How much is your content worth?

Wie viel ist Ihr Content wert?

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How much is your content worth?

Traditionally the value of a company is shown through material procedures of evaluation in the balance sheet. However, more and more companies tend to make also immaterial values a component of their balance sheet. Particularly human resources can be found as new balance-sheet value in the balance sheet of future-oriented companies.

Content as assets in our balance sheet

If people are integrated as human resources in the balance sheet, why should we not show content as assets in our balance sheet? There are different reasons why content is excellently suitable as assets:

• content helps us to sell
• is an essential part of the after-sales service
• supports the branding
• improves work productivity through knowledge
• improves the work morale through information and
• initiates automated processes and reduces costs

Which value does content have in practice?

Unfortunately we still pay little attention to content. A lot of managers predominantly still consider content as cost factor and not as assets. In addition to this, there is a divided relationship with writing. Sales employees do not really like to write their reports. Consultants work hard at project descriptions and programmers prefer to programming their programmes than describing them. Websites are not maintained and intranets contain out-of-date information. There are laborious second jobs which have to be made. And to crown it all, the boss does not give us enough time anyway. Time is money and should not be wasted with unimportant things!

Unimportant? Worthless? Theoretically we know that content is not unimportant and worthless, but we do not know the real value. In practice content should not cost any money. It is only a means to an end. The more economic the content solution is the better it is. But how are we to know how effective our content solutions are?

Only the things we measure, we can evaluate

The value of content is difficult to measure and the measurement magnitudes from company to company are very different. In spite of this, there are some typical characteristics. All measurement magnitudes are used to achieve the higher target and make clear how content

• improves communication
• improves productivity and
• reduces costs

This requires at least basic knowledge of all company areas. Thus, a cross-department cooperation is the basic prerequisite for a successful content management. For this reason, the high status of content should be internalised in all company areas.

How do we measure the value of content?

Content is a part of cross-marketing. Compare the measurement magnitudes with other forms of communication. This is an immaterial size, which is difficult to quantify. It is not decisive how often an article is read but to which extent it motivates the reader to act. Not the quantity but the quality is to be measured.

For example, the content management scorecard delivers a possibility of assessment. The target is to identify content areas with high costs and low value or low costs and high value.

Example:

	Current score	Optimal score	Evaluation	Current score total	Optimal score total
Publication	4	5	30	120	150
Metadata + Classification	2	5	10	20	50
Navigation	1	5	5	5	25
Search design	3	5	20	60	100
Layout + writing	5	5	50	250	250
Total				455	575

Result: Only who measures the value of content, can evaluate his investment and effectively manage content!

03/2004, Sylvia Vorschel

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