The Content Strategy Experts - Scriptorium

The Content Strategy Experts - Scriptorium


Unifying content after a merger (podcast)

August 26, 2019

In episode 58 of the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Sarah O’Keefe discuss how to unify content after a merger.
In terms of pushback or in terms of change management, what we have to do is ask, “What does this other team do really well that potentially is going to be asked to change tools? How do you do this well?” And position the change as an opportunity.
— Sarah O’Keefe

Related links:

* Content strategy after mergers and acquisitions 
* Change management during mergers 

Twitter handles:

* @sarahokeefe
* @PattersonScript

Transcript: 
Elizabeth Patterson:     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 58, we look at how to unify content after a merger.
EP:     Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.
Sarah O’Keefe:    And I’m Sarah O’Keefe. Hello.
EP:    And we’re going to talk some today about unifying content after a merger. So I think the first question to really get into is, what are some of the biggest content challenges that you commonly see after a company merger?
SO:     Well, the biggest challenge in general is always change management. We should probably just start by putting that on the table and saying that overall people hate change, and mergers mean change for everybody, whether you’re the acquiring company or part of the acquiree, but the biggest content challenges that you face after a merger, so you take company A and company B and now we have a new shiny company C, or possibly just company A with company B included. So from a customer point of view, you now have a single company, but if you go and look at a post-merger website, or actually more likely post-merger websites, plural, what you’re going to see is that the content itself is not consistent. It doesn’t present the same unified, merged perspective that the company wants you to see them as, right?
SO:    They put out a press release and say, “We’ve now joined together. A and B are now C sharp, and it is awesome.” But then you go to their website and it’s very easy to tell which of the pre-acquisition companies actually created a particular kind of content, so you have a lack of consistency. That means that you’re going to have search problems, you’re going to have delivery problems, you’re going to have terminology problems where the two previous companies are using words to mean different things. The branding’s not unified. The documents look different.
SO:     So you have all of those issues, which are all kind of customer facing, outward facing issues, and then on the inside, the big challenges you’re going to have on the inside are two or three or more teams that do things in different ways, so they have different content creation processes, different content approval processes, different production workflow. They might be putting out different formats, and I mean literally. Like, “This group over here does only PDF and this group over here does only HTML,” or they’re both putting out PDF but one team was out of Europe, so their paper’s all A4, and one team is out of the US or North America, so everything they’re doing is US letter.
SO:    Setting aside the sort of obvious delivery problems, that now you have all this stuff that just doesn’t quite match up and it makes the merged company look bad,