Content Countdown: A guide to government digital strategy

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduction  My goal in this presentation is to give you all two things: a general timeline for putting together a content strategy, and a set of key templates to help you stay on track of your publishing timeline.  On each slide of this presentation you will see a clock – think about it as a pie of time. The shading represents generally how much time I spend working on each piece of the strategy.  I’ve seen a lot of presentations that focus on the tactics around digital strategy - but today I want to keep the conversation at the planning level. Change Slide
• #3: Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve been tasked with promoting an event, or a key issue area that your boss is excited about. This is usually the point that someone on your team will say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we used Facebook or Twitter to promote X” thing! It is your job to remind your team that what you do online is a digital representation of everything else that you working on. I highly recommend developing a project plan template that identifies all of the content that needs to be developed. (Tab first bullet) so you don’t get stuck throwing things online at the last minute.  What counts as content? Anything that you plan on publishing on any of your channels, including traditional and new media, counts as a piece of content. I.E., Press releases, media advisories, talking points, hand outs, Facebook and Twitter posts, blogs, newsletters, etc. (Tab to second bullet) Work with your team members to identify who will be taking on each aspect of the project plan. At this stage you can start to identify which pieces of content will work across multiple channels – saving time and keeping your message consistent across channels. (Tab to third bullet) It seems obvious, but start laying out the work plan by figuring out when your drop dead due date is and work backwards. Change Slide
• #4: You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create a style guide. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be as fancy as this. (Tab bullet) Creating a style guide will help keep your project consistent across mediums. Once you have developed it – it will ultimately save you hours of time making arbitrary decisions about what font and set of colors to use. If your agency has a brand or style guide in place, you should reference it when developing your style guide.  Key items to include in this template include choice of font and color, important logos to use, and any important hashtags or social media notes. Most importantly, having a consistent style across all of your channels, online and offline, helps develop trust with your end users. Share the style guide with your team and any stakeholders that will be working on content in tandem.  Change slide
• #5: Now it’s time to start producing your content. Use your project plan to figure out which projects will take the most time to develop and begin there. Reference your style guide to make sure you are being consistent. The lesson that I have learned as a content manager (Tab to bullet) is that it always takes to produce and approve content than you think it will. Also notice that in our pie of time, that while content production takes the most time, it should also take the least amount of actual strategy. You have already figured the important decisions and should be able to spend your time fine tuning the final product.  Change slide
• #6: No matter what what your role is in your organization – you bring relationships and connections to the table. At this point in your content strategy – it is key to figure out which relationships will matter when its time to publish. Spend time developing relationships with key communicators in real life. If you have been working at your organization for many years – you many know who the key stakeholders are. But do you know if you also follow them on their digital networks? Now is the time to take an inventory to make a list and check it twice to make sure you know what the sum universe of your potential stakeholder network looks like.  Last point here: Nothing compares to picking up the phone or meeting in real life to compare plans. At this point of developing my strategy I will often add key contacts directly to my project plan so I remember to engage with my stakeholders throughout the entire publishing process.  Change slide
• #7: Your team has finished the press release. Final quotes are signed off on. The time has come for you to publish. On the slide, you can see what I call a content spreadsheet. Here is where I take an inventory of all of the items that have been developed thus far, and start to plan when each piece of content will go live.  Key things to track here: What is it, what kind of a thing is it, who is responsible for publishing it, and when should it go live. Your content template doesn’t have to live in a spreadsheet. It could be in an app like Evernote, on an Outlook calendar, or even on a white board hanging in your office. The key is to make sure you know the nuts and bolts of when things are going out the door. The beauty of this stage of planning is realizing how far you can push a few quality pieces of content. That press release and graphic you made for Facebook? You can easily turn that into a blog post, and a newsletter, and an email update to stakeholders. This is what we call C.O.P.E – create once, publish everywhere.
• #8: You have posted all of the content that you developed. Now its time to dig in and see what worked, what didn’t work – and how it fits into the bigger picture. This template is what I call a baseline metrics document. What I’m showing here is what I track for our digital media channels – but at the Governor’s Office we also track metrics around traditional media using a similar template.  What is important here is tracking A: How much stuff did you do? B: Did you engage your followers? C: Did it help you grow your user base. In government, our biggest ROI is reaching the most amount of people with important information. Here you can compare month to month how you are doing. (Tab to reveal)  This second template is what we call the Communications Dashboard template. This document tracks the mean, median, or mean metric across a three month time period to help you visualize larger trends across your channels. For example, the day that Governor Dayton closed schools due to cold weather was one of our all-time most popular social media posts.... But it didn’t represent an actual growth in engagement. It’s important to put metrics into context so you can make decisions about what works – and what doesn’t work, in your content strategy.  Change Slide
• #9: Let’s look at our pie of time again and break it down.  Save these plans and share them across departments – the more you use them, the more effective they will become. By developing templates for each stage of the strategy, you can spend less time planning, and more time ‘doing’ - THAT is the power of content strategy. Thank you for joining me today – and best wishes for your success.