Acrolinx Takes Care of all Your Content, Brand and Target Needs

By Gabriella Pirrone

September 6, 2018

Acrolinx, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Branding, content, content marketing, content services, Digital Marketing, Exclusive Interviews, partnership, target

Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Burlington, MA, Acrolinx is a content platform that takes care of the complete content optimization process.
 
Editors can upload their content into the platform and in return receive a score depending on the customer’s pre-defined goals such as general content quality, certain audiences they want to target or they can even underline values so that they can provide real return on investment information for their customers. Predictive analytics can also be used within the platform so once you have defined certain rules the content can be optimized to show how the content will do in the future.
 
Acrolinx has about 45 integration partners which include Adobe, Sitecore, eSpirit, SDL to name a few and they also help large global brands such as IBM, Nestle, Siemens, Google, Facebook, Boeing, SAP and Amazon create content that’s on-brand, on-target and most importantly at an enterprise level. 
 
To learn more about Acrolinx and what their platform has to offer, I reached out to Andrew Bredenkamp, Founder & CEO at Acrolinx for a CMS-Connected exclusive interview – make sure you follow along below to read more.

Exclusive Interview with Acrolinx Founder and CEO

Businesses can benefit from cost reduction by using a translation service such as Acrolinx. What are some other ways that companies can save money and what challenges do you see companies utilizing the platform for?

“Translation, from any language to any other language is a complex process. In our experience, cost savings comes from increased clarity of source material. Acrolinx helps authors create clear, concise and consistent source material that is not only easier to translate, but far less expensive. The end result is content that is readable and understandable, without unnecessary or confusing translations of highly individualized language. And this better quality content can also be translated much better by modern machine translations engines.”

Which industries would you say use your platform more than others and why?

“Acrolinx typically brings the most value for organizations that are creating high-value content at scale. We are used by the all the major software companies in the world, as well as leaders in semiconductors, manufacturing and financial services.
 
What these companies have in common is an understanding that creating great content right across the organization is a major competitive advantage.”

With your wealth of knowledge in AI, what trends do you think we’ll see more of in the near future?

“Up until recently companies were very nervous about sharing data, but the AI revolution has created an awareness that data is the best way for a company to learn. I think we’ll see AI increasingly be used not to replace humans in a process but to support them and help them work together more effectively.
 
AI supports a general trend towards more data-driven decision making. Having good analytics about their content helps companies to know where to focus their efforts.” 

What features make your platform unique?

• Content Strategy made Actionable: Acrolinx is the only language platform that captures your content strategy, and makes it actionable. Taking all of the direct and nuanced aspects of your company’s use of language (formality, tone, terminology, personality) as well as the specific communication expectations of your target personas (education level, specialization), Acrolinx can then score your content against your strategy. The platform then provides a number of options to further align misaligned content. Strategy-aligned content has been proven to be more effective in meeting the top-level business objectives of customer acquisition and ongoing engagement, while eliminating legal and regulatory compliance issues.

• Singular Enterprise Voice: Other solutions on the market allow individuals to write their content better. Acrolinx allows an enterprise to create tightly aligned content that helps the company is speaking with one voice. These two approaches are very different. 1000s of individuals writing clear content in their own styles doesn’t solve the enterprise problem of “too many writers with too many voices.” Only Acrolinx, through the consumption of the enterprise content strategy, ensures that all content represents the voice of the business.

• Content Alignment At Scale: While other solutions provide tools that review individual documents, Acrolinx is the only platform that reads all enterprise content and measures it against one or many content strategies within the enterprise. Enterprises like IBM and VMWare are feeding hundreds of millions of words (184 million at VMWare, to be exact) through Acrolinx each year. No other language platform can come close to handling that volume of business-critical content.

How does Acrolinx deliver active content governance, and why does it matter? What is the difference between active vs passive content governance?

"Implementing ACG is a change management process, and it requires a framework and enablement solution in order for it to both work and take hold.
 
Companies spend huge amounts of time and money on developing brand and style guidelines, researching buying personas, and understanding what resonates with their target audiences. They then do almost nothing to ensure their content is aligned with these goals.
 
Active Content Governance is about helping individual content creators as well as whole teams, and ultimately the whole organization, to speak with one clear voice.

Active vs Passive:​

• Quality: “Passive” governance relies heavily on the motivation of the team. Active governance provides standard tools and guidelines designed to eliminate quality issues early in the process, allowing any writer to deliver content that can be considered “ready for review.”

• KPIs: The passive answer for “production-ready document” is often “when I say so.” Active Content Governance sets a standard level of content quality that all content is measured against means that, best case, all content meets the quality bar set by management, and in the worst case, no content is embarrassingly flawed.

• Guidance: Passive governance means providing authors with style guides and terminology directories and hoping that they follow them. With Active Content Governance, authors are provided with real-time, in-line guidance, available as part of their process with no learning or document review necessary.

• Review: In a passive approach, each person in the content development chain decides, on their own, when to hand off their work. The writer writes. And when that writer is happy with that work, it’s handed off to the first reviewer. Active Content Governance, in this case, means that we build a multistep, automated process into our content machine. Content is written and run through a series of AI filters to confirm or correct alignment with our guidelines. The result of each stage of the process is a document that is correct and aligned earlier and with less human intervention, leaving our valuable editors to actually create better content. Automating the process solves the issues of brand alignment, spelling and grammar, voice, clarity and consistency. And in doing that, maybe we can place our resources on making sure that the content says what we actually want it to say, which when it comes down to it, is the point."

Acrolinx and Xyleme Partner to Deliver High Quality Content ​

Since I was sharing an overview of the Acrolinx platform, I wanted to discuss their most recent partnership with a learning content management system called Xyleme.
 
The new partnership offers a powerful authoring and review process that will help enable Xyleme to “create high-performing learning content at scale.”
 
This new integration will allow writers “the ability to create content and accept editing recommendations through the Xyleme review process. The resulting content can be easily personalized and published for different platforms, devices, and regions through Xyleme.”
 
Here’s a snippet of what both CEO’s of the company had to say about the news:
 
“We’re pleased to announce the integration partnership with Xyleme. Xyleme’s long standing and successful history in the learning and development industry aligns with Acrolinx audiences,” said Andrew Bredenkamp, Founder, and CEO, Acrolinx. “Together, our partnership, will help organizations capture goals, analyze content to ensure alignment, and provide guidance to contributors to create engaging, effective content.”
 
“Acrolinx integration enhances Xyleme’s powerful authoring tool,” Xyleme CEO Greg Schottland said. “This partnership allows customers to systematically improve the quality of their content by enforcing improved language and ensuring writing quality is consistent and follows standards. With Xyleme and Acrolinx together, users can now fully manage the entire content creation process.”

Ending Notes

It’s really interesting to see that not only customers themselves can define their goals but they can also address content to their audience by adjusting and using criterias right in the platform itself. You can also adapt the content to regional language differences so being able to understand that and tailor that to specific need can be really important when it comes to content.  It’s also beneficial to be able to prove your initiates if you are reporting scoring or values of your website or content to a board of directors or even an owner who wants to see that the enhancements of a website work in real time.
 
Companies who outsource their content to external agencies sometimes don’t have enough staff who can really review the content so this is where a platform like Acrolinx could benefit a business because it can review the content and use analytics that are built in alongside the score cards about the individual department quality and how close they are following the corporate style guide or compliance regulations.
 
To keep everything going in real time is very important to businesses so I would definitely recommend Acrolinx to any company who needs to create quality content alongside capturing your content goals.

 

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.