The labels we put on the content we produce are vital. Let me explain…

I took my kids for a day out in London recently. They wanted to spend my money in toy stores and on sushi. I was determined that they should soak up a bit of culture too.

So it was that we were standing in front of an Egyptian tomb, many thousands of years old. “How much more boring stuff we do have to do before we can have lunch?” asked Sam, my oldest.

I explained with mounting frustration that the contents of the British Museum were not “boring” but of huge importance to mankind – recording its greatest achievements and inspiring fresh generations to reach new heights of timeless excellence. To describe them, and the other cultural treats I’d lined up, as boring was ignorant and totally unacceptable.

Sam nodded to himself and made some grunt of acceptance. I was just rejoicing in my minor parental triumph when he turned to me and asked: “How many non-preferred activities do have to do before we can have lunch?”.

He hadn’t fully rebranded ‘boring’ but he’d certainly re-labelled it in the hope of making it more appealing. It worked – we headed off to dine in front of a conveyor belt of costly raw fish. As we ate I thought how the museum could have been a whole load more appealing to kids if it had re-labelled the collections. Mummified Remains, Byzantine Artefacts and Military Armaments would be replaced by ‘Real dead people’, ‘Jewels worth more than £1 million’, ‘Vicious weapons’…

Many businesses will have some sort of content hub. But is it called something that helps people want to discover it. Perhaps your pearls of wisdom all reside on a page with the imaginative title of ‘blog’. That could be the perfect name for it – or maybe not.

Different content collections do different things and while a lot of effort goes into creating them, sometimes not enough thought goes into labelling them in a logical and attractive way. Get the top-line menu description wrong and you won’t get out of the starting gate. Nail that and you still need sub-divisions that help guide the user to find what will be valuable.

Venture capitalists First Round create some great online content that they sub-divide into nine categories they call ‘magazines’. The labels are easily understood – and calling them magazines adds a perception of quality.

Goldman Sachs know a thing or two about investment and put a lot of effort into the content they produce. It’s found under the label “Our Thinking” which works because of the business’s reputation. There’s lots of written content and some great infographics but the wealth of video content is housed quite separately. Not logical at all.

We often see clients whose content repositories live under the most unlikely of labels. These signposts were often inherited from a previous set-up and made sense way back when. Sometimes what is needed is a fresh pair of eyes, market research and some A-B testing. We’re working on new signposts for this site right now.

Getting the labels right allows the content you create to do its job – that’s why it’s far from a non-preferred activity for us.