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In-House Content Strategy - MinneWebCon April 2013
- 1. In-House Content Strategy MinneWebCon • April 15, 2013 Meghan Seawell @m3ggiesue
- 2. Content strategy is… • Using your content to meet your business objectives
- 3. Common problems • Silos • Governance • Consistency • Workflow • ROT • Unknown content landscape
- 5. It’s not your fault.
- 6. Why you? • Organizational knowledge • Investment (you care) • Influence • Time
- 7. What you can do • Assess problems • Set goals • Create tools (make it easy)
- 8. What are the problems?
- 9. Tools to ID pain points • Interviews • Surveys • Customer support • Informal asking • Analytics • Audits
- 10. “Tell me more about that.”
- 11. Analytics • Look for oddities, outliers • Where do people drop off? • Is “unimportant” content getting a lot of views? • Are people entering where you think they are/should be?
- 12. Content audits • Complete look at site • Good for making a case to do more work • Investment of resources
- 13. Sample audit criteria • Quantitative: • Qualitative: – URL – Branding – Views – Relevancy – Images – Audience – Size – Findability – Page name – Readability – Section/owner – Messaging – Word count
- 14. What are your goals?
- 15. Business objectives • What are your business objectives? • Which of those can your web content support?
- 16. Audiences • Who are they? • What unique goals do they each have? • Which are most important?
- 17. Brand voice • What words could describe your voice? • If your organization was a person, what kind of person would it be? – (Ideally.) • What different tones do you use?
- 18. Core strategy statement • What does your content need to achieve? • What does it need to be? • What will you need to do to support it?
- 20. How do I fix it?
- 21. Messaging guide • Core strategy • Top/key messages your content needs to echo • Ingrain language • Voice/tone notes
- 22. Style guide • Answer any questions that might be useful – Grammar – Nomenclature/language – Content types – Audiences – Voice/tone • Steal!
- 23. Content calendars • What happens annually? • Broad themes, granular topics • Quarterly/monthly/weekly • Include multiple communications channels
- 24. Content brief • Make a case: – What is this trying to accomplish? – Who is it for? – What is its lifespan? – Does it fit with core strategy? • Tool to say no
- 25. Workflows • Diagram it • How information gets posted • Life of a piece of content – Start well before it gets online • Current vs. ideal
- 27. Communicate • Talk to contributors regularly – Meetings – Emails – Informal chats • Pulse checks – Undiagnosed problems • Continual reminders
- 28. Make something up • Imagine a future in which everything works – How does it look? – What’s the gap? – How can you bridge it?
- 29. Resources • Links, slides, and sample tools: meghanseawell.com/minnewebcon-2013 • Contact me – meghan.seawell@gmail.com – linkedin.com/in/meghanseawell
Editor's Notes
- INTRODUCE YOURSELF. I’ve been both in-house and a Get a feel for the room. Who in here is a content manager at their organization? I wanted to ask about other roles, but I wasn’t really sure who else would come.Raise your hand if you’ve been to at least one other CS session today?Ok, good. We won’t spend a long time talking about what it is. You know.
- Short version is using content to meet your business objectives. Even shorter version is that CS asks why. CEO bio on the homepage? Why? What purpose is it serving?So content strategists are really just the people sussing out these issues. If we can’t explain why something is there, propose, “Maybe something else. Here’s how it might help.”
- The reason we have content strategy is because a lot of organizations have similar problems.You make a brochure. It says “Go to the website for more information.” Someone in a department is responsible for that section of the website. They make a page about the event/product, and they put up the brochure/flier, which directs people to the website. Oh, how circuitous for dear User!Departments competing for space on the homepageTwo departments requesting different content related to the same initiative/program. Or maybe they’re requesting very similar content, but they both think it should go in a different place.
- Talk about coming to conferences feeling overwhelmed and guilty. “Ohhhh. Why haven’t I done that yet? WHY ISN’T THIS FIXED RIGHT NOW?!”I’m going to give you some tools to make incremental changes in your organization. And I might say something is “easy,” this that’s really easy for me to say when I’m standing here and no coworkers are interrupting me. I don’t have deadlines to manage. I’m just spouting advice.You have to understand that the problems your content has are a team effort. It took a LOT to get to this point, and more than likely you’re the person with their finger in the dam.
- Org knowledge: You have firsthand experience with the site. You can see all the ways in which things are weird.It’s not your fault. Talk about all at once technique consultants need to use—HERE’S A BUNCH OF STUFF< GO FORTH—vs. gradual roll out you can use internally. You can create one deliverable at a time, and get people to adopt it.Change will be glacial but effective.Give yourself only one thing at a time.
- Your job isn’t to fix everything. It’s to shepherd. To take care of the SMEs.
- So the first step is identifying problems. Pain points.
- Concrete data are really handy for making cases to executives.If you have a hunch, check it out.Data can tell the story you want it(them?) to. (Sometimes)Most likely a gut check, aligns with what you already think. Might lead to some surprises.Google Analytics offers good tutorials.
- Another good tool for executivesDo full site if possible
- Pull quantitative data from CMS or with crawling tools.The thing with qualitative factors is that you often need alignment on the criteria. You could go into the execs and say, “I’ve evaluated our site, and only 30% of it is relevant!”—but they’re definitely going to want to know what relevancy means.You also might be surprised to discover people in your organization don’t necessarily agree on who you’re audiences are.I’m kind of an audit nut, so I really hope you’re proud of me for keeping this contained to two slides. If you want to talk more about audits, find me at the after party, or let’s get coffee. I’m ALWAYS up for an audit chat. Seriously.
- Ok. So, you’re sitting in this room. In all likelihood, you already know what your problems are. And maybe diagnostic tools are not what you need. But I can tell you one thing you absolutely can’t do without: clear goals.If you want to move your content in a direction, you need a direction to move in. You’ll have an EASIER time getting people to move if everyone agrees what direction you’re going.
- For example, if your business objective is to develop meaningful relationships with high-value customers, then your website is likely not the venue for that exchange. Sometimes the only thing you can do is push people to the right venue.(Which is supporting it in a way, isn’t it?)
- Max Johns has a really great blog post about this
- The good stuff. Tools.
- Inclusive language. Not autistic child, a child with autism. Not wheelchair-bound, but a person who uses a wheelchair.Do you have an acronym problem? Talk about it! Remind people that the jargon you use internally is not always appropriate for external audiences. People might not know what you mean when you describe an “exploration station” when what you really mean is “advising center.”Or maybe you have special words you use.This is the place where you can include alllllll the documentation you did earlier. Include your core strategy and your audiences and your voice and tone. Every new decision you make, every new tool you create gets rolled up into the Almighty Style Guide. Keep it updated. Talk about it all the time. Keep it on people’s minds.There are a lot of great resources for developing style guides and templates you can steal. I’ve linked a few on my site, and there are plenty of others available if you poke around online.
- This is something you probably have some version of already within your communications plan. If you don’t, this is an easy place to start. Just start putting stuff on a schedule. Look at what’s coming up in the next few months, and work backwards. Assign deadlines for content to get online, into newsletters, etc.As you develop more strategic goals, assign them to the calendar. Start weighing the things people want to put into the calendar against your goals.Start with deadlines in Outlook. Invite contributors. Move it to an Excel spreadsheet.
- Often just writing this down is enough to see where it breaks