Dealing with Challenges
Donald Mazzella, Editorial Director, Information Strategies, an editorial-services company based in Palisades Park, N.J., is not a fan of outsourcing content offshore. “English is tribal language,” he says. “It’s best to find writers from your target audience.”
His company provides Website content and corporate newsletters for small to medium sized companies.
Mazzella says that he looks closer to home when finding his writers. He has a stable of about 30 freelance writers. Many are former journalists and stay-at-home moms.
While they charge higher rates than their Asian counterparts, Mazzella believes that he saves money in the long term. “They know the business, never plagiarize and know the difference between cents and pence,” he says. Mazzella cited a recent case where an advertising agency in New York was sued for a million dollars, because one of its advertising copywriters had plagiarized an entire ad. Content purchasers should therefore ensure that their contracts indemnify them from plagiarism.
Mazzella also advises that the customer develop a clear idea of what they hope to achieve by adding content to their Website. “The editorial product should enhance the company’s message. Most companies want to post content that benefits the company, when they should really be posting content that benefits the customer,” says Mazzella.
Once the message is established, a clear editorial procedure needs to be specified: Who approves the copy? Should the content be permanent, semi-permanent or updated regularly? An editorial style guide needs to be developed specifying how the message should be communicated. An animation company may employ humor, whereas, this would be inappropriate for a military or medical devices company. Finally, a budget should be allocated and a publishing schedule should be established.
Depending on the type of business, Mazzella recommends that companies turn their customers and prospective customers into a newsletter list. This builds brand loyalty and keeps the company on the customer’s radar.
Familiar Territory
Innodata Isogen is a Hackensack-based outsourcing and technology provider that caters to the media and information services market sector. Its customer base ranges from the New York Times, to the McGraw-Hill publishing company and the Library of Congress. It provides a range of editorial services from data entry to XML-tagging from any one of its nine facilities in India, the Philippines and Vietnam. Recently, it finds that its customers, who at one time only required data-entry services have moved up the production line, and are now requesting data analysis, synopsis of technical documents and content creation.
“We’re working with a number of magazine and journal publishers to produce rich data products,” says Jack Abuhoff, Chairman and CEO, Innodata Isogen. “In most cases we can provide cost savings of somewhere between 40%–60%.”
A proportion of that can come from lower wages and less costly real estate. However, with 10%–15% wage inflation in Bangalore, according to a report by DiamondCluster International, a consulting firm based in Chicago, wage advantages while significant may be short lived.
In fact, Abuhoff says that wage savings are only part of the equation. “We re-engineer the content-production process,” he says. Innodata Isogen turns a production process into a manufacturing process by breaking it down into its individual parts, eliminating any unnecessary stages and introducing new technology.
The first stage examines the current production process at the level of individual steps. For content creation, the company examines how the editors assign a topic to the writers; how the employees collect data; how they source subjects to be interviewed; how they analyze the data; what are the constituent parts of an article or essay such as the introduction, statistics, body of the essay or article and conclusion; how is the article edited and who carries out quality control. These steps need to be documented so that the knowledge can be transferred to workers outside the company.
KEY ISSUES IN CONTENT OUTSOURCING
8 Typically, content production outsourcing works best for domain-specific areas such as the scientific, technical and medical sectors as it relies on people with graduate degrees rather than cultural, social or geographically specific backgrounds
8 Quality control is perhaps the central issue when outsourcing content, as plagiarism is common in the editorial business.
The next step is skills remediation. For example, what skills are needed to write an article on Java, and how is it possible to bring the new employees up to speed; do they need to be re-educated; can existing employees train them and so on.
A project-management methodology is then defined. Then the whole process needs to be examined to see if there are ways to streamline the production, eliminate any unnecessary stages so that costs can be cut. Once this process is complete, the technology platform can be re-designed to suit the application. So it’s not just the cost saving but also the manufacturing process and risk mitigation that attracts major publishers.
In short, the outsourcing companies are attempting to do for content production what Henry Ford did for automobile production.
Furthermore, following the Asian Tsunami disaster, many large companies do not wish to locate all of their content creation in an earthquake or natural-disaster area. For example, one technique is to “co-locate work” in India and the Philippines.
