What is Content Reuse?
Creating Content takes a lot of time and energy.
It only makes sense to reuse rather than re-write.
Every department has content that gets used... a lot
Marketing, human resources, sales, technical communication…
All of These departments constantly reuse recurring chunks of content:
* industry terms * product descriptions
* Company “about us” * Terms of service
* Assembly instructions
So, to reuse, they… copy and paste.
No sweat.
Sort of...
By “no sweat” I mean it’s fast and it takes very little effort.
At least, initially.
Fast and low effort does NOT mean it’s healthy for your documentation.
Candy bars and soda pop are easy to consume.
I never had to bargain with my child to get them to finish their chocolate bar at dinner.
But if you rely on those as staples of your diet, you start to feel the effects... quickly.
Likewise, with copy and paste, your content gets weighed down with outdated pasted items
that need constant, manual updates.
So, if not copy and paste... what’s the healthy diet your docs need?
If you’ve been watching these videos, you know that we’re obsessed with structured
content.
We made a whole video about it.
Structured content is content that conforms to a predetermined standard.
This standard makes your content understandable to systems and applications.
Structured content is also arranged as modular chunks that are self-contained like building
blocks.
They can contribute to a larger creation but they also have standalone value by themselves.
These building blocks of content are sometimes called topics, or microcontent, but we’re
going to use the word components.
Components are crucial to reuse.
With structured content, You don’t copy and paste a paragraph.
You reference and link a component.
You can learn more about components and a component content management system in one
of our other videos.
Now, Reusing components via reference and linking is a game changer.
It makes content assembly fast and easy
But even more useful, when you have to make a change, you only update the original component.
Then, the change is automatically applied to every linked component!
Ok, now that we have a general understanding of reuse, let’s get specific.
There are 4 primary ways to accomplish reuse.
1.
Topic level 2.
Element level 3.
Variable phrase level 4.
Filtering or Conditional processing
First, topics.
Topics are components of content about a single idea.
Topics make up a majority of the content we reuse.
The introduction to your sales brochures, assembly instructions, product part details,
things like that.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say that you write for a unicycle manufacturer.
You have 10 different unicycle models.
All ten of these models use the same axle crank.
With topic reuse, you write the assembly instructions once and reuse for all ten manuals.
In the future, if your part sourcing changes, you only need to update the original.
That change automatically occurs everywhere the topic was reused.
Second, element reuse.
Element reuse is similar to topic reuse.
An element is a smaller component that sits within a topic.
You might have the same element reused multiple times in the same document.
For example, you still write for that unicycle manufacturer.
Your company sells within the state of California, known for their restrictive laws on unicycle
usage.
In your brochures, you have multiple warning elements.
These warning elements state that the legal age of unicycle usage in the state of California
is 21.
You can reuse this element across all your documentation.
Ok, you just finished reusing this element when you find out that the youth of california
have revolted!
Through their activism, the oppressive restriction to their joy has been reduced.
15 is the new legal unicycle age.
You only update the original warning element for the change to apply across your documentation.
The third type of reuse is phrase or word level.
We also call it variable content.
This type is different from the previous two reuse methods.
With variable content, we can automatically change a word based on the context.
This is done by tagging certain words or phrases that are more likely to change.
* product names * company address
* Titles * Anything you like.
Content strategists can get creative with this.
Any word that is likely to change a lot receives a tag as a variable.
And then you add a context map to your content.
A context map is just a table that assigns an ID value to your variable tag.
This sounds complex, but it’s really a common idea.
You can think of it like the contacts list of your cell phone.
Let’s say you want to call your mom (call your mom, she misses you)
You would pull out your phone and select mom from the contacts list.
However, If you used a friend’s phone and selected “mom” from their contacts list…
you get the idea.
The phone uses uses a contact list to assign a phone number to a contact name
In the same way, your system uses a context map to assign an ID value to your variable
content.
In this system, you can choose different context maps that allow you to have variable content
for the same ID values.
Let’s see this in action with our Unicycle.
Here’s a topic.
Don’t read:“The [Product Name] is the perfect unicycle for [skill level] riders.
Featuring a state of the art, high-efficiency, axle-crank system, the [product name] makes
any rider feel complete control over their ride.”
You’ll see here that the product name and skill level are both tagged as variables.
If I reuse this topic for a document for the Nitro 2 Unicycle with a Nitro 2 context map...
the variables change to match the ID values from the context map.
Likewise if this was in the document for the Sun-side-Sailor, the variables would match
the context again.
This is nice with a paragraph, but consider the implications for all your content.
Days or even weeks worth of effort is done in minutes.
The last type of reuse is a way to filter content, it’s called conditional processing.
Conditional processing lets you tag components for different audiences.
It’s a great way to hyper personalize your documentation for multiple audiences.
Conditional processing is so powerful and exciting, that we made another video just
about it.
Why Does This Matter?
Structured reuse is old news with technical communicators, but it’s finally starting
to gain traction for other departments.
This is because structured reuse with components provides a way to deliver content that is:
* More personalized * More accurate
* Easier to manage * Faster to create and assemble
* Faster to publish * More exciting to develop
With Structured Content Reuse, your company knowledge is ready to deploy.