content strategy (for librarians and beyond)
my program pitch to MLA
So your library just got a shiny new mobile-friendly website. You've got every social media account under the sun and a handful of blogs to boot. You've got a whole ton of research guides or online pathfinders -- plus your various paper-based PR and marketing materials: posters, brochures, bookmarks, and the like. Maybe you don't have all (or even most) of those things yet, but you're working on it and want to be sure your hard work will result in a new set of streamlined, user-friendly communication tools that your patrons will not only use and respond to but *love*.
Only problem is, with so many different channels and so much content, how can you manage everything? How can you communicate to the huge range of people you serve when you don't always know where, when, how, or why they're looking for information? Are you being redundant when you post the same thing to a listserv and a blog AND your Facebook page, or are you just casting a wider net? Are there things that simply work better on a given publishing platform, and if so, how do you know? This, my friends, is where content strategy comes in.
Content strategy is planning for the creation, publication, and maintenance of useful, usable content. It's a set of mindsets, tools, and best practices to help organizations understand and produce the kinds of content their audiences really want and need - and to keep that content sustainable and flexible for future maintenance. It aims to align communication across all channels and platforms - websites, social media presence, print materials, and beyond. This introductory session will tailor these techniques specifically to the unique needs of librarians and library-related content and communications.
riffing on some content strategist/manager job requirements...
publishing processes & standards
data management & reporting metrics
content policy definition/development, standards, guidelines, etc for content maintenance and governance
(can include things like style guides, required tagging/metadata/keywords, standardization, templates)
troubleshooting problems & anomalies; changing course as needed. make sure the desired content is reliably and consistently delivered to users.
driving user adoption of content - regardless of medium.
conducting content audits. what patterns do you see? what issues leap out? what could be reduced, simplified, replaced? what do analytics tell you? how can you turn audits into actionable steps?
digital content/collection management. what skills do you need for that?
project management
"managing content, syndicating content, reporting key measures as well as the maintaining the backend content infrastructure"
know thy user
"The user's context includes actions, constraints, emotions, cognitive conditions, and more." Stolen from Daniel Eizans via Erin Kissane's book The Elements of Content Strategy.
just WTF is "good content" anyway?!
good content is
1) sustainable & supported
2) useful
3) user-centric
4) usable & clear
5) concise
6) consistent
Sustainability is a must. Don't publish/create "oodles of content without considering the long-term effort required to maintain it." Time-sensitive information must be published on time and removed when it's no longer relevant or useful. User-generated content has to be tended and monitored with some kind of consistent schedule in mind. Publishing and writing tasks must be recognized for the time-consuming, complex tasks they are (not just seen as "one and done"). No CMS can replace that type of human effort.
Useful content - usefulness is defined by what content should accomplish. Go beyond selling or dully describing a product - show why the product is desirable, how it helps the buyer, how it fits into the context/ecosystem of other products. Demonstrating benefits and features is easiest and more useful to people when you understand the reason why they need it or would want to use it.
"Right for the business" and "right for the user" = the same. Without readers, buyers, sellers, clients, etc. all content is meaningless - so their needs must drive the creation, targeting, and maintenance of it, or they'll gtfo.
User-centric/Empowering users - make 'em feel like geniuses who are accomplishing exactly what they set out to do. You must get into their heads to determine how to make them feel this way, as well as what it is they actually need, when they need it, and in what form they want it.
Understand user's mental model/conceptual framework - Use their vocab; use the way they use specific terms and phrases; make sure users can figure out what to do and tell what is going on. Stop building sites and products around internal org charts and mission statements and jargon and proprietary names.
"Good content speaks to people in a language they understand and is organized in ways that make it easy to use" (from Kissane, TEOCS)
Concision - Too much content and too many words = meaningful stuff is too hard to find. Remove redundancy, especially redundant instructions or documentation. Don't dump endless feature lists on people; if you need to use them, make sure they're well organized.
Consistency - reduces cognitive load for users (think of standardization in other products, like cars and coffeepots) and helps them understand content. Language, when kept consistent and reliable, acts as an interface to facilitate understanding. But consider how to tailor it at an audience level, when you've got more than one.
key tools of the trade
style guides, clearly documented publishing workflows, editorial calendars, running writing/editorial workshops, content templates, custom content for specific channels & audiences
Understand existing resources - who is writing content? Are they good at it? Do they want to be doing it? How can you help make it easier on them? If they're needed, what does the budget for hiring more writers look like?
"the acquisition, cataloging, and practical maintenance of content in our care" - library skillz much?? Immerse yourself in the content you manage. Go beyond simple familiarity. Be on the lookout for it everywhere. Balance understanding of where/how content is created with where/how it's read and used.
Consider your channels - how can you use them to your advantage? What are they, to begin with? (Web stuff, social media, apps, multimedia, white papers, blogs, ebooks, catalogs). How can all of this weave together in an ecosystem of sorts?
Information architecture (wireframes, site maps, page diagrams, user flows, all driven by user research - plus navigation and taxonomies). Keep it usable and findable.
Your CMS should be your friend - and a friend to everybody contributing through it. Develop CMS requirements, define info workflows, manage version control, preserve and archive info, optimize search tools and processes, define metadata & tagging systems and best practices.
Evaluate
Background info & research, analytics, needs assessment, competitive review, personas
Design
Communication strategy, public and back-end faetures related to content (content infrastructure on both sides). Tactical plans for creating and revising content, designing tools/processes for long-term content management and evaluation
Execute
Writing and revising, workflow setup, sourcing/aggregating/organizing/describing
templates and guidelines
standardize wherever possible. determine primary/secondary audiences and messages, integration/relationships of one platform with another, recommendations on delivery via different channels.
wireframes. represent structure, give skeletal outline. but still need to determine: what each type of content is intended to accomplish, how it relates to other types of content, how it's supposed to look and sound. guidelines are needed here too - determine tone, depth, detail, strategies for cross-linking/syndicating/reusing, plans for metadata.
templates. list each piece of info required, and also optional info. note what each content chunk must accomplish. what turns up in search results? what's under a read more link? lists of features or benefits should focus on how it'll help users and how it fits in with other products/tools they may be using (or need to get). formatting - word count, capitalization, paragraph or bulleted list, avoid or use jargon, whether or not to use images. provide examples.
regularly schedule editorial reviews of all content (requires initial audit). ongoing traffic/findability analysis. "altmetrics" - where might people be discussing you? find the discussion and see how it can help shape your strategy or improve your technique. editorial planning sessions - define changes in theme, usability expectations, what the guys down the street are doing, what campaigns are going on in the org, etc. also, consider ongoing translation and localization efforts.
where do you fit in? who are you working alongside? solo? team? department? organization? who writes? edits? does QA?
"ten simple steps" from karen mcgrane's content strategy for mobile
1) No assumptions
Quit thinking you can just guess what subset of content a "mobile user" wants. You're going to guess wrong.
2) Use analysis to drive adoption of your strategy
Do your research, look at competitors, and evaluate your analytics data. Figure out how to convince [the people in charge/with money] that you need a content strategy for mobile [or in general].
3) Content parity
Before jumping into imagining new mobile products, figure out how you can achieve content parity across platforms. You don't have to show exactly the same content on every device, but you should provide an equivalent experience.
4) Clean your closet
Use mobile as a catalyst to remove content that isn't providing value. Inventory and audit your content to find what's outdated, badly-written, or unnecessary. When you edit or delete it, do it to make the experience better for all users.
5) Content is as content does
Don't create content for a specific context or platform. It's not your desktop web content, your email content, your social content, or even your print content. It's just your content.
6) Package, plug, and play
Create content packages: a flexible system of content elements that cover a range of possible places where your content might get used. Then manage and maintain those content elements all in one place.
7) Adaptive content
Develop a process and workflow that will support and enable maximum content reuse with minimum additional effort. That's adaptive content: structured content that's created so that it can be reused.
8) Platform independence
Separate content from form and create presentation-independent content. Don't encode meaning through visual styling - you'll have to strip that out when you move to another platform. Instead, add structure and metadata to your content.
9/10) Get a CMS that works
Ensure that your content management tools make it easy - and possible - for your content creators to develop the content structures needed to support adaptive content. Invest in CMS frameworks that support multi-channel publishing. If you're imagining a future where you have finer control over which content you publish to mobile, desktop, and everything in-between, then you've got work to do to make sure your tools, processes, and workflow will support that.