Content Strategy in Higher Education

Editor's Notes

• #2: Who are you?Why are you here?
• #4: Ask for their ideas about what it is
• #5: Breakdown the definition, word by word. Content= text, data, graphics, video, audio. Strategy= holistic plan for obtaining a specific goalCreation= what and why? Structure. Where will it come from? Who is responsible?Delivery= how will it get online, who will edit? What tools used?Governance= Who cares for it? What’s the plan for adding, archiving? Policies? Standards?
• #7: Involves content and people.
• #14: Mstoner after Confab: “Relieved” they were already doing content strategy. “And we didn’t call it “content strategy.” As a small team, we had to be pragmatic generalists rather than focused practitioners of a single element of content strategy.”
• #15: This is bigger than the web team. Involves senior leadership, IT, Comms, Academics, etcClearly linked with strategic plan
• #16: If you want more, here’s a good resource that links to many of the resources you’ve seen today
• #20: People with little or no experience creating official website content on your behalf.
• #25: If your boss has seen this and showed it to you, you probably need content strategy
• #26: Ian Alexander coined this term– find and forage
• #27: Everyone! “You probably need a content strategy”
• #32: WHY?? Why are you doing this? Why blog? Because everyone else is?Must connect user needs to business objectives. Can’t do that if you don’t know either of those.
• #33: We’ll talk first about context
• #35: Discuss this. Exercise to identify business objectives in higher ed. Who defines objectives? This is bigger than the web team. Involves senior leadership, IT, Comms, Academics, etcClearly linked with strategic plan
• #43: Modified later in process to reflect migration
• #44: Modified later in the process to include metadata for CMS migration
• #48: We have to get senior admins to understand why and what value it providesGovernance ensures it gets funded properly
• #49: We talked about the case for CS earlier
• #51: From a comment on Mark Greenfield’s blog post
• #55: Jeff Cram says “stop letting people use your CMS”CMSs are not one size fits allSometimes the best way to engage the community in content development is not to involve the webReference the possible ASC CMS model.
• #56: Requesters (These are the bosses who tell you to “get this up on the web”.)Providers (These are people closest to your product, service or audience who will likely run for the hills when you ask them to contribute website content!)Creators (This is anybody and everybody and rarely includes someone with professional communications training.)Reviewers/ approvers (These are usually the bosses who probably requested it in the first place. More likely than not, there is no reviewer at all. The untrained creator has total authority to do whatever she wants. It would be nice, however, if this function was served by a real editor with the authority to edit.)Publishers (These are the people with access to the CMS who are probably the creators, too. This is the one function that the organization usually provides some training and support for.)Community Managers (You likely have far more of these than you know.)
• #62: Piet Niederhausen- Content in Motion
• #67: You can think of your content much like Legos
• #78: Think about the granular parts of your content
• #81: Can happen with or without a CMS
• #87: It’s not just the pages
• #91: “Reveal, don’t repeat. Don’t blast key messages over and over. Instead, let content reveal and support different facets of the messages.” from Clout
• #92: We run the risk of creating too much content. It takes over if we never prune it. Creating more content isn’t the goal. Less can be more.
• #94: How do we go from a pile of Legos to a Volvo?
• #97: How do we do this? We can do it by carefully curating our content.
• #98: If you want people to believe you are great at something, you have to build the case by presenting evidence. A better strategy with better evidence presents a better case. It doesn’t happen by itself and can’t happen if you don’t have good content to curate.
• #99: We can do this through curation
• #101: Timely= news/headlines. Timeless= evergreen content.
• #102: A mixtape is thoughtful. Genius is an algorithm. Use caution in expecting your CMS to do this. Don’t overdo it with syndication or you could end up with a dynamic site of loosely related content that fails to tell your story.
• #103: Use your CMS to remove barriers, not to think for you.
• #105: Start with a master calendar: Holidays, Deadlines, EventsBuild the calendar to suit your needsConsider calendars by audience or content type
• #106: Start w/existing content. Identify gaps. Think story-building: if you learned this, now it makes sense for you need to know that.Helping depts. create editorial calendars pays great dividends (aligning the organization with messaging, giving them reminders for when to refresh content, helping to see connections and integration with social, etc.)
• #110: You have to plan for what you want to measure in your strategies and make sure you’re set-up to collect the right data.
• #111: How do you know if your strategies are working?
• #112: Triangulate your assesment. Usability testing alone is not enough.
• #116: Quantitative tells you what is happening, qualitative tells you why it’s happening. There’s a good chapter on this in the book Clout.
• #117: Usability vs. utilityUsability= the site is easy to useUtility= the site provides the information the user needs
• #118: Usability scenarios aren’t always real-world. You wouldn’t just pick the first camera and check-out.
• #119: What are people not finding?What are they searching for?
• #120: So you can create content your users want
• #122: Taking content strategy to the campus
• #123: Begin by aligning and educating people at all levels of the organization. Make sure people know your organization’s business objectives and audiences and how their objectives and audiences fit.Cover the overall brand and messaging strategy, content strategy and editorial strategy
• #125: Giving people a tool and no knowledge isn’t going to make your content better
• #126: You have been this for hundreds of years. Sometimes the best way to approach it if offline.
• #128: These can be more detailed for specific content types. Good idea to tie these to your wireframes so people can see them
• #130: Vague instructions: People don’t know what that means and they’ll just waste time trying to do that.Workshop: reformatting your garbage so it’s easier to scan