Tag Archives: Jira

The Reality of Content Calendars and Content Management

(Imagen 3)

I have worked with several companies’ content calendars over the years.

  • Two of Bredemarket’s clients are using Jira to manage their content calendars.
  • Another of Bredemarket’s clients doesn’t (as far as I know) have an official content calendar, but is tracking some content in a go-to-market Excel workbook.
  • If I remember correctly, MorphoTrak also used Excel for content management. MorphoTrak’s parent Morpho used a social media management platform, but I can’t remember which one.
  • At the time I was at Incode, the company used Asana to host its content calendar. (I have no idea how Incode has managed its content since May 2023.)

Bredemarket creates its own content (this is an example), and I also use Asana as my official content management platform.

Sharp-eyed people spotted how I worded that last sentence.

What did I just say?

If you read it again, you’ll see that I only discussed my OFFICIAL content management platform.

Some content, including this blog post/LinkedIn post/wherever else the text ends up, never gets logged in Asana. I just started writing it in iOS Notes and I will add various checkboxes up top as I share it on the blog and social channels.

Some other content, also not logged in Bredemarket’s Asana, is repeatable content that I store in Notes and repost periodically.

Something I post to my identity-related social channels (BIFS = Bredemarket Identity Firm Services).

And sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—I just go to a platform and WRITE stuff.

As a sole proprietor, I enjoy absolute control over Bredemarket’s messaging, and therefore the blog and social media approval process is very…streamlined. That isn’t the case elsewhere, where even a simple tweet requires approval. This makes it hard to live-tweet an event when the approver is unavailable…but there are workarounds. Perhaps I will reveal them one day.

What about process?

But if your corporate environment requires you to impose a strict content management structure, where all content is logged in the content calendar and all content requires approval, make sure that your content logging and approval process protects your company but DOESN’T silence it.

Because if your content approvals are too onerous, you will end up with no content at all.

Or you will end up with…perhaps I will reveal that one day.

My Gmail Labels Need a Draft 0.5 to Draft 1 Conversion

(All images from Imagen 3)

I’ve previously discussed my writing process, which consists of a draft 0.5 which I normally don’t show to anyone, and then (preferably after sleeping on it) a draft 1 in which I hack a bunch of the junk out of draft 0.5 to streamline the messaging.

I need to apply that elsewhere.

Like my Gmail labels.

Creating a content calendar

Bredemarket just started providing content services for a new consulting client (no proposal or analysis services—yet), and one of my first tasks was to set up a shared content calendar for the client.

Keeping a content calendar in an email or a document or a workbook works, and I’ve done this before. But keeping it on an accessible, shared platform is better because everyone has the same view and you don’t have to worry about synchronization issues.

Creating a content calendar in Jira

While Bredemarket’s own content calendars (internal and external) are in Asana, this client requested that I use Jira. Another client uses Jira for a content calendar, so I knew it would work fine.

If you’re curious, the content calendar I set up has the following statuses:

  • Backlog
  • On Hold
  • To Do
  • Doing
  • Done

Bredemarket’s external content calendar is more complex, but that’s because I know that everything on that calendar goes through my iterative review cycle process, and because most of my external projects require an invoicing step at the end. So “Doing” involves a lot of sub-statuses before I’m “Done.” My client obviously didn’t need all this. 

So I set up the content calendar, and the first issue (CC-1, create content calendar) is Done. (No confetti, Jira? Asana provides confetti.)

As Steve Taylor spoke in “Jung and the Restless,” “So what’s the problem?”

Creating email labels

The problem is one of my other obsessive habits, labeling or tagging my emails so that I can easily find them.

All my content work for this client generates a lot of emails. And I decided that the best way to label these emails was with their Jira issue number.

So emails concerning the creation of the content calendar bear the label jiracc001.

And emails concerning another issue are labeled jiracc005.

Did I mention that we already have 28 Jira issues so far? (Mostly in the Backlog.)

I shudder to think what my email will look like a week from now. I will find the relevant emails, but will have to wade through dozens or hundreds of labels first.