Intro to Content Strategy: January 2013

A Crash Course in
Content Strategy
A workshop at the
School of Visual Concepts
January 25, 2013

Your host: James Callan
@scarequotes

(This workshop stands on the
blog posts and books of giants.)

Introductions!
Who are you?
What brings you here?

What’s a website with content that you like?
(Bonus points if it’s not straight-up media.)

What do you like about it?

“You are all in publishing!”

Jeffrey Zeldman,
king of the web

http://www.zeldman.com/2011/03/15/web-design-is-publishing/

A content strategy
gives you the structure to decide what to publish,
accounts for the resources you have,
and helps you plan for the future.

People don’t visit your site
to see the amazing design.

People don’t visit your site
for a great user experience.

From Signal vs. Noise: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3404-reminder-design-is-still-about-words

“Like a gentleman in a finely crafted suit
who wants to burp you the alphabet,
even if your website looks nice, no one
will stick around to hear what
you have to say if you don’t
craft something compelling.”

Jason Santa Maria
@jasonsantamaria

http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/the-elements-of-content-strategy/

“Apple has ... given us a solid example of how
high-quality content contributes to a user’s
experience, and how, when you reduce the
quality, it interferes with that experience.”

Jared Spool,
@jmspool

“iOS6 Maps Is An Incredible Gift
to UX and Content Professionals”

It’s also a lot of work,
if you want to do it well.

Divide into teams of 2-3 people.
We’re going to go analyze some web content.

When you’re in your teams, get a website from me.
Then we’ll go to the computer lab.

Pull up your site on a computer.
Start looking through the content.
Click through as many pages as you can.

Gut check: Is it good?
Is there enough? Too much?
Take notes.

Be ready to spend 5 minutes telling us:
What content was useful and usable?
What content was missing?
What’s the most ridiculous thing you found?

And we’re back downstairs.
Keep your burger joint in mind as we
discuss more content tactics.

Step 1:
Know what content you’re working with.

The content inventory:
The cornerstone of any
successful content strategy!

How do you know
if your content is good?

Inventory and audit.

Inventory:
What content do we have?

Audit:
How good is the content we have?

Yes.
It really is a big, big spreadsheet
that documents every page—
every piece of content—
on your website.

How do you do a content inventory?
Click each link on your site.
Document what you find.

Or get a bot to do it for you.

Things often tracked in a content inventory:
• Page ID/number
• URL
• Page Title
• Parent
• Page Description
• Components
• SEO Information (metadata, keywords)
• Who inside the organization owns that content.

The inventory is quantitative.
What’s on the site?

Followup: the content audit.
That’s qualitative: How good is what you’ve got?

Is there ROT?
Look for content that’s:
Redundant
Outdated or
Trivial

You can tailor an audit to evaluate all kinds of qualities.
Is content on brand?
Is it accessible?
Do people understand it?
Is it meeting customer needs?
Is it in a usable format?
(There are many possible measures.)

So your audit uncovers some
problems.

Now what?

Remember the nutshell:
1. What content do we have?
2. What content do we need?
3. Fill the gap: edit, create & curate.

Erin Kissane’s even shorter breakdown:
1. Evaluate.
2. Design.
3. Execute.

Step 2:
Give yourself metrics
for evaluating content.

Message Architecture

What are your brand’s key messages?
Are you delivering them? How?
Does your audience believe you?

Your message architecture is not a
tagline, or a mission statement.
It’s communication goals.
Specific terminology.
The backbone of your messaging.

What content on the site–just content,
not layout–can we keep, as is?
What needs to be edited?
What’s missing and needs to be created?
And what needs to be killed?

Let’s try an exercise.
Let’s come up with a message architecture
for each of your burger joints.

When you know your messaging architecture,
all of your content can be on brand.
Even the details!

One example of contrasts:
Cook’s Illustrated vs. Allrecipes.com

“I hate the idea that cooking should be
a celebration or a party. Cooking is about
putting food on the table night after night,
and there isn’t anything glamorous about it.
Cooking isn’t creative, and it isn’t easy.
It’s serious, and it’s hard to do well,
just as everything worth doing is damn hard.”

Neither approach is the right approach.
They work for their respective companies.

So we’ve done steps 1 and 2.
We’re doing content strategy!

This would be a good time for lunch,
if we haven’t done it already.

Back up a sec:
What is content strategy?

“In the web industry, anything that conveys meaningful
information to humans is called ‘content.’”

Erin Kissane
@kissane

The Elements of Content Strategy

“Content is anything an organization
or individual creates and shares
to tell their story.”

Ann Handley
@marketingprofs

illustrations images
tweets
help articles navigation
words
photos
audio
slideshows
interface copy
podcasts Facebook posts
blog posts infographics comments

cartoons video
white papers error messages

It’s a plan for getting stuff done
in order to achieve a goal.

Put ’em together:
What is content strategy?

“Content strategy for the web is about bringing
editorial skill and methods into website planning. In
order to create good content, you need a plan for
how you’re going to get it and keep it coming.”

Elizabeth McGuane
@emcguane

http://mappedblog.com/2010/10/04/fear-loathing-and-content-strategy/

“Content strategy is to copywriting
as information architecture is to design.”

Rachel Lovinger
@rlovinger

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/content-strategy-the

“Content is story.
Content strategy is storytelling.”

Prateek Sarkar
Director, Creative Services
Walt Disney Parks and Resorts

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication,
and governance of useful, usable content.”

Kristina Halvorson,
Content Strategy for the Web

Creation:
Who’s providing your content?

Publication:
How are you getting your content to users?

Governance:
How do you keep content up-to-date?
When do you send content out to pasture?

Useful:
How does this content benefit you?
How does it benefit your user?

Usable:
Can people find, consume, and act on your content?

Speaking of “usable”:
Is content strategy part of
user experience (UX)?

You can’t create great UX
around bad content.

“Content strategy helps organizations use content
to achieve their business goals.”

Melissa Rach
@melissarach

“(God help a business if UX isn’t one of
their business goals, but helping the user
isn’t an inherent part of content strategy).”

Melissa Rach
@melissarach

One more thing to note:
“Content strategy is not a single solution
or deliverable. It's a process and a mindset.”

Is content strategy
part of marketing?

(Marketers have been very excited
to talk content strategy!)

“Everything you write should be crafted
with the intention of selling, educating, or
increasing customer loyalty.”

“Important content like FAQs, Docs, Press Releases,
Welcome messages, etc. sometimes fall into some
other bucket of ‘Content That Does No Marketing™.’

Bullshit. It’s all marketing when you’re doing it right.”

Des Traynor
COO, Intercom
@destraynor

Step 3:
Use your content strategy to
drive your content marketing.

Content strategy
vs.
content marketing.

Content strategy:
The plan. The big picture.

Content marketing:
The execution. Tactics.

Content marketing:
Content that earns you interest
and wins you customers.

Pop quiz:
Can you name some creative ways
companies sold bubblegum
using content marketing?

Let’s look at a couple of real, recent examples of
content marketing informed by content strategy.

Another example: Burt’s Bees

Any ideas for using content
marketing for your burger joints?

Here’s what Comodo, a
restaurant in NYC, did.

Again, having that architecture
helps you drive what you
produce. It makes you more
effective at collaboration with
other departments, such as SEO.

Content strategy is closely allied
with user experience.
It’s closely allied with marketing.

“Good links are important, but good experiences
are essential. Need to build links? Start by
building out good content.”

Jonathon Colman
@jcolman

Content strategists may be
involved in:
Project management.
Data modeling.
Change management.
Social media.
Editorial.
Taxonomy.
Information architecture.
SEO.
And other stuff.

Different content strategists
have different emphases.

Front-end content strategy
What your audience sees and experiences.
It includes:• User experience content
strategy• Marketing and editorial content
strategy

Back-end content strategy
This is how to make the content work
well. It includes:• "Intelligent" content •
Content governance and operations

(That breakdown courtesy of Kathy Hanbury.)

@kathyhanbury

“Good content” is in the eye of the
beholder. Ultimately, your users decide.

What are your goals?
What is your content supposed
to achieve for you?

“There’s really only one central principle of good
content: it should be appropriate for your
business, for your users, and for its context.
Appropriate in its method of delivery, in its style
and structure, and above all in its substance.”

Erin Kissane
@kissane


Good content is:

• Appropriate
• Useful
• User-centered
• Clear
• Consistent
• Concise
• Supported

Erin Kissane again. Seriously, read her book.

One thing to keep in mind:

Content strategy is a process. It’s a cycle.
It never really ends.

Content strategy is a design discipline.
You are contributing to the way
something functions at its very core.
Content experts should be involved
from the beginning of a web design project.

“Design from
the content out!”

Step 4:
Always Be Asking Questions

Talk to everyone involved with the
content, preferably one-on-one, about
what they need and want from the
site’s content.

The goal is to get an idea of how
content works within the organization.

ASK QUESTIONS.
(Go with the classics: who, what, when,
where, why, and how.)

Who’s supplying the content?
Who is the target audience?
Who’s maintaining the content?

Where will we publish?
(Our site, email, Facebook, Twitter,
etc.)

How will all of this get done?

And a big one, especially in discovery:
WHY?
Why do we need a blog?
Why do we need a Twitter feed?
Why aren’t we using a CMS?
Etc.

Editorial Style Guide

What’s our tone?
Which dictionary do we consult?
Do we use the serial comma?

Editorial process

Who’s creating our content?
How do we decide it’s good enough?
How do we evaluate its effectiveness?

Editorial Calendar

How do we decide when to publish?
(Tweet twice a day? Update home page
when new products launch? Respond
to holidays? Respond to news events?
How quickly? Etc.)

Step 6:
Figure out what your content looks like.
Even on the inside.

Content Template
(a.k.a. Page Table)

What needs to go on each kind of
page? Includes both visible and invisible
content. Accompanies site map and
wireframes. Communication bridge
between subject matter experts and
writers.

Content Template
(example #1)

http://intentionaldesign.ca/2011/02/22/writing-templates/

Content Template
(example #2)


Content Template
(example #2, continued)


And content strategy is not, ultimately,
about learning a particular tool. The
tools help the process, but they’re not
the point of the process.

Also, not every project is a site-wide
redesign. Content strategy works on a
project-by-project basis.

Governance!
How content strategy plays
out over time.

“If IA is the spatial side of information,
I see content strategy as the temporal side
of the same coin.”

Louis Rosenfeld
@louisrosenfeld

“When I look at where most websites fail, it’s in
managing their content over time.”

Karen McGrane
@karenmcgrane

Let’s look at one example of what
governance can mean.

Who knows Sporcle.com? A
bottomless supply of trivia quizzes,
mostly generated by users.

July 9, 2011:
South Sudan splits off from Sudan to
become a separate country.

So Sporcle had a lot of geography
quizzes to update.

And they just did it again this month
after the UN recognized Palestine as
a “non-member observer state” —
meeting Sporcle’s working definition
of “country.”

Consultants and agencies:
People want to hear from you!
Yay, buy-in! But you don’t get to be
there for the long haul.

In-house:
Buy in can be a major challenge!
But you know the brand and business
goals, and you are there for the long
haul.

Content strategy is not a quick fix.
It’s a long process. One reason
content is valuable is because it’s
messy, and difficult, and requires a lot
of resources.

To keep your content working:
Track when content will need to be
archived or updated.
Use the editorial calendar.
Use a rolling audit.
Budget time to get that done.

What does a content strategy look like?

Whatever your approach and your
background, learn about the other
areas of content strategy.

“You’ve set up a content management interface and
workflow, that is designed to make it as easy as
possible for the content creator to manage and
maintain all of that content in one place.”

Karen McGrane
@karenmcgrane

Where do content strategists come from?

From “Apes of Wrath,” a Warner Bros.
short.

Content strategy is a big playground.
People join in from different perspectives,
and tend to specialize.

Where can you find content strategists?

Come to a meetup with Content Strategy Seattle!

http://www.meetup.com/content-strategy-seattle

Join the Google Group, or LinkedIn discussion groups.

Follow smart people on Twitter.
Content strategists are a friendly, helpful group.
(I think it’s a job requirement.)

I’m tired of yammering.
I know you’ve got questions. Shoot!

THANK YOU
Remember to fill out your evaluation.

Don’t forget to write.
james@scarequot.es
http://scarequot.es
Twitter: @scarequotes

Intro to Content Strategy: January 2013

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