by Stanford University in the summer of 1971 was ended prematurely because of the impact it had on its university participants. Those students who were given the role of prison guards showed themselves capable of brutality. The students consigned to prisoner roles became stressed and depressed (as if their confinement were real).

Stanford, and the earlier Milgram experiment conducted at Yale University, opened up interesting questions, not just about the deeper, darker side of human nature but how we behave when we assume a role, or are put into a certain situation. As psychology professor Phil Zimbardo, who led the Stanford research team, puts it: “Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behaviour, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.”

Okay, now the digital communication segue…

While I’m not suggesting that digital content ‘controllers’ will ever resort to beatings and electric shocks, there is often a divide between those who police the content and those who do not. These schisms can exist between online content commissioners / editors and content producers / authors. Or between active members of the content team and ‘the rest’. The rest being anybody in an organisation that doesn’t take an active role in web, email, digital messaging strategy, development and delivery. It can also exist between on and offline teams (marketing, editorial, brand…).

The Stanford experiment didn’t end prematurely because the research team had learnt everything there was to know, but because they became alarmed at how quickly the abuse of roles and situations occurred.

So in any situation where there is authority and lack of authority there is the opportunity for abuse.

I can’t make over entire organisational hierarchies on the basis of the above premise, but I can suggest discreet changes to the way online content oligarchies are handled. That may seem a small change but just think about the influence your online content has on your brand and therefore on how wider audiences perceive your organisation. Plus online is relatively young and still relatively fluid. In-house content processes are not set in stone. Change them while you still can.

Where to start?

Who are the content controllers and what power do they have? A healthy content process has checks and balances in place reflecting different content steers. This shouldn’t be a cumbersome process but a light matrix approach to ensure that core organisational values, the needs of marketing and sales, corporate information, plus the rigours of online execution and presentation are held in balance.

When changes are made to online process and / or presentation – a new website, extensions to email campaigns etc – who is consulted (and who isn’t)? It’s hard for people to be all fired up about the company website if the only time they’re consulted about it is retrospectively: “Oh, the new website launches in 3 weeks. We need your new page content ASAP. Did you not get the email?)

How do you regularly test the water in terms of existing content processes and how they are viewed internally? Zimbardo points out that at some stage there is a shift from what’s reasonable to what isn’t. How would you know if this shift happened within your organisation’s digital content process?

If existing online content processes and manifestations aren’t working, do people (outside any content claque) feel empowered to say ‘this isn’t working’ or ‘our new website is rubbish’? If the emperor is in the buff you need to know quickly. Online is everybody’s business.

Checks and balances

A qualitative content audit can throw up weaknesses is existing systems. It needs to be carried out by an external team (but this could involve different departments or areas of online activity critiquing each other’s work).

Content should be reviewed against organisational values and Tone of Voice, online ambition and audiences. You may want to read an earlier post on personas (I’ve popped the link at the bottom of this post). I’ll work up a personality for any site I’m reviewing (as if it was a flesh and blood member of the team). If your website sat at the next desk, would you share your sandwiches with it?

I also came up with this acronym. I think you should be answering ‘yes’ to 6 out of 9 points.

1. Can a wide range of people within your organisation suggest a digital change and / or refinement and know someone will take notice?

2. Have they got a clear idea about who to approach if something isn’t working right – broken website links, poorly coded emails, spelling mistakes online… (or know where to find out)?

3. Are new digital projects only embarked upon after a well-rounded opinion-seeking process and shared collective understanding?

4. Little digital errors (page not found, spelling errors, broken links…) rarely happen.

5. Large digital errors (website down, email campaigns producing little or no response…) rarely happen.

6. Everyone takes an interest in what rour company is doing digitally, even if they’re not actively involved.

7. No faction, department, skillset, business unit, or organisational activity feels excluded (frozen out).

8. Guards need walls. Are the processes and decisions made about how your brand is communicated online done in clear view?

9. Eyes (2), ears (2) mouth (1). Is your organisation watching and listening to what’s been done and said online rather than simply talking about it. You should watch and listen more than you speak.

Internal link

>> More about personas

>> The 7 ages of content maturity table (towards the end of this post)

Find out more about the Stanford and Milgram experiments (I’ll open these links in a new window):

>> Stanford Prison experiment website

>> The Stanley Milgram Experiment

Here’s a question – if content is king, how come it hasn’t got a seat on the board? Or a top of the range company car? How come content doesn’t sit in on senior management team meetings? Hm?

At best most organisations treat content rather like a middle manager that everybody believes has been promoted beyond their competence. Nobody disrespects them to their face but neither do they give them any real power. And they certainly don’t need to keep content in the loop.

I know what you’re thinking. The Lab Rats have got a bee in their bonnet and are blowing it up out of all proportion. (Can you blow up a bee? Isn’t that apian cruelty? Ed.)

Okay, the title ‘Content Manager’ is a fairly common one, but Content Managers are very rarely – if ever – at the top of the management food chain. And what about Content Directors? Visit one of the big jobs’ websites, put Content Director in the search engine and see what comes up. Then put in IT Director. See what I mean?

Yet everybody pays lip service to the fact that content is critical. Content is what allows us to engage with and shape the experiences of our customers, prospects and users. Content is what we use to create conversations online. It’s what we use to create usefulness – ‘this is how to buy in our online shop’, ‘this is where you download the form you need’, ‘here’s how this website / email /digital message will enable you to do what it is you want to do’.

But we still treat content as something that just needs to be sliced and spliced. Content is something we control – not something that exerts control in its own right. We ‘chunk it’, ‘cut it’, ‘edit it. We approach content with mental scissors (or by in scissor expertise to keep content under control).

(The sound you can now hear is a million Content Managers, and one or two Content Directors, hammering at the lab door and baying for my blood. A few of them are waving scissors. This could turn nasty.)

So I need to state here and now that if I ruled the world content would be supreme commander and Grand Poobah in every organisation. When the CEO played golf on Saturday he’d invite content to tee off with him. Content would have dinner with Alan Sugar and Barack Obama regularly. I rate content, okay? Put the scissors down.

Why Content needs a seat on the board

Content and its keepers must be elevated is we are  to truly exert its power to communicate and influence. Those who control it within organisations need to conduct peer to peer conversations at the higest level; not just about its use but its governance, budgets, its strategy and the wider social responsibilities that come with publishing and broadcasting. Particularly when the platform is as powerful as the internet.

The larger and more influential the organisation the more critical that its key content personnel are recruited and deployed at the most senior level. (This should be so for all organisations, not just the farsighted ones.) This is especially pertinent for public sector, goverment and quasi govermental organisations whose brands are also trustmarks for people seeking advice or reassurance. To ensure content is relevant, accurate, up to date (or suitably archived); to ensure is is adequately budgeted for and considered at a strategic level, it needs its own big cheese.

I’ve just joined a Google Group on Content Strategy. At the moment I’m just observing from the corners of the room but I’ve been struck but some of the arguments (and who’s doing the arguing). Serious hitters, every one. For example, Rahel Anne Bailie, Content Strategist / CM Consultant,  Intentional Design Inc, who observes how the customer value proposition may suffer if those developing the content are taken outside their knowledge base and not supported into new skills and knoweldge sets (which is, I think,  increasingly likely to happen as we harness a growing range of socio-adaptive, potentially vetuperative, user-centric platforms).

We need to bring on our content keepers, so that they are mixing on a daily basis with higher management and boardroom echelons. This is the level at which serious strategic skillsets are traded and mashed. Get content into that arena and we are creating (for the future) more rounded senior people who understand content as well as they do a balance sheet. Your current CEO may well have previously been a Director of Finance. Might your future CEO once have been the Director of Content?

Content and what happened with HR

I’m tempted to draw some parallels between Content now and  the position of Human Resources / Human Capital some years back. HR has a much higher profile these days. It reflects the fact that organisations became increasingly aware of both the potential and potential risk that was encapsulated in people. And not just senior people, but the employee driving a van or working the post room. It’s the same with content. It’s very easy to get excited about the content for the ‘big, new website launch’ or the ‘bumper annual report’, while that PDF languishing at the back end of some deserted, 4th level down, sub-page heirarchy, (out of date and poorly worded), still has the ability to bite you on the corporate bum and shame your brand.

So, I’m wondering, could you interpret an organisation’s content maturity, in part, from the seniority of its content keepers? (See my visual musing below: 7 ages of content maturity within orgnisations, with apologies to William Shakespeare.)

The maturation of HR function wasn’t just about watching out for the bad stuff that could happen – unfair dismissal claims, workplace bullying and the like – but also about providing the structure and support that enabled an organisation’s human capital to be the best it could be. HR maturity (and increasingingly senior titles for HR players) brought with it huge leaps forward in terms of equality and diversity, mentoring, workplace learning… Oh the wonder if content was treated and respected in the same way.

Seamus Walsh of Vazt, also part of the Content Strategy Google Group, sent out the rallying cry ‘Has the time come for a Chief Content Officer?’ at the end of April this year. It was his clarion that prompted me to join the group (that and the very bossy co-founder of CDA). As Walsh put it: “Enterprise content is a corporate asset, yet it is  one of the only assets that is not represented on the executive leader team.    I firmly believe that an ‘enterprise content strategy’, with gap  analysis can help a company be more effective and efficient.  Frankly, I think removing IA role out of IT and moving in into the business in  an executive capacity will do the trick.’

So far there are about 33 messages triggered by Walsh – not all gung ho by a long chalk. One concern is that as debates about roles can quickly become political. The implication being that the thoughtful conversations about content and its management will be dismissed as talk designed to facilitate greasy pole climbing.

Another message that caught my eye was someone saying that they wouldn’t want to go into a job as a Chief Content Officer if the organization didn’t already have high content values. Just appointing someone senior with a fancy title doesn’t change orgnisational structure or culture. What we’re talking about here (well, what I’m talking about here) goes deeper than simply a title.

I believe that senior content appointments could have a profound influence on our industry. After all, it is acknowledged that leadership plays a major role in organisational change. Why shouldn’t content leadership have as important an influence?

Me? I’m holding out for the title of Grand Poobah.

With due credit to the big hitters and the Content Strategy Goggle Group

>> Content Strategy – Google Groups

>> Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design Inc

>> Seamus Walsh, Vazt