Content Strategya field guide for higher education

J. Todd Bennett & Adam Forrand

What is content strategy?

Why do you need it?How do you do it?

What we plan to cover today:

What is Content Strategy?

Content Strategy is…

“…the process of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.”

Content Strategy is…

Melissa Rach

“…figuring out the best way for content to help achieve your business goals”

diagram Rahel Bailie, descriptions Jonathan Kahn

Brand strategyMetadata strategyMessaging strategyEditorial strategy

Information architecture

Tone & style guidesTaxonomy/

categorization

The many disciplines of content strategy

http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/getting-to-grips-with-content/ Felicity Evans

Haven’t we seen all this before?

Louis Rosenfeld, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”, 2002

“If [Information Architecture] is the spatial side of information, I see content strategy as the temporal side of the same coin.”

Louis Rosenfeld

Content strategy is ALL of these things.

Content strategy is NOT new.

You’re probably already doing it (to some degree).

Content strategy that isn’t tied to well-defined business objectives is not strategy.

Flickr: joey.gonoza

http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/complete-beginners-guide-to-content-strategy/

Any questions?

Why do we need content strategy?

If you just spent $100k on a CMS and your website still stinks, you probably need content strategy

If your CMS solved a technical problem, but created a human one, you probably need content strategy

“You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.”

Jeff Cram

If you just spent $200k on a redesign and your

website still stinks, you probably need content

strategy.

If you just spent $300k on a rebranding and your

website still stinks, you probably need a content

strategy.

Start here. Go far.

Content College

If the inmates are running the asylum, you probably need a content strategy.

xkcd.com

If your website is like a flea market, you probably need

a content strategy.

Metaphor by Ian Alexander

If you are [insert issue here]• Under-staffed• Under-funded• Under-appreciated• Under-water…

Content strategy can help you…• Understand and meet your

audiences’ needs• Support actions you want to promote• Stop wasting resources on content

nobody wants• Eliminate the guesswork about what

to publish, how and where• Get more done

Source: Brain Traffic

Any questions?

Creating the Content

Creating the Content

PART 1: ANALYSIS

Sound familiar?

Source: Halvorson

This needs to go on the home pageWe should be on YouTubeI need this brochure converted for the

webWe need our new mission statement

upLet’s write a dozen articles next monthWe need to launch a blog

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/04/12/make-your-content-make-a-difference/

Analysis

Context

Content

The elements that surround and affect your content

Context Analysis

Who does this?

How do you ensure they’re linked with the strategic plan?

Define your business objectives

Flickr: Marubozo

Who are they?What are their task

and info needs? Focus groups Interviews Surveys Secondary

research

Identify & understand your users

Flickr: manjulakoza

Analytics Website Search

Usability testing

How are people using your website now?

• Current processes• Politics• Competitors• Brand

What is your current web ecosystem?

Flickr: OTHConsulting

A close review of your existing content

Content Analysis

Content Audit

• What do you have?

• Where is it?• What’s the

format?• What’s the

structure?• Is there “ROT”?

Any questions?

Creating the Content

PART 2: Planning

Governance

A problem everywhere, but complicated in higher education by decentralization

and academic freedom.

Mark Greenfield

“…senior administrators are disengaged from the web.

…And the lack of any formal operational model results in an inefficient use of resources and no real sense of the value and ROI the web provides. ”

Build the case for why the web matters• Use good data• Tie it to recruitment/ fundraising• Show efficiencies

Help leadership understand what you’re doing and why so they’ll stop asking you to do stupid things.

Getting buy-in

Hear more from Mark Greenfield on Highered Live:http://higheredlive.com/2011-the-year-of-web-governance/

- Jay Collier

“…why [is] the centralized-decentralized debate is so often presented as a dichotomy? Can’t our organizations respect both, in their appropriate roles?

…the concept of hierarchy … is sometimes confused with power inequality…centralization means power over others.”

Role of the CMS

“If you don’t adapt technology to support your business process, your business process will adapt to your technology.”Colleen Jones in Clout: the Art and Science of Influential Web Content

Rethink roles•Requesters submit requests for web content•Providers subject matter experts•Creators develop the content•Reviewers/ approvers consulted before publication online•Publishers get the content online•Community Managers participate in online conversations via social media

Any questions?

Creating the Content

PART 3: Architecture

There’s more to IA than a sitemap

Content Models

Taxonomies

Controlled Vocabularies

VideosImages

Stories

StatsNews

Events

Projects

Website as a platform for interacting with

content

Bios

19 billion/year 2.16 million/hour

36,000/minute

400 billion Lego bricks produced

since 1958

Gizmodo.com

Just 6 (2x4) bricks of the same color combine in 915,000,000 unique ways

Lego.com

Content Reuse

A single piece of content is created once and used in

multiple formats and contexts

The 3 Rs of Content Reuse

Re-use

1 piece of content, multiple contexts

Re-purpose

use parts of a piece of content for different purposes

Re-package

multiple documents created in multiple media types

Benefits of Reuse• Quick and Easy Updates• Consistency• Knowledge Repository• Extended Reach• Do more with less

Content Reuse: Cautions

• Context reduces re-usability• Lack of context requires branding

of the content itself• Decentralization requires

consistency in structure and taxonomy

Structured vs. Unstructured

Content

What is Structured Content?

• A way of separating content from presentation

• A way of creating & storing information based on a predefined set of rules

• Content that can be parsed and formatted into just about any other structured (or unstructured) format

What is the alternative?

Unstructured Content

• Traditional HTML• Static, freeform• WYSIWYG

Problems with unstructured content

• Difficult to make site-wide changes to content or layout

• Redundancies, inconsistencies, erroneous info

• Presentation often coupled with content

• Difficult to re-use content

Content is the sum of its parts

Use of MetadataInformation used to describe & categorize

content

Album namesArtistsSong TitlesAlbum ArtworkRatingsLast Played DateGenrePlaylists

Metadata• Structured/controlled metadata– Categories & Relationships– Content Fields in the Structure

• Unstructured/ free form metadata– Tags– Ratings– Usage Data

Content modelinggiving consistent structure to your

content

Any questions?

Creating the Content

PART 4: Content Design

And remember…

forms, instructions, error messages, calls to action, page titles, link labels and photo captions are all content. Give them some love.

Any questions?

Creating the Content

PART 5: Editorial

Editorial is planning the “what and when”

•Key messages and topics•Voice and tone•Grammar and punctuation guidelines•Copyright•Editorial calendars

Check out the Yahoo! Style Guide

Building your brand with message architecture

What do you want people to believe about you?

What are your key messages?

Credit: Jessica Hagy

What’s the message?

Without a message, you have nothing to say.

Messages are not contentThey are a

frameworkfor content

Drawn from business

& user needs

“When your content has built your reputation enough to attract the right people, convincing those people to act is a natural next step.”

Colleen Jones, from Clout

Develop a strategy-> Build the case ->

Present evidence

… and let your audience decide

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/field_museum_library/

Curation is a mix of both TIMELY and

TIMELESS content

Erin Sceme, “Content Strategist as a Digital Curator”

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/content-strategist-as-digital-curator/

Flickr: jinxiboo

Flickr: jinxiboo

•A compilation of songs (just as websites are collections of content)

•Created for a specific someone (consider your audience)

•Communicates a specific message (in service of business objectives)

•Should elicit a particular response (meet user needs/assist in task completion)

http://www.content-ment.com/2010/05/content-strategy-or-lets-make-mixtape.html

Editorial Calendars

http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2010/08/content-marketing-editorial-calendar/

Parts of an editorial calendar• Publication or Re-use date• Description• Funnel stage (prospects)• Format (web page, blog post, video, pdf)• Call to action (what do you want them to do?)• Distribution (website, Facebook, Twitter)• Related (emails, tweets, landing pages, other

content, registration forms, etc.)• Owner• Status (draft, review, finished) • Review date

Conversation Calendars

http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2010/12/social-media-conversation-calendar/

Any questions?

Evaluation, Measurement & Testing

Analysis = post hoc

Evaluation = strategic

“Too many usability tests focus only on finding information—not on how the information itself works for people.”

Ginny Redish

http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/12/testing-content-concepts.php

Some qualitative techniques

• Focus Groups• Interviews• Observations • Subjective

analysis• Environmental

Scans

Some quantitative techniques

• Surveys and questionnaires

• Data mining/ modeling

Mixed

• Web analytics• Usability

testing

The qualitative helps give meaning and

context to the quantitative

Web analytics

Useful for measurement, but also for research

Do people do what they say they do?

Look for ways the behavioral data supports/refutes what you learned in other research

Analytics can help you see…

•Where users come from•How they share your content•How your content is being digested •What causes people to leave•What the most popular topics are•Movement between related materials

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/content-strategist-as-digital-curator/

Any questions?

Taking the show on the road

byronfgarcia.com

The incidental publisherincidental (adj):1 : being likely to ensue as a chance or minor consequence

2 : occurring merely by chance or without intention or calculation

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

How did they become publishers?• Without intention? They didn’t intend to

become a publishers, did they?

• Perhaps it happened by chance (low woman/man on the totem pole, newest employee in the department, they have an iPad).

• And of course it’s a minor consequence (the last item on their job description calls this “other duties as assigned”).

– Erin Kissane

How do you get the information out of the brains of people who know stuff and into the brains of people who can write web copy?

Use content templates

• The page title

• A short description of each chunk of content, including formats it can be in (paragraph, bulleted list, etc.)

• Examples of each chunk of information, written by actual writers

Developing Publishers• Teach them how to conduct simple

audience research (i.e. talking to people).

• Help them develop their own strategies that align with the institutional strategies.

• Jump start efforts one site at a time. • Teach the role of measurement and

build-in simple, understandable ways to measure the effectiveness of their sites.

• Provide ongoing professional development.

Developing Publishers

DON’T:•Use vague instructions like “keep your content fresh” and “promote interactivity”

•Start and end your education with a “writing for the web” presentation or workshop

Any questions?

J. Todd Bennett

todd@decimal152.comhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/jtoddbennett @jtoddb on Twitter

Adam P. Forrand

adam@decimal152.comhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/adamforrand @4and on Twitter