By Ellen Barnes Pfiffner, EBP Business Consulting and Darby Mason-Werner, Director of Client Solutions, Signet
A Client Center without content is like a museum without art. Highly customized content welcomes guests to and through the Center and drives discussions in the collaborative areas and briefing rooms. Content is one of the key differentiators between a briefing Center and a nice meeting space. Center content often includes the corporate story, overviews of product, services and solution sets, demonstration narrations, tour commentary, signage, apps, gamification, collaboration materials, white papers and customer engagement messaging before, during, and after a briefing. The media may be video, audio, graphic displays, paper, social media and multi-media.
An emerging role in Client Centers is the position of the Content Curator. Like a museum curator, the Center professional researches the collection, manages it and keeps it fresh. Typically the Center curator is responsible for defining and implementing the experiential and content strategy across all the Centers. Their job is to frame the customer experience and connect the briefing Centers environments, brand positioning, and briefing content to drive higher engagement and customer satisfaction. Successful Client Center curators work across organizational silos and channels to locate as well as create relevant content. They are often responsible for ensuring the technology is in place to efficiently distribute consistent content across Centers. This includes the integration of content management platforms with briefing scheduling tools to provide automation that increases briefing staff efficiency while ensuring personalized guest experiences. Content curators also work closely with subject matter experts (SMEs) to keep the repository of presentations current and often repurpose content to personalize and customize messaging for visiting customers. A best in class practice is to budget for the creation and curation of content, as well as the platforms and technology to deliver it.
Content curation means different things to different programs and companies. Briefing programs are employing various staffing models to support Center content curation.
Some award-winning Client Center programs have models that include having the briefing program share a team member with Marketing Communications. The headcount resides in Marketing Communications, but the team member works on Center content fifty percent of the time. These shared models have flourished for many years in these programs.
Whether your staffing model is a shared resource or a full-time briefing staff role, successful curators share common traits. They need to be knowledgeable about corporate strategy and initiatives. Having a familiarity with content management platforms and other technologies is immensely helpful when working with technical partners both internally and externally. Their role requires strong written communication skills, critical thinking and the ability to represent the Center across the entire corporation to influence the availability of content for Center visits. Finally, it is extremely useful if they have the talent of creating order out of chaos and are budget savvy.
The next blog article in our series will focus on the Essentials of Managing Content including relationships with content developers and governance.
Ellen Barnes Pfiffner, M.Ed.,CMM – Ellen is the principal of EBP Business Consulting and offers benchmarking, tools, and consulting to executive briefing programs globally, on-site ABPM Competency courses, and customized training programs including Facilitation Skills. Active in the ABPM for 15+ years, Ellen has published Briefing articles on numerous topics and , has served on the ABPM Advisory Board . She can be contacted at: www.ebpbusinessconsulting.com, Ellen@ebpbusinessconsulting.com, or at 214-789-3571.
Darby Mason-Werner, Director, Client Solutions – Darby has been a member of the briefing profession for more than 15 years having built and managed the Xilinx Corporate Briefing Center Program before joining Signet in February 2016. She has been an ABPM member since 2003 and served on the ABPM Advisory Board. Darby is a frequent presenter at ABPM conferences including Core Competency Curriculum courses. She can be contacted at: dmasonwerner@signet.tv or 408-472-8181.