Editor's Note: portions of this post come from viewing a DNN webinar presented by Carrie Hane titled "How the Right CMS Makes Content Future-Friendly." We include Carrie’s slide presentation below. For more information about Carrie, visit the Tanzen website.

We have never lived in a more oversaturated content environment than we do now. We have images and hashtags and blog posts demanding our attention at every turn. Our environments have become so overwhelming that we’re surrounded with white noise from what has become too much content.

Most of this content is weak. It's not actionable at its best, and downright inaccurate at its worst. Even if your content is great, getting it in front of the right audience means you have to cut through all that white noise—and that’s increasingly difficult to do. As a result, readers' attention spans are rapidly declining, with 55% of users that click on a page will read for only 15 seconds or less.

Related Presentation

Editor's Note: Here's the presentation from Carrie Hane's webinar.

How the Right CMS Makes Content Future-Friendly from DNN

Content Consumption Trends

It's hard to completely wrap our heads around just how much content is being created. Approximately 2 million blog posts are published every single day, and about 400 hours of new video are being uploaded by users on YouTube every minute of every day.

Users even share enormous amounts of content on a daily basis, sharing about 1.3 million pieces of content on Facebook per minute. This content doesn't just demand our attention when we're sitting in front of a computer; it can pop up on your phone, your watch, your fridge, and your TV.

Some content will even send you notifications, encouraging you to Read Now!

We’re constantly connected to all these devices through more methods than ever before, with Bluetooth, WiFi, and data, all of which may use a number of different applications to display your content.

How We Consume Content: Mobile, Digital Assistants, Voice Search and More

By Dennis Shiao

The Challenge for Content Creators

This overabundance content and constantly accessibility isn't just overwhelming for our readers, it's overwhelming for businesses and content creators, too. Content creators now must struggle with ensuring that each piece of content will be displayed correctly on every browser and every type of device imaginable; our blog posts don't just have to be mobile-friendly, but watch-friendly and fridge-friendly, too.

In the midst of all of this, we have websites that are increasingly difficult to maintain, which end up hoarding information that is difficult to distribute. This significantly limits us, our content, and our results.

The Future of Content

The future is rapidly approaching, and if you're not proactive, your business will lag behind quickly. We're already seeing significant strides in the technology that will define the future of content, some of which we’re already using on a daily basis. Here's what's coming soon:

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence sounds like something distant and faraway, but we're already using it. Apple’s Siri can intelligently answer human questions, and Google has created self-driving cars that may actually be safer than cars with humans behind the wheel.

Plenty of sites are already implementing chatbots on their sites and on Facebook Messenger to be able to provide quick customer service, personalized recommendations, and content curation abilities to visitors.

Note: Read our related post, "Could IBM Watson Be an Online Community Manager?"

Screenless Interfaces

As technology evolves and becomes more accessible, we'll move closer to screenless interfaces. Typing commands into a phone or laptop is no problem; typing them into a watch or a pair of glasses is much more difficult.

We already have keyboards that can be projected onto a flat space, as well as the ability to vocally communicate with many of our devices. Dictation and voice command technologies are becoming more advanced, so you can have more natural conversations with your devices.

Editor's Note: In this short video, DNN Software's Joe Brinkman shows how an Amazon Echo can talk to our CMS.

Portable Interactive Devices

Technology is accessible and it's mobile, and this is a trend that will only increase in the future of content. We're already seeing everything from portable interactive whiteboards available for classrooms and kiosks that can travel to exhibit floors and provide information to viewers.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (or IoT) is the network of devices that can be connected to the Internet. In the near future, we'll see increases of machines that can talk to machines through an internet connection.

Your printer could send you a notification on your phone alerting you that your ink was running out, along with a prompt to instantly reorder it with a few clicks.

Devices that Talk to Each Other

Devices that can talk to each other will become more prevalent. Our phones can already talk to our car through Bluetooth to play our music through the car's speakers, and we can instantly send pictures from a computer to a phone with air drop. With these capabilities, information can be shared across systems, providing immediate accessibility.

What Do These Technologies Have in Common?

The future of content is gravitating towards exceptional personalization, immediacy, and constant accessibility.

This isn’t just about making sure your site loads as fast as your competitors. Instead of a five-second loading time difference, we'll see the difference of a business with artificial intelligence that can immediately recommend entire personalized outfits for a boutique's customers instead of a "Users Also Viewed" plugin at the bottom of the page.

Not only will the former site sell a lot more, it will also have increased client retention rates, as users are able to get personalized suggestions that improve their shopping experience.

How to Make Content Future-Ready

As information spreads seamlessly to more channels, more systems, and more devices, you need to ensure you have a content platform that’s ready to reach these channels. To do this, you'll want to take a structured content approach.

What is Structured Content?

Structured content is exactly what it sounds like; it follows specific formats or contains specific sets of attributes.

This type of content will be planned, developed, and connected outside of an interface so that it can be easily altered and distributed.

Recipe cards are an example of how structured content can surface online. The cards display the recipe name, a description, cooking times, ingredient lists, nutritional value, an image, and step-by-step instructions in a clean, consistent format.

Structured content focuses more on specific content types instead of entire web pages, which will be essential in the future.

Why Do We Need Structured Content?

Structured content is much easier to alter or adapt both now and in the future, allowing you to quickly and effortlessly aggregate, syndicate, mashup, re-use, and distribute your content across multiple channels.

What is Structured Content? Definition, Benefits and How to Get Started

By Dennis Shiao

Structured content relies on metadata that computers can easily identify, allowing for more seamless content connection and distribution. This makes your content much easier to find for both the computers and the humans searching for it.

Structured content also aids in distribution, allowing your content to be displayed on any interface. This provides consistency and error-free displays of your content, regardless of what channel, browser, or device users view it on.

Why the Right CMS is Essential

Structured content requires a content-centric Content Management System (CMS), as opposed to page-centric CMS solution. In page-centric CMS solutions, content must be tied to a page and can't exist outside of it.

In a content-centric CMS solution, content exists in chunks that can be easily shared across different channels: websites, mobile apps, web applications and even Internet of Things (IoT).

To start creating structured content, create models and formats for different content types, starting with one type of content at a time. For example, you could start with news articles, then product pages, and then move on to events.

Each type of content will have specific properties and data types that need to be added for each piece of content that fits into the category.

An Events content type might consist of the following attributes:

• Event name
• Location
• Date
• Time
• Image
• Organizing Brand
• Contact Email
• Description

Before jumping right to create structured content items in your CMS software, a fair amount of content planning must come first. You’ll want to identify the built-in content types available in your CMS, then determine which custom content types to create.

You’ll save a lot of time by planning your content types first, and it’s much easier to build the system around the model you’ve carefully designed.

The Benefits from Choosing the Right CMS

The right CMS platform is future-ready, one that allows your content to travel wherever it needs to go. The right CMS stores content in chunks instead of pages, making it more adaptable and re-usable. You can do much more with less work.

The benefits of choosing the right CMS:

You can change the design and architecture of your site without a complete redesign

You can even change your CMS. Because your content exists outside of pages, it stays put and is protected even when everything else needs an update.

You can do multi-channel content publishing with a single piece of content

Since your content exists as independent chunks instead of being tied to a page, it's much simpler to distribute it to multiple channels with just a few clicks.

You can integrate with other systems more easily

Software can now read your content as data, allowing you to house your content all in one place while allowing for full integration with other technologies you need to run your business, including your mobile app.

You re-use content throughout the websites or to other channels

Snippets of content can be created once and reused in different places through your site. A person's biography, for example, can appear in one format underneath a blog post they’ve written and be displayed in another format on your "About Our Team" page.

You improve SEO

Because structured content is readable data that computer systems can understand, a CMS platform that allows for structured content will provide immense SEO benefits. Search engines will be able to more quickly identify and understand your content, giving you a boost in rankings and a leg up on your competition.

How to Choose the Right, Future-Ready CMS

While most businesses and content authors are happy with their current CMS product, it's important to understand whether the system is page-centric or content-centric. To prepare content for the future, a content-centric CMS solution is essential.

What Content Management Systems Are Not Future-Ready?

A Content Management System that is page-centric will limit users very quickly. Content is tied to specific pages, and the content is trapped there. These CMS systems would more aptly be called website builders, because their main purpose is to build pages on a website. They're not able to do digital publishing beyond websites.

Many of these systems aren't capable of helping you reach your full potential, because content is tied to a page; it's not stored outside of an interface. This results in distribution to different channels challenging, and content is stagnant and stuck instead of fluid and dynamic.

What Does the Right CMS Look Like?

"Are you ready for the future of content and everything that it brings?"

To create dynamic, personalized, and engaging content that can be consistently accessible, you must choose a content-centric CMS solution. This enables you to more effortlessly and seamlessly tell your brand's story. The right CMS takes a structured content approach, meaning that it separates content from its interface and allows it to exist without being tied to a page.

Not everyone is used to taking a structured content approach. It’s a change, and for many, it will be a new way of thinking and creating content. But the future is coming and our businesses' success relies on us being ready for it. We can struggle to survive, or prepare and thrive.

Are you ready for the future of content and everything that it brings?

Evoq: A Future-Ready CMS

Your website is not the primary destination it used to be: your customers are on apps and they’re speaking to digital assistants. With Evoq, your content can find your customers on these channels.

In Evoq, content is stored outside of an interface. This helps you surface the right content on your Evoq website and have it published anywhere.

Complete our request form and we'll schedule a custom demo for you and your team.