A Crash Course in Content Strategy

A Crash Course in
Content Strategy
A workshop at the
School of Visual Concepts
August 16, 2012

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 that has content
that you think is good?

What do you like about it?

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

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

“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/

Let’s go poke around on a real site that I know we’re all
interested in, or at least we all have been.

SVC:
http://www.svcseattle.com/

Split into teams of two.
Pull up the SVC website.
See how many pages you can ﬁnd.

Be ready to discuss:
What information do you ﬁnd useful and usable?
What are some questions you have that the site doesn’t
answer?

Content is not a nice-to-have.
Content is not an add on.
It’s a business asset.
It has value.

Because ...
it brings you customers,
wins you fans,
builds you an audiences,
and earns you money.

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

U.S. Findings: Web Use +
Perceptions of Content Credibility

“You are all in publishing!”

Jeffrey Zeldman,
king of the web

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

You need to get it right.
Enter 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

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?

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

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

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 ways companies
people have used content marketing
to sell bubblegum?

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

Content strategy has tentacles in:
Data modeling.
Product design.
Change management.
Social media.
Editorial.
Taxonomy.
Information architecture.
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

“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?

“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.

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?

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

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.

One thing to keep in mind:

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

Content strategy is a web design discipline.
Content experts should be involved
from the beginning of a web design project.

“Design from
the content out!”

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.

Once you’re done evaluating, it’s time
to design.

Some tools you might use to do so:

Message Architecture

What are your key messages?
How are you delivering them?
Does your audience believe you?

Your message architecture is
independent of form.
It’s not a tagline, or a mission
statement, or a video.
It’s communication goals.
Speciﬁc terminology.

Let’s talk about the message
architecture of SVC.
What do we think the key messages
are? Let’s spend some time on that.

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?

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?

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)


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.)

There are more tools.
content matrices
content modeling
accessibility guidelines
SEO analysis
taxonomy
personas
competitive analysis
wireframes

Not every project requires every tool.

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

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.

“It’s about seeing structures through the lens of
meaning and storytelling, and building relationships
across disciplines so that our databases reﬂect this
richness and complexity.”

Sara Wachter-Boettcher
@sara_ann_marie

“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

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

Resources:
I’ll post a bibliography and links and stuff on my blog:
http://scarequot.es
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.)

THANK YOU
Remember to ﬁll out your evaluation.

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

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