Perception

You know multichannel management is one of your biggest content operations problems because your teams tells you, all the time, in so many ways: too many channels, too many formats, too many versions, never enough time, not enough control on what gets posted. That is why you spend so much time and resourcing on trying to solve for it.

Reality

You are treating the loudest symptom as the root cause, and it’s not.

Sure, RSW research reports that 72% of leaders rank it as a top-five pain point. But more interestingly, and important I think, is that those same leaders rank governance and approvals dead last in satisfaction of any element of content operations, with only 10% being very satisfied.

It’s not suprising, at least to me, that Governance is rated the most broken thing in the operation, yet rarely does it get named, let alone prioritized or funded, as a problem that needs to be addressed. Which is, and always has been, a problem.  Broken governance does not hurt where it happens. It hurts three steps downstream and manifests itself as multichannel chaos, inconsistent quality, duplicate assets, and repetitive rounds of unscheduled (and likely unnecessary) approvals.

So, while half have a chief content officer and plenty have documented strategies and or a center of excellence, only 14% of organizations have centralized content management function. Translation: the structures exist but the formal and documented authority missing.

Why It Matters

• Tools are bought treat the symptoms, but technology isn’t the cause of the problem. And it’s not the solution either.  
• Trying to fix multichannel complexity without fixing governance may provide temporary relief, but the issues will resurface because the thing generating duplicative and off-brand versions is still generating those versions.
• Just 22% of leaders are "very satisfied" with any element of their content operations. That is not a pain point. That is a foundation problem being reported as a mood.

What Most Teams Get Wrong

1. Prioritizing by complaint volume. The loudest problem is rarely the the one are the root, it is just the teams most frequently can feel.
2. Confusing governance artifacts (a CCO, a documented strategy, a CoE) with governance authority (someone who can say no and make it stick).
3. Treating governance as a policy exercise rather than a daily operational discipline with named owners and enforced decisions.

What to Do Instead

1. Take your top three pain points and ask of each one: what upstream decision, or missing decision, produces this? Keep asking until you hit something that is a rule issue rather than workload issue.
2. Fix the front door before the factory floor. Intake, prioritization, and the authority to decline low-value work will do more for multichannel complexity than any orchestration tool.
3. Score content ops on what you’re confident is working not on the pain points. The lowest confidence score usually points at the cause of the problem whereas the highest pain score typically points to the effect of the problem.

Try this with your team: Run two lists side by each: what hurts most and what are we least confident is working well. Rank both. If the top of one list is not the top of the other, you have just found the gap between where the pain shows up and where the problem lives. Focus on solving the confidence issues.

Seventh Bear Take

Pain tells you where to look; it does not tell you what to fix.

Every operation has a loud problem and a quiet one. And too often it’s the loud problem that gets the budget, the tool, and the steering committee. And the quiet problem keeps on producing the loud one.

Governance is almost always the quiet problem: it scores worst, gets named least, and causes most issues. Start there and half the noisy list solves itself.

Deeper Dive

Want more on this topic? Check out: Bear Essentials: If Nobody Owns the Content Lifecycle, Nobody Owns Your Brand