Content stewardship is the responsible management and oversight of content assets to ensure quality, accuracy, and compliance with brand standards.
What is content stewardship?
Often referred to as data stewardship, it involves creating, deleting, updating, and archiving content to ensure its accuracy and integrity. Content stewardship also requires monitoring how content is being used and ensuring that it complies with any applicable legal or ethical standards. Content stewards also need to be aware of how content changes over time and how it impacts a business or organization’s mission. Finally, content stewards need to be able to adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape and create strategies for successful content management.
Why is content stewardship important?
Content stewardship is important for a number of reasons. It:
- Ensures content is up-to-date and accurate.
- Helps ensure content is accessible to all users.
- Enables organizations to comply with data privacy regulations.
- Can help maximize the ROI of content creation efforts.
- Can improve content relevancy, user engagement, and conversions.
Why does a content strategist need to know about content stewardship?
A content strategist should be aware of their organization’s content stewardship policies in order to ensure that content is created and managed in a way that is legal, ethical, and meets organizational goals. Content stewardship also includes:
- Ensuring that content is up-to-date, accurate, and relevant to its intended audience
- Understanding when content should be removed from the organization’s platform(s)
Both of these are something a content strategist should be concerned about. Also, a content strategist needs to understand how to apply both legal and ethical standards when creating, maintaining, and disposing of content.