I was invited to speak about content strategy at the Association of Publishing Agencies “Digital Breakfast” event, held at Channel 4 television in London on 5 April. The APA is a professional association for the customer publishing industry. Here’s a video of my talk, “What Web Content Strategy Means for Publishers”.
The same problem keeps cropping up in web, marketing, and communications teams. You’re working on a project. Maybe it’s a time-limited campaign, a section of a website, or a specific delivery channel like email or social media. You know the project is unlikely to achieve its objectives because of problems with strategy, governance, execution, or measurement. But that higher-level stuff is outside your official scope. What can you do about it?
After the resounding success of CS Forum 2010 in Paris, we’re bringing this year’s conference to London, with a bigger venue, 3 days of presentations (single-track, multi-track, and workshop days), and three awesome parties. Together London (my company) is organizing this year, joined by the super-talented Randall Snare and Destry Wion.
Why you should submit
We’re trying to make the conference as inclusive as possible. Help us to achieve that by submitting a talk or a workshop, and encouraging your friends and colleagues to do the same. Even if you’ve never presented before, give it a shot: there are many 20-minute slots in break-out rooms, and we’ve laid out topics to help you decide what to talk about. As Erin Kissane tweeted, how can you resist?
The call closes on 4 March, so start thinking now! I can’t wait to welcome you to London in September.
Here’s a video of my 5-minute lightning UX presentation on why content strategy is a big deal for user experience professionals.
Transcript
The video is captioned, and here’s the transcript:
My name’s Jonathan Kahn. I’d like to talk about why content strategy is a big deal for user experience professionals.
So content strategy, you’ve heard about it, right? Everyone’s talking about it, have you got a content strategy? So, why is it so hot? It’s been around for as long as the web’s been around, it’s not really anything new, it’s part of user experience. Why the big deal? So I think the reason it’s such a big deal is we’ve been talking for a long time about stuff like information architecture, usability, UX, research, all this different stuff. They’re disciplines that people have grown and talked about for ages.
If you think about content and content strategy, it hasn’t really happened. We’ve only just recently been starting to talk about it, to write books about it, to have conferences about it. So I think we’ve been ignoring content and all of its complexities and hoping that it will go away, and that’s kinda caused a bit of a crisis.
So I think content strategy is the moment when you realise that you need to do some more thinking. If you think about all the complexities associated with planning and creating and governing and editing content, they raise all these questions that most organisations aren’t really very well placed to answer.
So think about the organisation you’re working with as a UX professional. They need to cover 4 components in order to really have a content strategy and be able to deal with content properly. And two of them concern content itself, which are substance, which is things like a messaging architecture, what are our key messages, and style guides, and structure which talks about the way that people navigate that stuff, classifications, you know, classic IA stuff. And then people components which include workflow, in real life which human beings are going to do what when, with all the content, and governance, which talks about decision-making processes, how do we set policies, how do we have ownership, standards, that type of thing. And the problem that we have as people who come from the IA background, speaking for myself, is that we’ve really focused on the structure piece only, and ignored all the other ones, which makes a lot of what we do kind of like a fantasy that may never actually get implemented.
So I think content strategy is an appropriate context to discuss some deeper business issues that are broader than any particular product or project that you’re working on right now, it’s an appropriate place to talk about bigger stuff. It doesn’t necessarily have all the answers, you can’t kinda go to the book and say right, content strategy, what’s the answer to this problem. But it think it has some really good questions, and that’s how we should think of it, it’s a way in, some things it’s OK to ask that come raise some bigger stuff. I think as UX designers, we are helping our organisations move through a time of great change, right, you know, the web revolution like the industrial revolution. And we’re all trying to help our clients or organisations deal with some big scary words, like these. Product strategy, corporate governance, metrics, or ethics. And I think content touches all of these things, so we can talk about these things in the context of content. So just to take ethics for an example.
What type of persuasion techniques are we using as an organisation, you know, are we straightforward with people, are we upfront, are we transparent, or do we use unethical marketing tricks for example, like Harry’s documented, and I know he’s going to talk more about that later, the dark patterns like this. Everyone in this room would like our organisations to not do any of this stuff, and I think content strategy is a great way to talk about why we need to have an ethical stance, and what bad things will happen if we do unethical things.
So if you think about your design context you might think of an oil tanker heading the wrong way, as if the web never happened. And in that context how on earth can we change some of the things I’ve been talking about, like how the organisation deals with content. I think the answer is, we have to become content strategy advocates, that’s what I’m asking you to do today, become an advocate. Which means you’re the person who’s bringing up these issues, and saying this is a problem, we need to deal with this problem. So the way to do that is to become, sorry, to thrash early. If you can get everyone in the room as early as possible and bring this up, on whatever level you can, and say, this is a problem, are we dealing with this, if not let’s create a plan to deal with it. I think that’s the way to start to turn that oil tanker around, because it can be done, it just takes a long time. So if you’d to learn more about content strategy I have a shameless plug for you this evening, which is I’m helping to organise a conference here in London in September about content strategy, keynoted by Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane, which will be really good so I hope to see you there. And that’s why I think content strategy is a big deal for UX professionals. Thank you.
Last week I attended the Content Strategy Applied conference,
generously hosted by eBay in London. Here’s my review of four sessions:
Nikki Tiedtke’s eBay case study stole the show. She talked
us through a year-long process of Europe-wide networking, persuasion, and stakeholder engagement that
resulted in the first ever holistic approach to content within eBay Europe. The specific case study concerned
content about policy changes directed at eBay’s most valuable customers:
500,000 business sellers, served by 12 websites in 7 languages.
The project resulted in concrete improvements to metrics like
comprehension and retention of key messages by users, as measured by user surveys as
well as customer support metrics and web analytics.
“It was obvious that the teams were struggling,” but it took a linchpin like Tiedtke to
convince the organization to change working practices to meet the realities of modern communications.
Her story shows that content strategy is half collaboration, advocacy, and
organizational change–the deliverables and techniques are useless without them.
Rahel Bailie argued that content strategy
is misunderstood, under-utilized,
and difficult to pin down because you only notice it when it’s broken. Her selection
of stories about both failure and success demonstrated how broad this field is–from
support and training materials to product marketing and emails.
Rob Hinchcliffe discussed the role of content strategy in the age of social media. It’s obvious that broadcasting brand messages on twitter won’t work, but how do you find
a community that’s interested in your organization, and what content do they actually want?
His case study described how Lego created a “hook” by finding its higher purpose:
“Lego as a creative medium”. Sounds obvious, but it wasn’t–the company had always ignored its crazy enthusiast audience, and actually engaging in this way took a lot of work. Most interesting to me
was an attendee comment that this strategy wouldn’t work for clients like insurance companies, because
insurance is only mentioned in social media in a negative light. But which other industry can sell
you peace of mind? It seems to me that the insurance company that manages to find their higher purpose–as
Hinchcliffe puts it–will sell more policies than everyone else combined.
Kristina Halvorson brushed off her hyperbolic conference
billing as a content strategy
“pioneer” and “guru”: “I’m not a pioneer, I’m a storyteller.”
This is worth repeating. Content strategy has been around as long as the web has.
The people talking about it now aren’t trying to claim some kind of technical or theoretical
superiority over other practitioners, and neither are they selling some novelty-infused snake oil.
Yes, it’s been around since forever, but we’ve only started talking about it recently.
Halvorson offered her full arsenal of stories–from the movie WALL-E
to a decrepit house to an ecosystem–and described
persuasive techniques that practitioners can use to effectively communicate value, and ultimately introduce
change. Which is the difficult part.
She argued that despite the consistent clamor for case studies, it’s impossible to actually demonstrate
strategic thinking. You can show the deliverables, you can show the results, but you can’t actually
demonstrate the process. (Halvorson also offered a glimpse of Brain Traffic’s
“substance, structure, workflow, governance” framework for content strategy consulting–developed by Melissa Rach and others–which is fantastic.)
Thanks to the organizers for a great conference. There’ll be more content strategy action here in September, when the Content Strategy Forum comes to London after
last year’s Paris debut. The open call for speakers launches next month, along with early bird registration
and some exciting announcements. Follow on twitter or register for email updates to be notified when the website launches. See you there?
You know that content strategy is crucial to your organization’s mission: content is a critical business asset that’s central to user experience. But there’s a problem: your organization still thinks it’s 1999. How do you turn around the oil tanker? Learn how to shift the conversation from fear and denial towards positive and realistic change, by becoming a content strategy advocate.
Strategy scares the hell out of web and user experience professionals. It’s outside of our comfort zone.
So instead of dealing with it, we distract ourselves with tools, tactics, and techniques.
Here are some examples that you might recognize.
You’re asked to help improve a train-wreck of a website that’s so obviously broken
that you don’t know where to start. Somebody suggests
a usability test. Great, we get to use the lab!
Fun, but inappropriate.
A quick expert review will catch the biggest usability problems.
Diving into your favorite UX technique is a distraction from the real
problem: a lack of web strategy.
Or you’re involved in a website redesign with the vague goal of
“improving the user experience”. Users aren’t happy, please make them happier.
The team decides to draw some wireframes and rework the visual design, instead of
delivering the unwelcome news that a redesign won’t make the problem go away. As
Lou Rosenfeld puts it, redesign must die.
Here, tactical design work provides a distraction from content strategy,
or the lack of it—which is the root of the problem.
And don’t forget classic shiny object syndrome. Have website issues?
No problem! Just add a Facebook widget and some RSS podcast YouTubes, and
everything will be OK.
Making change is scary
User experience design is about making change. To be effective, we need
to be what Seth Godin calls a
linchpin: create work that matters by challenging the status quo.
Which is scary.
As Karen McGrane puts it, design is the easy part:
For a designer to sit down at a desk and craft a better experience than what most businesses provide today is not that hard. What’s hard is getting a large, decentralized organization with many competing business units to review, critique, approve, and launch a better product. Show me a digital product that’s hard to navigate, and I’ll show you a business with an equally convoluted organizational structure.
Meet your new client, the ACME Widget Company. They’ve been doing fine for years using
interruption advertising to sell products, and they’ve never
dealt with the impact of the internet. Suddenly it’s obvious to anyone
with a web browser that they have no competitive advantage, no coherent message, and
no direct relationships with customers. They’re scared by the web, and in denial about
their changing business model. ACME ask you to improve their website’s user experience.
But the content and usability problems are symptoms of deeper
structural and strategic problems. They need what Lisa Welchman calls
web operations management:
web strategy, governance, execution, and metrics.
Until they get a strategy, tactics won’t be effective.
Tactics are easier to sell
We always got away with the distraction sell in the past.
Client: Our customers can’t use our website. Us: Wanna buy this shiny new CMS? How about an eye-tracking study? Hey look, 2000 friends on Facebook!
The client didn’t hire you to tell them that their business model is threatened
by the internet. They’re actually looking for distractions, for superficial fixes.
Perhaps an important customer told them their website stinks, so they want you to
make the problem go away. They’re in denial about the scale of their web-related problems.
They probably don’t even know what content is on their website. (See:
content strategy.)
Even clients who are aware of the deeper strategic issues are reluctant to confront them
because of organizational politics. Can’t we just redesign the website and deal with all of that later?
The distraction sell is dangerous
Here’s the problem: today, the distraction sell is dangerously short-sighted.
The client will judge the success of the project on outcomes, not on whether
you did what they initially asked for. When that customer calls after the redesign
and says the website still stinks, you’re in trouble.
Don’t be part of the problem
Web people are enthusiastic about technology to the point of naïveté.
I can’t remember the number of times I’ve truly believed that if only a client would
start a blog, or sell online, or participate in “the conversation”,
everything would be fine. In reality there are few low-risk wins. Change is
hard, and there’s no guarantee it will work.
When we sell tactics, techniques, or tools as magic fixes for an organization’s problems,
we’re distracting them from what’s important–which makes us part of the problem.
It’s time to stop doing that.
Do something scary today
To really help organizations fix their broken user experiences,
we need to tackle the scary work of making change.
If you choose to stick to what you’re comfortable with, own
that choice: don’t be surprised when your work isn’t valued.
The valuable work comes from moving outside of our comfort zone, and
helping our clients to do the same.
If that seems overwhelming, let me suggest a first step. Next time
you’re tempted to reach for your favorite technique, tool, or tactic,
start a conversation about strategy instead. How does this
initiative support our overarching web strategy? How will we measure
success? What’s the governance structure for decision making? And do
we have a content strategy to stop it from
smelling fishy the day after launch?
If you can help to slowly change the organization, you’ll create
a context for great design work. Tackle the scary strategy work first,
and there’s a better chance that your tactics will be appropriate,
effective, and appreciated.
Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?
At the conference the Brain Traffic
crew invited me to visit Minneapolis,
an offer I couldn’t refuse. While I was there I recorded a podcast
with the super-smart Meghan Casey, in which we talk about content strategy,
design processes, and job titles—and I completely fail to speak Minnesotan.
Check out the podcast.
I also visited a flour mill museum and managed to
answer two bar trivia questions correctly (a personal best.)
Thanks to all at Brain Traffic for being such welcoming hosts! Y’all are welcome in London
anytime.
Most wireframes are works of fantasy: more aspiration than design solution. Fantasy wireframes lead to broken experiences, unmet goals, and angry stakeholders. But content strategy can help. Learn how UX professionals can use content strategy to design user experiences that work in real life, not just in a pretty wireframe.