Content reuse is often associated with content management projects and indeed, content reuse is key to successful content management and is frequently the reason companies give for wanting to get into content management.
But, content reuse is an effective business practice on its own and can be implemented without investing the time, effort, and money in a content management initiative. In fact, getting started with content reuse will put you in a better position when, or if, you do decide to proceed with a content management project. Content reuse is really all about the content, not the technology, and the better you plan your content reuse strategy up front, the more effective your reusable content will be.
So, why reuse content? For starters, reusing content is efficient for you, for the company you work for, and for your users. Reusing content helps to ensure that content is consistent regardless of where it appears, enhancing its usability. Reuse also eliminates the duplications that result when writers recreate content that already exists. I’m sure many of us have written the same content, over and over again, simply because we can’t locate the right version for our project, or spent two hours writing a product description only to discover that someone else wrote it last week.
In a content reuse environment, content is written once and used wherever it is required, which not only enhances consistency and usability, but significantly reduces the costs to write and review content. Two (or more) writers and subject matter experts working on the same or similar content is double the cost (or more). Reusing content also facilitates translation; reused content is written, reviewed, and translated once.
Planning and writing for reuse
Reuse doesn’t just happen—you need to plan for it. Your first task is to determine your reuse goals and analyze your content, finding your best reuse opportunities. Where is most of your similar and repeated content? User guides? Technical manuals? Collateral? Online help? Web? Training?
Once you know where you want to reuse content, you can determine how to structure and write it to support reuse. If content is to be truly reusable, its reuse must be transparent to other writers and to your users. While good content should always conform to standards based on usability, in a reuse environment, standards are critical to ensure that content is reusable. If you are reusing a product description that someone else has written, it must fit with the other product descriptions in the document where you are reusing it. In a content reuse environment, all product descriptions must be structured and written the same way, ensuring their consistency regardless of where they are used.
Accessing modular content
Reusable content is modular content, allowing you to easily access components and use them where required. For example, to be able to reuse a product description, you need to be able to access it, independently. A modular approach to your documents allows you to construct with content; you can access the modules you need and insert them where required. Modules can be stored in a central location and given substantive names so all writers can access them as required, without spending hours searching through “the server”.
Summary
Although content reuse makes sense, it isn’t always easy to implement. Reusing content successfully requires much planning. You need to identify reuse opportunities, decide how to structure and write your content, create writing guidelines, and figure out how you will access your reusable content. You also need to design how your content will flow throughout your content lifecycle, from planning, writing, review, translation, and storage. And, while you do need to decide how best to use technology to help implement your reuse strategy, you don’t need to invest hugely in technology to make reuse happen.
