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Content Everywhere

Modular, reusable content is a force multiplier.

Your website is not going to become a destination. There just aren’t that many of those, and the ones that do exist either provide content you can’t get anywhere else, offer a truly exceptional user experience, or both. You lack the organizational culture for the first and the budget for the second.

But your failure to become a destination site doesn’t doom your communications efforts—provided that you’re ready for your digital strategy to evolve beyond “post a document to your website.”

The move to content everywhere demands a paradigm shift.

Writers must embrace modular content, viewing content as functional elements rather than as documents. And web managers must think digital publishing rather than websites or webpages.

Unfortunately, there are no interim steps, no Content Everywhere-lite that allows you to keep your Word documents and still magically publish everywhere. Getting to Content Everywhere means changing how you think about writing. It means changing the tools you use for writing. It means changing how you think about design. And it most definitely means changing how you build your CMS.

But in a world of infinite content, your choices are to become a destination site or to put your content on existing destinations. Very few can do the former.

For the rest of us, it’s time to get cracking. Those paradigms aren’t gonna shift themselves.

For more context

What does it mean to treat content as functional elements?

What to read next

What's wring with my CMS?

Other items of interest

What would a better writing tool look like?

What do you mean by treating content as documents?

What's wrong with documents?

Referenced in

Back to WonkComms and Superheroes

This is the content everywhere model. It’s one in which you create modular content that you can remix and push out across multiple channels. No single output is a “main” thing. Rather, each blog post, each tweet, each infographic, each op-ed tells part of the story.

Omnichannel (definition)

Omnichannel is a refinement of the kind of multi-channel approach that I've called content everywhere. Where the content everywhere approach is aimed at delivering content on multiple channels, "Omnichannel is about understanding and optimizing for the entire journey across all channels," as Noz Urbina writes.