The role of the Digital Manager is one that we could not have imagined only five years ago.  Visit any large organisation’s website and you will see how roles and responsibilities have been transformed over the last few years.  Previously, job titles will have related to a specific channel, such as Web Manager or Social Media Manager, whereas now organisations are recognising the need to manage and govern all of these areas together, within the role of the Digital Manager.

The Challenges for the Digital Manager

Given the transformative and ever-evolving nature of all things digital, the role of the Digital Manager brings with it some challenges to face, as well as opportunities to be embraced.  Large organisations have adopted digital to a lesser or greater extent, but this adoption will always have been partly planned, and partly adhoc, largely due to the nature of the diverse range of people who make up that organisation.  Part of the role of Digital Manager is to harness the good and weed out the bad, and ensure that their organisation is using digital in a way that is user-oriented, accessible, usable, high-quality, and compliant, and this is no mean feat!

Speak to any Digital Manager about the challenges that they face, and some, or all, of the below, plus more, will ring true:

- Multiple channels run by multiple teams across different departments

- Lack of underpinning policies and procedures for Digital to which everyone adheres

- Vast quantities of content created by editors with differing skills and expertise

- Workflows are often not adopted with checks for content quality, accessibility and compliance being run only after publication, posing a high risk and leaving the organisation wide open to errors and issues

- Constant demand for reports and analytics

- Ever-changing internal guidelines and external legislation to react and adhere to

- Evolving institutional brand styles and guidelines

- Inconsistencies across channels and departmental outputs

- Emerging technologies to be aware of, in order to adopt them, or not

- Ability to stand out in a crowded and growing market

- The need for their organisation’s channels to appeal to a vast array of audiences, all at the same time

- Increasing demand for constant and new, up to date, informative and engaging content, especially from Millennials and Generation Z

- Rogue channels springing up outside of the official organisational channels

- Development, maintenance, and governance of digital channels that offer the best content possible, ensuring that all audiences have the best possible user experience when they interact with their organisation online

Sitemorse: The Digital Manager’s Best Content Governance Friend

You may already have a Content Management System within your organisation, and even a system that provides snapshot reports as to the state of your live site and any issues there may be with, for example, broken links and spelling errors.

But Sitemorse goes, more than, one step further, and provides the service to manage standards, rules, and regulations and then deploy these across all organisational digital touch points.

Sitemorse works with, and across, all of your digital channels and team, and enables content to be published error and issue-free, first time.

Key Features

No more long, technical reports: introducing the Digital Manager Dashboard

Sitemorse has been developed to maximise the data collected through the system to provide a Dashboard view of the organisation’s digital footprint, negating the need for the Digital Manager to trawl through endless, detailed technical reports, to find out where high-impact issues and errors are occurring.  Through the Digital Manager Dashboard, you will get a view of your institution’s full digital landscape including your main website, social channels, sub-domains and development sites.

From one screen you will be able to understand the quality and compliance of your digital footprint across a number of elements, and forward these reports to those within your organisation who need them.

Assessments are run on: 

- Compliance

- Visitor Experience

- Optimisation

- Accessibility

- Spelling

- Links

- SEO

- Availability and downtime

- Response time

 Digital Managers can then drill down into the detail of each element, right through to which Content Editor or Developer created or amended that piece of content and when.

As part of the Digital Manager Dashboard, Sitemorse’s Prioritisation Reports present the Top Ten high-impact task to be undertaken to demonstrably improve your organisations digital channels speedily and effectively, thus cutting down on the time required from the Digital Manager to identify, prioritise, and allocate tasks to the Content Editors across the organisation.

Sitemorse enables the Digital Manager to see what is important, and to deal with it now.

Individual Reports for Content Editors and Developers

Sitemorse understands that Content Editors have often had this role added to their more substantive post.  Due to the diversity of skills, experience and time available across a large, devolved team of Content Editors, it can be difficult for Site or Section Managers to keep their teams up to date with training, support, and changes to organisational rules.

We also recognise that Developers are integral to the success of any digital channel and Sitemorse understand the need for high quality, ‘back end’ content such as style sheets and templates.

Sitemorse is designed to give Content Editors the exact information they need to be able to carry out their duties quickly and efficiently and with as little training and support as possible.  Each Content Editor will receive individualised reports identifying their top 10 pages to work on to get fast results, and they also have access to real-time monitoring of pages, through their browser, with Sitemorse SMARTview.

Developers will also receive their own, unique prioritisation reports, containing detailed diagnostics based on the same information provided to Digital Managers, enabling them to fix site-wide, or more localised issues, that Content Editors would not be able to.

Content Recording

It’s not unusual for a request to come to a Digital Manager asking what was on a particular page at a particular point in time.

Sitemorse is unique in being able to record, store and demonstrate exactly what you had online and when, including faults in the content or code, metadata, when changes were made, and updates published.

Sitemorse is able to show pages before and after changes were made and store them for seven years, giving institutional robustness around internal and external guidelines and legislation.

Find out more

Our Support Team are on hand to answer any questions you may have or to set up a demo report for your site.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Contact us at: info@sitemorse.com

We can’t wait to hear from you!

Claire Gibbons works mainly across the Higher Education and charity sectors on digital governance audits and strategies, content marketing, and web and digital transformation projects.

Prior to going freelance in the summer of 2016, Claire headed up the Web and Print teams at the University of Bradford and was responsible for the University’s website and printed materials, leading two small teams of web and print specialists for many years, and through many a change.

Claire is also the Co-Chair of the Institutional Web Management Workshop conference (IWMW); the premier staff development forum for those with responsibilities for providing institutional web services and other digital channels.