Write Once, Distribute Many: Part Deux

Reaching the people for whom documents are intended is no longer “merely” a matter of sending Word files to the right email addresses, putting books and magazines in the right stores, and/or mailing catalogs to the right houses.

Instead, it’s increasingly about making content available anywhere and everywhere a targeted reader might be – including places where printed material may not be handy or even preferred – and doing so without having to deal with multiple workflows to repurpose the content each time.

This issue is coming to the fore because of the accelerating acceptance of Web sites, smart phones, e-book readers, and the like, which are giving readers choices in terms of searchability, portability, and convenience that they can’t get from paper and are beginning to miss when reading printed works.

Thankfully, many software solutions now exist – most using tried-and-true ECM technologies of different sorts – to facilitate the kind of multichannel distribution options people want. Transforming a document’s content so it can be delivered to and displayed on multiple devices still isn’t fully automatic, but there are a sufficient number of technical standards on tap to make the process manageable. The technology also can be acquired either as a package or on a service basis, so it is now more accessible than ever.

The result is that the business case is now emerging to make multichannel delivery a reality. Savvy corporate and publishing industry executives are waking up to the operational efficiencies, environmental effects, and financial gains that can be achieved by embracing the multichannel model. The trick now is to embrace the changes quickly and willingly lest they lose competitive ground at a time they can least afford to do so.

(More to come, here and elsewhere ... stay tuned!)

Write Once, Distribute Many: The Content Publisher’s Dream

You spend days, weeks, sometimes months gathering your facts, composing your content, obtaining the necessary reviews and approvals, formatting the document, and, in most cases, either printing it to paper or creating a PDF so you can send it out.

And then the questions come:

• I don’t really need all of this. Can you send me only the pages I care most about?
• I’m about to get on a plane. Can I get this on my smartphone so I can read it there?
• I’d really like my whole team to see what you wrote. Can you put it all on the Web?

Sure! you say. Love to! But who has time to reformat all that content so it displays properly on all those different media? What you really need is a tool that can take what you wrote and automatically ready it for distribution in whatever ways your readers desire.

Fortunately, such tools actually do exist, and yours truly is about to take a snapshot of ‘what is,’ ‘what could be,’ and where the benefits accrue.

Please let me know, here or via a private message, if you have any experience with multichannel publishing – good or bad – and/or if there are particular vendors you’d like me to query. Depending upon the response, I’ll let you know what I find out.