Content Strategy

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away in cyberspace, there lived an email list for internet travelers searching for the meaning of “information architecture.” I remember it well–especially the thrilling chirp, buzz ‘n rattle of my modem dialing in and that one dude (or was it a dudette?) who alternately bedeviled or captured or led or derailed almost every thread struggling to weave its way through our feverish little minds. S/he never identified him/herself and we never figured out who s/he was, but s/he definitely dominated the discussions despite our occasional attempts to shame or out or ignore him/her. So that’s one kind of troll–the arrogant show-offs and con men. Think Donald Trump.

Then there are the pranksters who just want everyone to lighten up a bit, have some FUN. The internet’s response to the British government’s recent public poll on the name for a new government research ship is an good example of that.

And then, of course, there are the Bad Trolls, the ones out to do damage, the ones you have to  deal with or, better yet, avoid to begin with. Here’s an excellent, quick primer on doing just that and handling ego-maniacs and funsters, too: http://www.pr-media-blog.co.uk/5-ways-to-beat-the-trolls/.

Marketing and sales seer David Meerman Scott (“The New Rules of Marketing & PR”) recently had an ‘aha’ moment while watching the Vans World Cup of Surfing in Hawaii:

I was surprised by how low key this important competition looked to me while there in person. I knew it was a big money event and had seen it on video and covered in the surf magazines in prior years, but I thought it strange there were only a few hundred spectators on the beach.

That’s when I realized that the entire production is built around the videos and photos that come out of the contest.

So… more and more these days it’s not just that “a picture is (still) worth a thousand words,” it’s that meatspace events are now designed more to produce online content than to entertain “in person” spectators.

At Vans World Cup, photographers line beach mostly empty of spectators

> read/see full D. M. Scott post 

It’s hard not to “like” your periodontist on Facebook if you have to stare at a personal request from one of his hygienists for two hours AND she does such amazingly skilled, pain-free work. Thanks to Elena (hygienist) and Dr. Jorge Ramirez of Periodontal Solutions of South Miami!

View from the chair – not for the faint of heart, but likable anyway.

The McDonalds “I’m Lovin’ It” slogan was bad enough, unless you actually liked McDonalds food. Their more recent “Choose Lovin” campaign is an even bigger stretch, trying as it does to connect an unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible fast-food chain to the most sublime of all human emotions. It got a lot of Bronx cheers as a result, mostly from folks who pointed out that the company might want to kick off its “lovin’” campaign by announcing that it would start paying its employees a $15 minimum wage and also show Earth more love by not buying potatoes grown with toxic pesticides.*

Still, emotional pitches are all the rage these days among digital age Madmen. “The rise in emotional advertising comes at a time when brands are striving to create ‘content,’ not simply make ‘ads’,” writes Rae Ann Fera in Fast Company.** “That is, they are devoting their energies to crafting stories (and other things—products, apps, experiences) that people actively seek out and share—stuff that looks more like the entertainment and editorial material audiences like, not the unpleasant interruption to that material.”

So what works? The answer is pretty simple, according to several advertising gurus Fera quotes: being strictly true to real human emotions and making sure the specific emotion elicited by an ad somehow matches consumers’ actual experience of a company. According to Fera, Volkswagen’s now famous “The Force” ad had a below-average “purchase intent” score with consumers in pre-distribution testing, but a phenomenal “neuro-engagement” score. Volkswagen’s decision to run “The Force” paid off, she says: “It became among the most beloved and shared Super Bowl ads ever, amassing a staggering 56 million views on YouTube, earning a reported 6.8 billion impressions worldwide and more than $100 million in earned media. And it helped the VW brand achieve the best market share stateside in 30 years in 2011. So much for purchase intent.”

I would add only that “The Force” was phenomenally successful in large part because of its multi-level “surprise” factor—the little boy’s surprise and the surprise we experience with him when the VW turns on, accented by his father’s raised-eyebrow glance at his mother just after we see the remote in the father’s hand. Deutsch L.A. adman Douglas Van Praet would call that a “pattern interrupt,” which he sees as an essential component of successful advertising.***

And of course all of the above can and should be applied well beyond TV advertising–to many kinds of marketing communications, including Web content strategy and copywriting.

* “McMadness: Activists Pile on at McDonald’s Shareholders Meeting” (Allison Aubrey, NPR)

** “The Rise of Sadvertising – Why Brands Are Determined to Make You Cry” (Rae Ann Fera, Fast Company)

*** “Research–You’re Doing It Wrong. How Uncovering the Unconscious Is Key to Creativity” (Douglas Van Praet, Fast Company)

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway): Every Web writer should prepare some kind of content strategy, no matter how barebones, for each and every gig — before starting to write. Even if it’s just figuring out the main messages the client wants to get across, how they align with the brand, who you’re writing for (personas!), what style guide you’ll be using, who needs to approve your copy (editorial workflow), and so on — you need to know all that beforehand to write copy that’s worth its salt. Most clients with any communications experience recognize that and cooperate, although often you get the impression they think you’re being a tad finicky. (I remember one exec. calling me “methodical” with a slight air of disparagement). Some will even review and approve the document or documents you prepare for them to make sure everyone’s ‘on the same page’ from the get-go.

The hard part, I’ve learned, is (1) getting get busy execs. to recognize that the time and effort required to prepare those documents is worth paying for and (2) the documents are not optional guidelines that can be ignored later or whimsically changed along the way; they’re specific plans that should be respected and followed throughout a Web project if the copy is to be high-quality and not cost more than originally planned. A documented content strategy plan signed-off on by key project stakeholders can work wonders in avoiding the many additional rewrites, follow-up meetings and phone calls that result from not having a strategy.

Here’s a table of contents from a  pretty basic content strategy I recently put together for a small company (13 employees) that hired me to write copy for their new website. It includes most, but not all, the main components of a typical content strategy planning document:

• Intro (explain purpose of document)
• Market position
• Competition
• Market differentiators
• Site business goals
• Brand attributes & messaging
• Web copy voice and tone
• Editorial style guide (published)
• Personas (goal-based)
• Website content support for social media channels
• Blog content support for company brand

Back at the turn of the century, when the Web was young, not long after Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (aka “The Polar Bear Book”) was published and information architecture (IA) began to make a name for itself, I spent a lot of time (probably too much time) on an listserv hosted by The American Society of Information Science. It was devoted to (you guessed it) IA, and by far the longest-running, hottest, most thrilling, frustrating, addictive thread was called “Defining the Damn Thing” (IA). Even with all the debate, even back then, thanks again largely to “The Polar Bear book,” most of us who called ourselves IAs were well aware of how important it was to pay close attention to content while designing and building websites.

Fast forward about a decade and I’m four years into a job as “Web writer” that required me to do a lot of IA without actually calling it that, and I get a call from a Web design agency that wanted to talk to me about a “Content Strategist” job. Though I’d never heard of that job title it sounded like just what I was doing, so I poked around and found some new books about “content strategy” and a lot of online debate about what “content strategy” was and had another “defining the damn thing” moment and déjà vu all over again. By 2010 I was working as a Content Strategist (note title case) for Verizon Telecommunications, basically doing much of what I’d been doing for the past 12 years (but making more money).

Then along came “Content Marketing” and people calling themselves “Content Marketers,” aided and abetted by the rise of social media, which unsettled many a newly anointed “Content Strategist,” including me, until I figured out that “content marketing” was basically all about creating good content, publishing and sharing it and thus attracting more attention to a business or organization or self or what-have-you, which again was a big part of what I was already doing.

And then I knew (as someone says somewhere in the Bible)… that like all the many new Web design and development roles and job titles that have come down the pike over the years, “content marketing” is just another healthy symptom of the explosive growth of the Internet and Web and social media and networks and the resulting constant demand for new specialties and specialists to get a lot more new, different work done.  And by now I’ve learned to just keep doing my Web content whatchamacallit thing and if anyone asks me what that is, just describe it to them so they can understand it as much as they need to–and let the job titles fall where they may.

“The Polar Bear Book,” where for many Web IA’s (erstwhile and otherwise) it all began.

Here’s a good start on explaining the huge success of the ALS “Ice Bucket Challenge” that was all over the media (especially social) in August – Erin Carson, Tech Republic:

• Compelling message with emotional resonance (humor);
• Peer pressure (competition)
• Time sensitivity – 24 hours to respond;
• Low physical risk to participants;
• A clear “template” (what to do) with a clear call-to-action;
• Mobile usability – easy ‘shareability’.

I would add:

• Trust in the ALS Association – a known, recognized organization
• Awareness of ALS as a horrible, incurable disease (fear, self-preservation)
• Getting a tax write-off.

And I’d also emphasize the particular strength of “peer pressure” (competition) among celebrities – even if a member of the Rich and Famous Club wasn’t initially interested in participating, his or her publicist probably said “you gotta do this,” especially after it reaching a tipping point when le-tout-LA was doing it and celebrity wannabees and anyone chasing easy “cool” points started doing it, too.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, it required all participants to challenge someone else. Here’s from a list of “Top 10 Reasons People Give” I recently found in a file of goodies I saved from my work for the foundation that fundraises for Boston Children’s Hospital: “Ask and Ye Shall Receive: the number one reason people give–someone asked them to give!”

Mickey Rourke accepts the challenge on “Late Night.”

Numbered lists… “listicles” – they’re everywhere on the Web, like an invasive weed. But there’s no denying we’re drawn to them, click on them, eat them up. New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova calls them our “fast food information diet.”

“The article-as-numbered-list has several features that make it inherently captivating: the headline catches our eye in a stream of content; it positions its subject within a pre-existing category and classification system, like ‘talented animals’; it spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that’s finite, whose length has been quantified upfront. Together, these create an easy reading experience, in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption—a bit like sipping green juice instead of munching on a bundle of kale. And there’s little that our brains crave more than effortlessly acquired data.”

– Maria Konnikova, “A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Love Lists,” New Yorker, December 2, 2013

Listicles – now running wild on the Web

4 Lists You Really Should Read!

At Wordcamp Miami I picked up some buzz about a book called “Youtility,” heard it was the latest/greatest about online marketing, read it, and was thinking about it when I had to go to Radioshack to see what I could do about a water-damaged iPhone (don’t ask). I was just about to pay way too much for a new phone, when a customer behind me, a deeply tanned 60-something guy wearing wraparound shades, a goatee and a Miami Heat ball cap, said “You know, there’s a guy in Homestead who fixes water-damaged iPhones. Just Google ‘iphone repair, Homestead’.” “Thanks!,” I replied, thinking to myself: “What a perfect Youtility demo!”

The book’s sub-title is “Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype.” If the author, Jay Baer, had overheard us in Radioshack that day, he surely would have pointed out that while the goateed guy wasn’t selling anything, he sure was helpful. The Radioshack employee, on the other hand, had been totally focused on selling (hype), and by not mentioning any alternative to shelling out $500+ for a new phone, she missed a perfect opportunity to convert me into a grateful, loyal customer who might eventually spend more than $500 at Radioshack stores.

A key component of “youtility” is what Baer calls “radical transparency”:

“Creating customers by answering their questions is imminently viable and carries remarkable, persuasive power. Unless it inhibits ease-of-use, there is no downside to providing extraordinarily detailed information to your prospective customers. It doesn’t matter whether anyone in your industry is providing self-serve information—big companies are, and they’re training all consumers to expect it.”

Source: “Youtility” via Hubspot (2012)

General conclusion: smart, helpful Web content, as much of it as possible and affordable, is a smart investment for any company trying to build long-term, productive relationships with its customers. That’s not big news, it’s obvious, but easy to forget.  (So many of the many new, buzz-worthy new booklets about Web writing and content strategy are just lite, ‘fast-food’ versions of important points that thought leaders in both fields have been making for years – re: “youtility,” see for example, “Letting Go of the Words,” THE best book about Web writing, by Ginny Redish, published in 2007, pps. 110-113, ‘Market by Giving Useful Information.’)

Now 5 years old, but still good as gold—Britt Parrot’s Digital Web Magazine article on including social media in your content strategy. 4 basic takeaways:

1) Social media is about going out to where the action is, the relevant conversations are, on the Web–and joining in.

2) It’s about open communication (or if you’re a cautious newbie–monitoring relevant conversations).

3) Your primary goal for your content should be communication, not just showing off the latest hot social technology. Which platform will be most effective building relationships, getting word out, gathering info. about your organization?

4) As always with content strategy, you gotta have the patience and discipline to do a careful content audit that identifies different formats (text, video, audio, images) on your site and figures out how and where to share them most effectively.

Sample blank page of B. Parrot audit for social media

Most successful business owners know what’s special about what they’re selling (or like to think they do)– their “differentiators” in the marketplace. But it’s amazing how often those competitive advantages aren’t clearly expressed on their websites!  Read through a few Keys sites in any business sector and you’ll have a hard time telling them apart, beyond a few different graphic designs—and even those tend to lean heavily on the same “paradise” themes (palms, bamboo, parrots, sunsets – you know the drill).

So there’s an opportunity here,  and it’s not just making sure your overall business strategy (internal strengths & weaknesses, external opportunities & threats) is expressed in your homepage welcome text. Take an hour or two to evaluate your main competitors’ sites, looking for mo’ bettah ways to differentiate your business online. Definitely check out their visual branding, usability (ease-of-use), and functionality (search, ecommerce, forms). But look very carefully at their content. Is it fresh? Credible? Relevant? Clear and concise? Easy to scan and read quickly?  And be sure check out content specific to your industry – if you’re evaluating restaurants, can you see daily specials, a wine list? If you’re reviewing hotels, can you learn about the view from each room, fees for local transportation (car & bike rentals), local attractions (both high-level and detailed information)?  The key to it all is being methodical, and yup, that probably means using a spreadsheet or at least a checklist, carefully teasing out a few things your competition does better, or isn’t doing–then tweak your site to dull their advantage or add your own to boost your business.

“Content” section of competitive evaluation spreadsheet used by a national online research agency

Section with industry-specific items

Interesting, research-based New Yorker article on what kinds of content Americans share most.

Illustration for New Yorker article about viral content