Great storytelling is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to successful content marketing. To generate real-world returns, brands need to start with a results-focused strategy, and let’s […]

Great storytelling is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to successful content marketing. To generate real-world returns, brands need to start with a results-focused strategy, and let’s not forget the most basic component: Content must actually be easily published on the web for the whole thing to work.

On top of strategies and content creation, Brafton makes sure content publishing runs smoothly with our proprietary content management system, Scribe. Through our made-from-scratch, in-house software, Brafton is able to keep tight control over delivery , even in our constantly evolving editorial landscape.

And that complete control is critical – in the past year alone Scribe has housed more than 1.5 million published articles.

Here are a few other fun facts about our content management system, courtesy of Brafton’s Lead Software Engineer & Architect Chetan Sharma.

1. Scribe is exactly what our users want: We asked them. Scribe represents 18 months of editorial and dev team collaboration. The process included brainstorming sessions with various users to best determine required functionality and how the program could work most efficiently to deliver premium service to our customers. After several drafts, the next phases included Architectural Design, Implementation and UX.

2. 1.5 million articles (and counting!) saved in the Cloud. If our Boston or Chicago offices have a short power outage, it’s not a problem – our teams’ work is saved and clients can still get their headlines on time. More, all content is easily accessible through Scribe’s robust Search function. Every article has minimum of six versions (Draft Articles, Editing Queue, Revisions, Approvals and Live articles) – so editors and writers can easily track articles’ progress.

3. Take your pick: More than 190K photos are available for writers to use in Scribe. That’s nearly five times the amount of downloadable images in the Google Art Project.

4. Personal user dictionaries: Perfect for client keywords.  Scribe has a function to give every writer a dedicated, personal User Dictionary. If a client has technical keywords that aren’t listed in the dictionary, our editorial team can swiftly scan the dictionary to ensure content is SEO optimized. Simply put, it’s a more efficient end-to-end content and delivery system.

5. Keywords for all: Primary and secondary keywords are devised for each client, and any time a writer prepares an article, the related list of keywords is readily available within the system. Through our analytics processes, we can then look to see direct correlations between article performance, keyword usage and organic search results, making for more optimized content strategies.

6. Scribe hosts approximately 3,000 articles (including all six versions) every day to the cloud, of which more than 500 articles were delivered to clients website per day.

“Creating our own system has helped us and our clients many times over,” Production Manager Jeremy Corb said. “Not only can we customize the functionality and troubleshoot problems in real-time, we’ve streamlined our publishing process to the point that news and SEO-based copy go out more quickly and at a higher quality than ever before.”

Molly Buccini is Brafton's community manager. She joined the team with a background in digital journalism and social media. She's a theatre nerd, pop culture junkie and lover of summertime.