In my ongoing quest to make content strategy more accessible to the masses, I’m always looking for cute or clever (or ill-advised) metaphors to explain certain aspects of the craft. I stumbled upon one such example this week while upgrading my smartphone from an older Google phone to a newer Google Nexus.
There’s a well-worn phrase in the CS industry called ROT, which stands for Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial. Strategists use these categories to classify the content that no longer makes the cut during a website migration project. It’s also one of the columns you’ll find in a content audit spreadsheet, and it’s a great way to face the fact that some portion of your website is obsolete or was likely done to either appease a particularly insistent colleague or an SEO specialist who once valued quantity over quality.
Digital Spring Cleaning
Over the past three years I’d installed more than 100 apps on my phone. Many, as it turns out, were added in moments of frivolity, frugality, or foolishness. As part of my “migration strategy”, I only needed to carry over 25 percent of those apps to my new phone. It felt liberating removing those layers of app cruft — like a much needed spring cleaning for the digital age.
Now that my new phone includes only the apps most relevant to my personal brand, the relevant question to your business is this: Would you have the fortitude and self-reflection needed to remove that much content from your website if it turned out to be as irrelevant as those many apps were to my new phone?
