Content analysis Archives

What is content strategy and why should you care?

The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows:

“Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.”

This definition is a great place to start. Although the discipline has clearly evolved, this breakdown of its scope makes perfect sense. The aspects of content strategy that matter most to Web designers in this definition are design (obviously!), development, presentation and production. In this article, we’ll concentrate on the relationship between content strategy and design in creating, organizing and displaying Web copy.

As a writer and content strategist myself, I’ve worked with designers in all of these areas and find the creative process highly enriching. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with designers who are quick to challenge ideas that are unclear or unsound, who are brilliant at creating striking visual representations of even the most complex concepts. A lively interplay between design and content is not only fun, but is how spectacular results are achieved. This is why content strategy should matter a great deal to designers.

What Is Content Strategy, And Why Should A Designer Care?

Content strategy is the glue that holds a project together. When content strategy is ambiguous or absent, don’t be surprised if you end up with the Internet equivalent of Ishtar. When content strategy is in place and in its proper place, we’re on our way to producing beautiful and effective results.

While wrapping one’s head around content strategy might be difficult, the thing that makes it work is very simple: good communication. Sometimes a project moves along like a sports car on a superhighway. Other times, the road is so full of bumps and potholes that it’s a wonder we ever reach our destination. As we explore the relationship between content strategy and design, I’ll detail how I keep the channels of communication open and go over the workflow processes that I’ve used to support that effort. I hope that sharing my experiences (both positive and negative) will help you contribute to and manage projects more effectively and deliver better products to clients.

How To Get Started: The First Step Is The Longest

Project manager: We need a landing page for client X.

Designer: I can’t start the design until I see some content.

Writer: I can’t start writing until I see a design.

You may find this dialogue amusing… until it happens to you! At our firm, we find that the best way to get past such a standoff is to write first. This is because content strategy, at a fundamental level, frames a project for the designer. As a content strategist, my job is to articulate the why, where, who, what and how of the content:

Why is it important to convey this message? This speaks to purpose.
Where on the website should the message appear? This speaks to context.
Who is the audience? This speaks to the precision of the message.
What are we trying to say? This speaks to clarity.
How do we convey and sequence the information for maximum impact? This speaks to persuasiveness.

Bringing it down to a more detailed level, let’s consider a landing page. A content strategist will determine such things as the following:

Audience
Is the audience sophisticated? Down to earth? College-level? Predominately male? Female? Etc.
Word count
Some pitches scream for long copy, while others must be stripped to the bare minimum. SEO might factor into the equation as well.
Messaging priorities
What is the most important point to convey? The least important? What needs to be said first (the hook)? What needs to be said just leading up to the call to action?
Call to action
What will the precise wording be? What emotional and intellectual factors will motivate the visitor to click through?

Clear direction on these points not only helps the writer write, but helps the designer with layout, color palettes and image selection. When we start with words, we produce designs that are more reflective of the product’s purpose.

Landing pages are a great place to try this workflow, because in terms of content strategy, they are less complex than many other types of Web pages. A product category page, on the other hand, might have a less obvious purpose or multiple purposes, considerably greater word counts, more (and more involved) messaging points, and a variety of SEO considerations, all of which would affect its design.

Quick Tips for Getting Started

Make sure someone is specifically responsible for content strategy. If strategic responsibility is vague, your final product will be, too.
Slow down! Everybody, me included, is eager to dive headfirst into a new project. But “ready-aim-fire” is not a winning content strategy. Make sure everyone is on the same page conceptually before cranking out work.
If content strategy falls on your shoulders as a designer, cultivate an understanding of the discipline. Resources are listed at the end of this article to help you.
Make sure designers and writers understand what their roles are — and are not. There’s no need for writers to tell designers how to design, or for designers to tell writers how to write.

Perfecting The Process: Break Up Those Bottlenecks

Project manager: How are things coming along?

Developer: I’m waiting on design.

Designer: I’m waiting on content.

Writer: I’m waiting on project management.

Web development projects in particular involve a lot of moving parts, with potential bottlenecks everywhere. The graphic below describes our Web development process, with an emphasis on the design and content components. Chances are, whether you are freelancing or at an agency, at least parts of this should look familiar:

The process is by no means perfect, but it is continually improving. In the next section, we’ll look at the many types of content-design difficulties you might experience.

To help our designers lay out text for wireframes and designs, we utilize content templates based on various word counts. These templates also incorporate best practices for typography and SEO. When the designer drops the template into a wireframe, it looks like this:

The use of content templates not only takes a lot of guesswork out of the designer’s job, but also speeds up client reviews. When clients are able to see what the content will roughly look like in the allotted space, they tend to be more comfortable with the word counts and the placement of text on the page.

Communication can be streamlined using project management software. We use Basecamp, which is a popular system, but many other good ones are available. If you’re a freelancer, getting clients to work on your preferred project management platform can be an uphill battle, to say the least. Still, I encourage you to try; my experience in managing projects via email has been dismal, and many freelance designers I know express the same frustration.

The big advantage of a project management system is that it provides a single place for team members to manage tasks and interact. Internal reviews of design templates is one good example. The project manager can collect feedback from everyone in one place, and each participant can see what others have said and respond to it. Consolidating this information prevents the gaps and miscommunication that can occur when projects are managed through multiple email exchanges. Designers can see all of the feedback in one place — and only one place. This is a big time-saver.

by martin

The art of content marketing – Captivate!

Content analysis, Marketing, Usability

A few months ago I went to collect a friend from hospital. Arriving early, I entered the waiting room and noticed in-house magazines stacked by the door. I picked one up, grabbed a coffee and took a seat.

The magazine read like a very long press release, blabbering on about patient-centric care and employee awards. I was quickly bored, so I read from my phone instead. The magazine failed in its purpose.

Effective content marketing holds people’s attention. It gives you a distinctive brand, loyal fans and increased sales. You don’t need a big budget to succeed, which is why good content marketing is the single best way to beat bigger competitors online.

Content marketing used to be about customer magazines and mailed newsletters. Now it covers blogs, email newsletters, eBooks, white papers, articles, videos and more. In this article, you will learn about content marketing techniques that you can apply to your business.

Captivate

Give your content more personality. Captivate your audience with stories and characters that will draw them in and keep them coming back.

Tell a Story

Telling a story is a great way to connect with readers. According to a number of studies summed up by Rob Gill of Swinburne University of Technology, telling stories can be useful in corporate communication. Storytelling is fundamental to human interaction, and it can make your content more compelling and your brand more engaging.

Citing Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor, Rob says this: “It is believed people receiving the narration often come to the same conclusion as the narrator, but through using their own decision-making processes.” Told through a story, a message becomes more personal and relevant. The reader is also more likely to remember what was said.

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SEOmoz. Instead of sharing only positive accounts of his business, he also writes about difficulties such as his failed attempt to raise capital:

Michelle was the first to note that something was “odd.” In a phone call with Neil, she heard him comment that they “needed to do more digging into the market.” In her opinion, this was very peculiar.… Tuesday morning we got the call; no deal.

An email shared by Rand Fishkin in his post about SEOmoz’s attempt to raise funding.

Brands need stories, and stories need people, suspense, conflicts and crises. By reading SEOmoz’s content, and seeing both the positive and negative, you become immersed in its story.

Ikea is another example of a brand that tells stories that generate opinions about its company. For instance, it plays up its Swedish roots and paints a romantic image of a wholesome and natural society. Its website is full of stories that contribute to this effect.

A survey conducted by the B2B Technology Marketing Community showed that around 82% of LinkedIn users found that telling a story through case studies was the most effective form of content marketing.

Sometimes you’ll want to use anecdotes to make a point, and sometimes you’ll write a post or tweet to build a narrative. When you’re cultivating a story, keep the information simple, and don’t be afraid to repeat points here and there; some readers might have missed what you said before.

Always mix interesting stories with useful information; fail to do this and your audience will feel you’re wasting their time.

Use Real People

Think of your favorite writers. You’ve probably seen their photos and heard them speak. Likewise, people need to see and hear your employees, so use pictures, audio and video. This will bring your audience closer to your brand.

Jakob Nielsen has studied people’s reactions to images online. He used eye-tracking software to discover that people ignore images that seem decorative, random or generic. They even ignore generic images of people. But when they come across a photo of a “real” person, they engage with it for a longer time.

People prefer to get involved with a company with which they feel a personal connection. But introduce your employees gradually; as with any story, introduce too many characters too early and you’ll confuse your audience.

by martin

The art of content marketing – Teach!

Content analysis, Marketing, Usability

Teach

Think about what your audience wants. People want to hear answers and to learn something new, so give them what they want.

Give Answers

Content marketing needs to offer practical advice that people can use. Readers have been trained to expect answers on the Web, and yet so much content fails to deliver.

Consider FeeFighters, a comparison website for credit card processing. One of its blog posts, Do You Know What Makes Up Your Credit Score?, talks about the factors that affect your credit score. Instead of offering abstract advice and concepts, the post provides practical tips for improving your credit score:

Area #2: Your Credit Utilization Ratio

The second largest determining factor in what makes up your score is the amount of credit that you have available to you in relationship to how much of that credit you’ve used. This accounts for 30 percent of your credit score. The optimal rate is 30 percent, which means that if you have $10,000 in credit available to you, you should only be using about $3,000 of it. One trap that some people fall into is believing that if they max out their credit cards every month and then pay them off at the end of the month, they’ll build their credit. But since that gives them a 100 percent credit utilization ratio, and that ratio accounts for 30 percent of their overall credit score, they’re really doing more harm than good.

Say or Do Something New

Most content is boring and unoriginal, which is good for you. It makes it easier to beat your competitors.

You can make your content interesting by doing something new, without necessarily saying something new. For instance, you could write a comprehensive article on a topic that has only piecemeal information scattered across the Web. Or you could use a different format for a topic that gets the same treatment; rather than writing the fiftieth blog post on a topic, shoot the first video.

You can also make your content interesting by saying something new. An infographic by Rate Rush compares the popularity of Digg to Reddit, creatively combining a bar graph and clock to present the data. Although Rate Rush is a personal finance website, with little connection to social news, its staff researched a topic they were interested in and drew attention by putting it to imaginative use.

Our agency also researches things that we find interesting, and this has been a great source of content. In 2010, we polled around 1000 iPad owners to find out how consumers use the device. It led to a slew of media attention.

You can do the same. Come up with an original idea to research, and then undertake a study. Also look into studies that your business has done in the past, because interesting stuff might be lying around. One of our clients looked through her company’s research archive and found amazing material. She didn’t spend any money on research but got a lot of great content, links and media coverage.

by martin

The art of content marketing – Persuade!

Content analysis, Marketing, Usability

Persuade

Your content should be persuasive. Pay close attention to how you speak and what you say.

Use Simple Language

Take the question below on Yahoo! Answers. To “sound intelligent,” this person would like to know “big words that replace everyday small words.”

Many people make this mistake. They use language that is unnecessarily complicated, usually to show off or to sound corporate and professional.

“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all,” said Winston Churchill. So, don’t talk about “taking a holistic view of a company’s marketing strategy to deliver strategic insights, precise analysis and out-of-the-box thinking.”

Prefer “make” to “manufacture,” and “use” to “utilize.” While “quantitative easing” offers precision to economists, your personal finance audience would prefer “print money.”

Lauren Keating has studied the effect of scientific language on the persuasiveness of copy. She found that most people respond best to advertisements that contain no scientific language. People found them more readable and persuasive, and they felt more willing to buy the product. Lauren’s conclusion was clear: copy needs to be plain and simple.

Have Opinions

Interesting people have opinions, and interesting brands are the same. Look at the amazing work of new search engine DuckDuckGo. It has positioned itself as the antithesis of Google, launching websites that criticize how the search giant tracks you and puts you in a bubble. The strategy is paying off: DuckDuckGo is seeing explosive growth.

DuckDuckGo is an alternative search engine that breaks you out of your Filter Bubble.

While this strategy is perfect for defeating a big incumbent, you don’t have to be openly hostile to your competitors. You can say what you think without mentioning their names.

Bear in mind that people are ideologically motivated. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s study, “When Corrections Fail”, describes the “backfire effect” of trying to correct people’s deeply held beliefs. The authors found that contradicting people’s misconceptions actually strengthened those opinions. If people see you as an ideological ally (like a political party), they are more likely to agree with you on other issues — even ideologically inconsistent or non-ideological ones. You can use your opinions to attract people to your company: converting the agnostic or validating the views of allies.

As a small-scale brewer, for example, you might have a strong opinion on ale, believing in craft over mass production. You might think the market is dominated by big businesses that sacrifice quality for quantity. In this situation, you could use content marketing to talk about the best way to make beer. By stressing how seriously you take the development of your product, you communicate your opinion to those who share it without directly criticizing your competitors.

Think politically: consider the popularity of your views and whether they will attract media coverage. Ideally, your opinions should be bold and popular.

Sell the Benefits

In the same way that you sell your products and services, tell your audience the benefits of your content. This technique is essential if your audience doesn’t know what it wants.

PaperlessPipeline is a transaction management and document storage app for real estate brokers. Its founder, Dane Maxwell, had a creative idea to sell his product. The biggest problem for real estate brokers is recruiting. So, Dane invited them to a webinar titled “Recruiting Secrets of the 200-Plus Agent Office in Tennessee.” Brokers didn’t even know they needed to manage transactions, so he didn’t mention it in the invitation.

Paperless Pipeline takes your real estate transactions and related documents online—without changing how you work.

In the webinar, he introduced PaperlessPipeline and explained how it enables brokers to recruit more agents. The webinar attracted 120 guests, and “16 ended up buying at the end,” said Dane in an interview with Mixergy.

Imagine you run a company that develops technology for mobile phones, and you want to promote a new femtocell that boosts mobile reception in public spaces and rural areas. This technology could be valuable to people who want to improve mobile reception, but those people might not have heard of it.

So, instead of promoting the technology directly, offer content that focuses on the benefits. By using benefit-focused copy, you immediately tell the reader what’s in it for them.

by martin

The art of content marketing – Prepare!

Content analysis, Marketing

Prepare

Before creating content, you need to prepare. Think about your tone and style, where to find the best writers and how to organize your workflow.

Tone and Style

Too many companies start writing content before their brand has a defined voice. This leads to inconsistency. It’s like using one logo in your brochure, another on your website and another on your blog.

When speaking with people, you see their expressions and you adjust your tone accordingly. In a meeting, when you see that someone is confused, you clarify meaning, simplify sentences and speak reassuringly. The Web offers no feedback until your content is published, and then it’s too late.

To get the right tone, think of the person who best represents your brand. The person could be fictional or real, and they may or may not work for you. Now think of adjectives that describe them. Once you know what you want, provide clear details and practical examples.

Let’s say you run a travel agency that markets to young independent travelers. You want your representative to sound experienced, helpful and friendly. Try using a table like the one below to delineate what your adjectives do and don’t mean:

	Experienced	Helpful	Friendly
Does mean…	Knowledgeable Write with authority, as though the knowledge was gained first hand.	Efficient Explain things clearly and positively. Make sure all relevant information is obvious and accessible.	Personal Use informal language, and write as though you are talking to one person, rather than a broad customer base.
Does not mean…	Condescending You know a lot but don’t talk down to your customers. They probably know a lot too.	Pushy Promote your company, but not at the expense of good service. Always have your reader’s wants in mind.	Unprofessional Make sure there are no grammar or spelling mistakes. Proofread carefully.

You’ll also need a style guide, so that your authors write consistently. Should you use title case in headings? Are contractions appropriate? Check out The Yahoo! Style Guide for ideas.

Picking Content Creators

Don’t pick the wrong people to create your content. It’s hard for a non-technical person to pick the best Web developer, and it’s the same with content marketing. You need to know about content creation in order to judge other people’s abilities. Some people suggest making everyone in your company a content creator, but this is a bad idea. Not everyone can be a good accountant, secretary or rocket scientist, and the same applies here. To succeed, you should pick the best.

Ask everyone who wants to be a content creator to write a sample blog post. Then you can find the best few people. Some might not be able to write but have interesting ideas. In this case, you’ll need someone to edit their copy. Perhaps you want to raise the profile of a particular staff member. If they can’t write, have someone ghostwrite for them.

Workflow

Some companies have a simple workflow: one person does everything. The person researches, writes and publishes without any input from others. This model can work, but you’ll see more success with a workflow that enables other people to take part. Have different people write, edit and proofread. It’s a good way to catch mistakes and to bring more ideas into the process. Think about the best process for each type of content. One person might be enough for a tweet, whereas four to six people might be ideal for an eBook.

Imagine you’ve got a well-staffed company that is putting together a B2B white paper. You could organize your workflow like this:

An example of how to organize your workflow in a well-staffed company.

by martin

Do FAQs improve usability?

Content analysis, Strategy, Usability

Call me a heretic, but I hate FAQs. I understand that the FAQ has become de rigueur for websites, and I get that users expect them as a conventional content type. I even acknowledge that the FAQ has a venerable history. I don’t find them helpful, however: no one ever seems to ask my questions.

So I have questions about FAQs: Do they really work, or are they just a snake oil remedy for poor content? What does it mean when I can’t find my question in the FAQ? What do I do when the FAQ fails?

Do FAQS improve usability?

FAQs often read like a catechism, a fictitious back-and-forth conversation between the eager, inexperienced user and the wise, venerable expert, covering all the basics from the beginning, and urging purchase at every step:

Q: What is this product?

A: It’s a widget. It’s the best widget you’ll ever find. You should buy one.

Q: Is it hard to use?

A: NO! It’s the easiest widget on the market. You should buy one…

On the whole, FAQs like these patronize users. (Incidentally, the Greek root of catechism means, literally, to “talk down” to someone.)

While there isn’t much research supporting the usability of FAQs, they are a frequent topic among experts. Their advice includes:

Include real frequently asked questions. Jakob Nielsen addressed FAQs as one of the “biggest usability mistakes of 2002.” He said, “Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good.” Most FAQs seem to constitute a basic instruction manual or else call attention to selling features, making them only marginally useful to users with real questions.
Make sure you really need a FAQ. David Hamill offers a variety of tips, but cautions against having a FAQ for FAQ’s sake. “If your FAQ page is answering questions that the rest of the website should answer, then you have a problem with your site content.”
Show you care. David Coyne says that users appreciate a well-constructed FAQ because it shows you care about their time.
Keep it short and simple. Many other authors offer FAQ pitfalls and how-tos, and they are generally in agreement: Organize your FAQs in sections; make them simple, skimmable, and prominent; and ensure that they reflect the questions your users really do ask frequently. Feedback Army sums up their FAQ approach like this: “The trick is to make it easy to skim, keep it short, follow the right format, and stock it with questions people ask.”

The best case I’ve found for FAQs comes from Jonathan and Lisa Price in their book, Hot Text: Web Writing That Works:

When guests get stuck they most often turn to the FAQ, because the style seems friendlier than the average help system, and the genre promises answers to real questions from users, rather than a stonewalling corporate pile of documentation.

They surmise that the form originated in the pre-web world of the ListServ. Regular participants, weary of answering the same questions again and again from newcomers, would put their collective wisdom into FAQs and then admonish the uninitiated: “Yo, Noob! Read the FAQ before you post!”

I see their point. FAQs work on ListServs and Forums because their content comprises a spaghetti stream of topical, threaded conversations. A website—or any redacted document, for that matter—is different. The content on a website is composed, planned, and edited. If it doesn’t answer people’s questions, then it has only itself to blame.

Are FAQS still in my future?

A good FAQ is like insurance for your users: There when they need it, but hopefully they never will. If you decide that FAQs have a place in your content strategy, then I suggest the following:

Collect, track, and analyze your users’ real frequently asked questions. You need a way to gather your users’ questions and comments, so that you can sort through them and look for patterns.
Sales inquiries: When people call to ask questions about your products or your website, document precisely what they ask. Not only will this suggest content areas that are missing or unclear, but you’ll better understand your users’ decision-making process.
Support requests: Troubleshooting and frustrations give you a rich field of user feedback. If you have a call center, listen to recorded calls and ask your customer service representatives to pay attention to recurring questions. If you have a support request system on the web, study your support tickets.
Ask directly: If you do have a FAQ on your website, include a form that says, “Didn’t find your question here? What would you like to know?” Doing this creates a record of the questions you aren’t answering, as well as additional opportunities to follow up on with your users.

Use that insight to improve your site’s content. Having gathered these questions, look for patterns. Are there, in fact, any questions users ask frequently? Don’t just add them to your FAQ in the name of completeness. Sort the questions into piles. Look for common words. Count the frequency of occurrences. As soon as you see a pattern, look for ways to address it elsewhere in your content. Are users confused? Clarify the wording of the section that was originally intended to answer those questions. Are users looking for content that isn’t there? Create it. Are users looking for love in all the “wrong” places on your site? Reorganize it.

Never build your content strategy on the FAQ. Even if you create your FAQ from questions people actually ask, you should only use it to supplement your overall content strategy. Carefully consider your reasons for including a FAQ and your goals for supporting your users.

Are FAQs ever appropriate?

There are occasions when a FAQ is exactly the right way to go.

To answer the one question users ask before reading further. If you discover that a significant part of your target audience is looking for a quick answer to a few, simple questions, then it can help to pull them out so they don’t have to spend a lot of time digging around. If customers absolutely need a service to synchronize Outlook files, use the FAQ to tell them whether your service is right for them.

To demonstrate that you really have listened to your users’ questions. If you have completed exhaustive, authentic research into your users’ needs and preferences, you can use the FAQ to demonstrate to users that you understand their concerns. Such a FAQ could be used in response to a public relations crisis, for example. Just make sure that you’ve done your research: people will see right through a phony FAQ.

To reassure users that their questions are normal. Likewise, you could use your FAQ to show users that other people are asking the same questions as they are. This technique works especially well for health concerns: “Everything you ever wanted to know about [blank], but were afraid to ask….”

Is my FAQ doing what it should?

Whatever you do, make sure you subject your FAQs to the same rigorous usability testing as the rest of your site. Since you have already considered your reasons and strategy for including a FAQ, you can now test whether it achieves the goals you set out for it.

What have I concluded?

FAQs are ubiquitous and familiar and occasionally helpful. They have a place in your content strategy, but use them carefully: if your users are asking the same questions frequently, consider how you can improve your content before reaching for a FAQ.

by martin

How to work on your website content

Communication, Content analysis, Inspiration, Strategy

In content strategy, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good. Content may need to have other qualities to work within a particular project, but this list is limited to qualities shared across all sorts of content.

If this looks like theory, don’t be fooled. It’s really entirely practical: if we consciously refer to principles like these as we go about our work as info-nerds of various kinds, we’ll have an easier time making good, useful content—and explaining our priorities when we’re called to do so.

Good content is appropriate

Publish content that is right for the user and for the business

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. Content strategy is the practice of determining what each of those things means for your project—and how to get there from where you are now.

Right for the user (and context)

Let us meditate for a moment on James Bond. Clever and tough as he is, he’d be mincemeat a hundred times over if not for the hyper-competent support team that stands behind him. When he needs to chase a villain, the team summons an Aston Martin DB5. When he’s poisoned by a beautiful woman with dubious connections, the team offers the antidote in a spring-loaded, space-age infusion device. When he emerges from a swamp overrun with trained alligators, it offers a shower, a shave, and a perfectly tailored suit. It does not talk down to him or waste his time. It anticipates his needs, but does not offer him everything he might ever need, all the time.

Content is appropriate for users when it helps them accomplish their goals.

Content is perfectly appropriate for users when it makes them feel like geniuses on critically important missions, offering them precisely what they need, exactly when they need it, and in just the right form. All of this requires that you get pretty deeply into your users’ heads, if not their tailoring specifications.

Part of this mind-reading act involves context, which encompasses quite a lot more than just access methods, or even a fine-grained understanding of user goals. Content strategist Daniel Eizans has suggested that a meaningful analysis of a user’s context requires not only an understanding of user goals, but also of their behaviors: What are they doing? How are they feeling? What are they capable of?

Fig. 1. The user’s context includes actions, constraints, emotions, cognitive conditions, and more. And that in turn affects the ways in which the user interacts with content. (“Personal-Behavioral Context: The New User Persona.” © Daniel Eizans, 2010. Modified from a diagram by Andrew Hinton.)

It’s a sensible notion. When I call the emergency room on a weekend, my context is likely to be quite different than when I call my allergy specialist during business hours. If I look at a subway map at 3:00 a.m., chances are that I need to know which trains are running now, not during rush hour tomorrow. When I look up your company on my phone, I’m more likely to need basic contact info than your annual report from 2006. But assumptions about reader context—however well researched—will never be perfect. Always give readers the option of seeing more information if they wish to do so.

Right for the business

Content is appropriate for your business when it helps you accomplish your business goals in a sustainable way.

Business goals include things like “increase sales,” “improve technical support service,” and “reduce printing costs for educational materials,” and the trick is to accomplish those goals using sustainable processes. Sustainable content is content you can create—and maintain—without going broke, without lowering quality in ways that make the content suck, and without working employees into nervous breakdowns. The need for this kind of sustainability may sound boneheadedly obvious, but it’s very easy to create an ambitious plan for publishing oodles of content without considering the long-term effort required to manage it.

Fundamentally, though, “right for the business” and “right for the user” are the same thing. Without readers, viewers, and listeners, all content is meaningless, and content created without consideration for users’ needs harms publishers because ignored users leave.

This principle boils down to enlightened self interest: that which hurts your users hurts you.

Good content is useful

Define a clear, specific purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose

Few people set out to produce content that bores, confuses, and irritates users, yet the web is filled with fluffy, purposeless, and annoying content. This sort of content isn’t neutral, either: it actively wastes time and money and works against user and business goals.

To know whether or not you have the right content for a page (or module or section), you have to know what that content is supposed to accomplish. Greater specificity produces better results. Consider the following possible purposes for a chunk of product-related content:

“Sell products”—This is so vague as to be meaningless and is likely to produce buzzword-infested fluff.
“Sell this product”—Selling a product is a process made up of many smaller tasks, like discussing benefits, mapping them to features, demonstrating results and value, and asking people to buy. If your goal is this vague, you have no idea which of these tasks (if any) the content will perform.
“List and demonstrate the benefits of this product”—This is something a chunk of content can actually do. But if you don’t know who is supposed to benefit from the product, it’s difficult to be specific.
“Show how this product helps nurse practitioners”—If you can discover what nurse practitioners need, you can create content that serves this purpose. (And if you can’t find out what they need before trying to sell them a product, you have a lot more to worry about than your content.)

Now do the same for every chunk of content in your project, and you’ll have a useful checklist of what you’re really trying to achieve. If that sounds daunting, think how much harder it would be to try to evaluate, create, or revise the content without a purpose in mind.

Good content is user-centered

Adopt the cognitive frameworks of your users

On a web project, user-centered design means that the final product must meet real user needs and fulfill real human desires. In practical terms, it also means that the days of designing a site map to mirror an org chart are over.

In The Psychology of Everyday Things, cognitive scientist Donald Norman wrote about the central importance of understanding the user’s mental model before designing products. In the user-centered design system he advocates, design should “make sure that (1) the user can figure out what to do, and (2) the user can tell what is going on.”

When it comes to content, “user-centered” means that instead of insistently using the client’s internal mental models and vocabulary, content must adopt the cognitive frameworks of the user. That includes everything from your users’ model of the world to the ways in which they use specific terms and phrases. And that part has taken a little longer to sink in.

Allow me to offer a brief illustrative puppet show.

While hanging your collection of framed portraits of teacup poodles, you realize you need a tack hammer. So you pop down to the hardware store and ask the clerk where to find one. “Tools and Construction-Related Accessories,” she says. “Aisle five.”

“Welcome to the Tools and Construction-Related Accessories department, where you will find many tools for construction and construction-adjacent activities. How can we help you?”

“Hi. Where can I find a tack hammer?”

“Did you mean an Upholstery Hammer (Home Use)?”

“…yes?”

“Hammers with heads smaller than three inches are the responsibility of the Tools for Home Use Division at the far end of aisle nine.”

…

“Welcome to The Home Tool Center! We were established by the merger of the Tools for Home Use Division and the Department of Small Sharp Objects. Would you like to schedule a demonstration?”

“I just need an upholstery hammer. For…the home?”

“Do you require Premium Home Use Upholstery Hammer or Standard Deluxe Home Use Upholstery Hammer?”

“Look, there’s a tack hammer right behind your head. That’s all I need.”

“DIRECTORY ACCESS DENIED. Please return to the front of the store and try your search again!”

Publishing content that is self-absorbed in substance or style alienates readers. Most successful organizations have realized this, yet many sites are still built around internal org charts, clogged with mission statements designed for internal use, and beset by jargon and proprietary names for common ideas.

If you’re the only one offering a desirable product or service, you might not see the effects of narcissistic content right away, but someone will eventually come along and eat your lunch by offering the exact same thing in a user-centered way.

Good content is clear

Seek clarity in all things

When we say that something is clear, we mean that it works; it communicates; the light gets through. Good content speaks to people in a language they understand and is organized in ways that make it easy to use.

Content strategists usually rely on others—writers, editors, and multimedia specialists—to produce and revise the content that users read, listen to, and watch. On some large projects, we may never meet most of the people involved in content production. But if we want to help them produce genuinely clear content, we can’t just make a plan, drop it onto the heads of the writers, and flee the building.

Of course, clarity is also a virtue we should attend to in the production of our own work. Goals, meetings, deliverables, processes—all benefit from a love of clarity.

Good content is consistent

Mandate consistency, within reason

For most people, language is our primary interface with each other and with the external world. Consistency of language and presentation acts as a consistent interface, reducing the users’ cognitive load and making it easier for readers to understand what they read. Inconsistency, on the other hand, adds cognitive effort, hinders understanding, and distracts readers.

That’s what our style guides are for. Many of us who came to content strategy from journalistic or editorial fields have a very strong attachment to a particular style—I have a weakness for the Chicago Manual of Style—but skillful practitioners put internal consistency well ahead of personal preferences.

Some kinds of consistency aren’t always uniformly valuable, either: a site that serves doctors, patients, and insurance providers, for example, will probably use three different voice/tone guidelines for the three audiences, and another for content intended to be read by a general audience. That’s healthy, reader-centric consistency. On the other hand, a company that permitted each of its product teams to create widely different kinds of content is probably breaking the principles of consistency for self-serving, rather than reader-serving, reasons.

Good content is concise

Omit needless content

Some organizations love to publish lots of content. Perhaps because they believe that having an org chart, a mission statement, a vision declaration, and a corporate inspirational video on the About Us page will retroactively validate the hours and days of time spent producing that content. Perhaps because they believe Google will only bless their work if they churn out dozens of blog posts per week. In most cases, I think entropy deserves the blame: the web offers the space to publish everything, and it’s much easier to treat it like a hall closet with infinite stuffing-space than to impose constraints.

So what does it matter if we have too much content? For one thing, more content makes everything more difficult to find. For another, spreading finite resources ever more thinly results in a decline in quality. It also often indicates a deeper problem—publishing everything often means “publishing everything we can,” rather than “publishing everything we’ve learned that our users really need.”

There are many ways to discover which content is in fact needless; traffic analysis, user research, and editorial judgment should all play a role. You may also wish to begin with a hit list of common stowaways:

Mission statements, vision statements, and core values. If the people within your organization are genuinely committed to abstract principles, it will show in what they do. The exception is the small number of organizations for whom the mission is the product, as is the case with many charities. Even then, this kind of content should be supplemented with plentiful evidence of follow-through.
Press releases. These may work for their very narrow intended audience, but putting them undigested onto a website is a perfect example of the how-we’ve-always-done-it mistake.
Long, unreadable legal pages. Some legal awkwardness is acceptable, but if you want to demonstrate that you respect your readers, take the extra time to whittle down rambling legalese and replace needless circumlocutions with (attorney-vetted) plain language.
Endless feature lists. Most are not useful to readers. The few that are can usually be organized into subcategories that aid findability and comprehension.
Redundant documentation. Are you offering the same audience three different FAQs? Can they be combined or turned into contextual help?
Audiovisual dust bunnies. Do your videos or animations begin with a long flying-logo intro? Do they ramble on for 30 minutes to communicate ten minutes of important content? Trim, edit, and provide ways of skipping around.

Once you’ve rooted out unnecessary content at the site-planning level, be prepared to ruthlessly eliminate (and teach others to eliminate) needless content at the section, page, and sentence level.

Good content is supported

Publish no content without a support plan

If newspapers are “dead tree media,” information published online is a live green plant. And as we figured out sometime around 10,000 BC, plants are more useful if we tend them and shape their futures to suit our goals. So, too, must content be tended and supported.

Factual content must be updated when new information appears and culled once it’s no longer useful; user-generated content must be nurtured and weeded; time-sensitive content like breaking news or event information must be planted on schedule and cut back once its blooming period ends. Perhaps most importantly, a content plan once begun must be carried through its intended growth cycle if it’s to bear fruit and make all the effort worthwhile.

This is all easy to talk about, but the reason most content is not properly maintained is that most content plans rely on getting the already overworked to produce, revise, and publish content without neglecting other responsibilities. This is not inevitable, but unless content and publishing tasks are recognized as time-consuming and complex and then included in job descriptions, performance reviews, and resource planning, it will continue.

Hoping that a content management system will replace this kind of human care and attention is about as effective as pointing a barn full of unmanned agricultural machinery at a field, going on vacation, and hoping it all works out. Tractors are more efficient than horse-drawn plows, but they still need humans to decide where and when and how to use them.

Of theses and church doors

One of the great images of the history of the Protestant Church is that of a German priest standing in the cold in front of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on All Saints Eve, nailing his manifesto to its wooden doors.

The reality of the publication of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses is messier, and whether the church doors were really involved at all is the subject of academic dispute, but one thing is clear: Luther published his theses to begin an open, public conversation.

Our industry doesn’t lack for manifestos, some of them even explicitly modeled after Luther’s. This article—and the book from which it’s extracted—is not one of the firebrand, nailed-to-the-door attempts at full-scale revolution.

But it is intended to continue conversations we’ve been having for years, and to spark new ones, about the shared principles and assumptions that underlie our work, and the weird and interesting things we can build on top of them.

by martin

Get strategic

Business, Content analysis, Strategy

Content strategy is planning for every aspect of content to get results. That goes far beyond writing the copy. When getting strategic about content, focus on three key areas: analysis, editorial and architecture. While explaining content strategy in detail literally requires a book (or two or three), I’d like to share with you a concise introduction to each area in this article.

Contentstrategy-circle in Make Your Content Make a Difference

Figure 1: Content strategy usually involves analysis, editorial and architecture.

1. Analysis

Analysis is taking a magnifying glass to your content situation. The better you understand it, the better you can plan exactly what needs to change to reach the results you’d like to have. Two typical activities in the analysis phase are a content audit and a context analysis. Sometimes, these activities are lumped together into a content analysis. The exact term is not that important as long as you do the analysis thoroughly.

Content Audit

An audit is a close review of your existing content. If you have any content to start with, you need to know exactly what it is. The audit tells you what you’re working with. By the end of an audit, you’ll have answers to questions such as:

What content types, formats and topics do you have?
What is the quality of your content? (For help, consult this content quality checklist.)
How is your content structured?
Where do you have obvious content gaps and overlaps, or redundancies?

When you’re ready to try a complete content audit yourself, check out the guide Content Analysis: A Practical Approach.

Context Analysis

A context analysis looks at the elements that surround and affect your content. At a minimum, consider and answer these questions about your goal, your users, and your processes.

Goal

What is your business or organizational goal? Why?
How will content help you achieve that goal?

Users / Audience

Who are your users, or the people you want to attract and influence? Why?
Where (in what channels) are your users looking for content — on websites, on mobile, on social networks?
If you have an existing website or interactive experience, how is it performing?

Processes / Ecosystem

How do you create, maintain and govern content now?
How do you plan to do so when you launch the website or interactive experience?
What are your competitors doing in the realm of content?

As a simple example, let’s look at American Express’ OPEN Forum, a site for small business owners. Why did American Express want to attract and influence these users? Because reaching these users was a step toward their business goal. Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly, SVP of Partnerships & Business Development for American Express OPEN, notes, “…our biggest opportunity is with small business growth — if they grow, we grow.” And, American Express decided to help them grow through a unique approach to content. Rather than create more content about their credit cards, American Express decided to create content about small business owner concerns. (More about this approach in the next section, 2. Editorial.)

We could discuss analysis for days, but I’d like to introduce other aspects of content strategy to you as well. For a more detailed explanation of this analysis, I highly recommend the analysis chapter of Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. Also, I shared my step-by-step experience in the presentation Content Analysis: Know Thy Content.

The real benefit of analysis is ideas and insights for planning content editorial and architecture. So, let’s take a closer look at those sides of content, using the OPEN Forum as an example along the way.

2. Editorial

Editorial plans mostly for the people side of content, such as:

What style or voice should your content have to attract and resonate with users?
What topics and themes should your content cover and when?
Who is responsible for what content?
What are your standards or criteria for credible content?

Many businesses and organizations who are not media properties completely lack editorial oversight for their websites and other interactive experiences. That can result in problems ranging from errors to missing a competitive advantage. Let’s turn back to our OPEN Forum example. In the world of finance, much content is a combination of dull explanations or legal mumbo jumbo. OPEN Forum takes a different approach.

Figure 2: In the stodgy world of finance, American Express OPEN Forum offers a fresh approach to content.

The design might not look dramatically different from other finance sites, but the content is much different. To help small businesses, OPEN Forum regularly offers credible content about topics that small business owners care about. American Express produces some content, invited expert columnists create some content, and small business users contribute some content. Even though different authors contribute content, the content is original to OPEN Forum. Can you notice how different it is from aggregating random content or simply optimizing pushy landing pages? Through its consistent voice and handy content on OPEN Forum, American Express has positioned itself as a trusted advisor to small businesses. Because the articles, videos, and podcasts are deeply useful to small business users, they’re far more valuable to American Express.

Of course, having so many content contributors poses some risk of creating content that feels disjointed. To reduce this risk, what’s going on behind the scenes? The right editorial staff and processes ensure the content from different authors is coordinated. For example, while most websites lack an editor, OPEN Forum has an editor-in-chief. And, for robust editorial review and production, American Express partners with Federated Media. As you plan your content processes, you will consider what roles to hire in-house and what roles to hire as freelancers.

Besides the right people and processes, editorial planning results in an important tool: the Editorial Style Guide. This guide documents important decisions about your content for everyone involved to reference. A style guide typically explains:

Target audiences / users
Key messages
Voice and tone
Criteria for topics
Sample content
Usage, punctuation, and grammar guidelines
Trademark and legal considerations

For a helpful start, you might want to consider taking a look at The Yahoo! Style Guide.

So, all of this editorial work sounds interesting, but does it actually get any results? Yes, it does. Since 2007, OPEN Forum has built an audience comparable in size and engagement with other small business media properties. But that’s not the best result. In the lucrative small business market, American Express’s successful editorial approach is a differentiator. More than that, it’s a quiet coup. The results did not happen overnight. They took time. But, compared to its competitors, American Express now owns small business online.

I know what you’re thinking. “But American Express is a big company. Should a smaller one care about editorial?” Yes. A smaller company or an individual can do it on a smaller scale, with less content, fewer contributors, and probably fewer visitors. Editorial is about attracting the right visitors (or audience) and holding their interest through content. Size does not matter nearly as much as quality.

That’s a basic introduction to editorial. But, content concerns don’t stop here. Now, let’s turn to architecture.

3. Architecture

Architecture plans mostly for the machine side of content — while keeping the people side in mind. Architecture addresses how your content is organized, structured and repurposed. Architecture gets your content to the right place. This planning might start with a site map but won’t end there. You likely will need to define content models and taxonomies using metadata. In essence, you need to tell your content management system and other platforms what content you have, where to display it and how to display it.

Let’s look at a simple example, again from American Express OPEN Forum. The site has clearly defined templates for its articles, videos and other content types. Those content types come together (or aggregate) as meaningful topic pages. Take a look at this one for innovation. That aggregation happens dynamically because of good architecture.

Figure 3: This topic page brings together all of OPEN Forum’s original content about a topic (in this case, the topic is innovation), thanks to good architecture.

When you plan architecture well, you gain other benefits. Both search engines and people will find your content more easily. Your content becomes more accessible and flexible, not to mention easier and more efficient to keep consistent.

That’s some basic architecture. Now, let’s kick it up a notch. Is OPEN Forum part of AmericanExpress.com, the core American Express website? No, it’s not. Now, that might bother some user experience designers and information architects out there. Shouldn’t this be one cohesive experience? Yes, it should. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean all of the content has to be in one website or in one place. AmericanExpress.com serves more visitors than small business owners. So, putting all that small business content on AmericanExpress.com could easily get in the way of other visitors. Instead, OPEN Forum and AmericanExpress.com link to each other at relevant points.

Figure 4: OPEN Forum is not part of the core American Express site.

Okay, now let’s kick it up several notches. Content strategy pioneer Rachel Lovinger has articulated convincingly that advanced architecture also makes your content more nimble to use across different interactive experiences, from your website to your mobile application. She notes,

“Publishing content that’s marked up with smart structure and metadata allows it to be delivered on a wider range of channels, while still retaining the context and relationships that make it meaningful and useful to both your audience [visitors or users] and your brand. Think of it like providing publishing instructions with the content, where each different platform uses only the instructions that are relevant.”^[2]

For example, if your content is structured well, you can offer mobile versions of your content more efficiently, as American Express has. You also will have a much easier time creating widgets or an API to distribute your content, as NPR did. (See image below.) Does this kind of planning get results? Within 12 months after releasing this API, NPR doubled its users (audience). ^[3]

Figure 5: NPR structured its content well enough to offer a useful API.

You or your organization might think such multichannel architecture issues are mostly technology issues. Now hear this: They’re content issues, too. Consider how your content’s architecture will help you reach the right users in the right channels.

How These Areas Work Together

My diagram presents the areas of content strategy as a cycle. Now that you understand each area better, let’s look further at this cycle.

Before Launch: Architecture Last

When you’re about to reimagine a website or launch a new one, focus on analysis, then editorial, and then architecture. Why architecture last? Because that way you don’t waste time and energy planning areas of a site that you don’t need. You avoid scrambling to fill unwanted screens and features with content. You’d never build a house by constructing every possible room, then deciding which rooms you actually need. It should be no different with websites and interactive experiences. Plan the content you need first, then architect it.

After Launch: Analyze and Adjust

After you launch, the cycle doesn’t stop. Analyze how your content performs. Learn how users behave with your content. Stay in touch with industry trends. Watch for problems and opportunities. Address them by adjusting your editorial and architecture. Successful media properties never publish content, then leave it. I like how Tracy V. Wilson, Site Director for HowStuffWorks, describes her approach to ongoing analysis.

by martin