finding your web content balance
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Finding your web content balanceLisa Maria Martin | Cause Camp | April 4, 2014
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How’s your website doing?
Too much stuff?
Overlooked pages?
Inconsistent messages?
Outdated formats?
Total and utter chaos?
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Content strategy can help.
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What is content?
Content is all your stuff.
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Content
FunctionalityDesign
(swellwebsites)
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What is strategy?
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Strategy is thinking through what it would take to achieve what you want & assessing whether it’s realistic to try.
- Roger L. Martin
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So what iscontent strategy?
It’s a framework
for developing useful, usable
web content.
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How do we do that?
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1. Blood
4. Cake
2. Sweat3. Tears
Gratuitous cake photo.
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Create an engaged & sustainable strategy
by considering three factors:
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1. Purpose2. People3. Process
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Purpose1
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You have apurpose.
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Your audience has a purpose.
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Your content needs a purpose.
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Purposeful content
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Purposeful contentsupports what you
want& what they want
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Purposeful contentprovides context
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Purposeful contentdrives action
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You can tell a lot about an organization from
its homepage.
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Content should help others support
your mission.
Bottom line:
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People2
“ #CauseCampLNK
You cannot undertake a large content program
without having a significant impact on your
people and processes. - Kristina Halvorson
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Your content strategy must take your people
into account.
1. Your content needs shepherds.
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What are the roles?
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Who writes?
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Who edits?
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Who reviews?
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Who uploads?
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Who archives?
Who is responsible?
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The answer cannot be “no one.”
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The answer cannot be “everyone.”
“ #CauseCampLNK
Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock,
and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine
years lease of a garden, and he will turn it into a
desert.- Arthur Young
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Lack of specific ownership will derail
you.
2. Your shepherds need support.
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You can only have the content that your
team can maintain.
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Otherwise you get
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Otherwise you getabandoned channels
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Otherwise you getinefficient maintenance
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Otherwise you getvery stressed out
Do not bite off more than you can chew.
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Choose quality over quantity.
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Fit content plans to your
team’s size, budget, & workload.
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If it doesn’t work for the people who do the work, it doesn’t work.
Bottom line:
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Process3
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Plan
Create
Publish
Maintain
Analyze The
Content Lifecycle
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Plan
Create
Publish
Maintain
Analyze
Use this
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Plan
Create
Publish
Maintain
Analyze To think
through this
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What do you have to do to move content through the cycle?
Start with your purpose.
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•What are your goals?•Who is your site for?•What do they need?
Take stock.
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•What can you use?•What’s weighing you down?•What’s missing?
Look at your workflow.
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•Who is involved?•Where are the bottlenecks?•Where do you need to flex?
Launch is just the start.
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•What will you measure?•How will you measure?•What will you change?
Keep going.
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Websites are not “set it and forget it.”
Websites need care and feeding.
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Plan for every phase of the content cycle.
Bottom line:
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Voila! Balanced content.
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Right?
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That’s the ideal scenario.
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But things aren’t always ideal.
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If you can’t overhaul your entire website,
what can you do?
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Start where you are. Use what you have.
Do what you can.- Arthur Ashe
Recognize your limitations.
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(That’s how you’ll flourish.)
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What can you do within your constraints?
1) Break it into pieces.
2) Determine your priorities.
3) Fix just one thing.
4) Stay balanced.
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Plan content that ties back to your purpose.
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Plan content that you can maintain.
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Plan content for launch and beyond.
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Questions?
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Resources
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Content Strategy for the Web
Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach
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Content Strategy at Work
Margot Bloomstein
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Content Everywhere
Sara Wachter-Boettcher
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Thank you!
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