Month: May 2011

Confab | How to Create a Data-Driven Content Strategy

This session is by Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare, who together write Mapped.

They’re going to talk about how to use data to improve your content strategy.

  • Analytics
    When you see where traffic is coming from, and where it’s not coming from, you can tell if you have a title/link name problem. Ambiguous titles don’t inspire clicks. Product names may not inspire clicks. People need to be able to make a clear assumption about what they’ll get when they click.Challenge here is that this kind of information is sometimes buried deep in your analytics reports.
  • User testing data
    User testing can give you really concrete information about how your site and your content confuse users.  McGuane tells about how she tested some content on a banking website, for general readability and also understanding of specific terms. Used a “cloze” test — where you remove every 5th word and let your subjects fill in the word they think fits best. The test demonstrated that the tone of the content was wrong and was confusing 90% of the readers.
  • Metadata
    Ah, now they’re loving on metadata. Make my heart sing. McGuane says metadata gives your content longevity, structure and extensibility. You can run into challenges when you’re trying to best organize the page title and keywords against business goals….what’s good for navigation now may not be good later. Have to get creative about how you manage competing needs.
  • My so called data
    How do you analyze things that are subjective, for instance, quality of writing? Use examples…for brand/style/content guides, examples or prototypes tell the story best.McGuane gives an example of a yogurt company that researched not just the company, not just yogurt, but all dairy…and discovered that by far the most common comment about dairy products was how creamy they are. And the yogurt company wasn’t selling any products based on how creamy they are — great opportunity.
  • Useless data
    What data can you throw away? Had a client request to do a GPS on a blimp…when that didn’t work, wanted a car to follow it…too complex. Turned out it was enough to create a map with dates and times you could see the blimp. Don’t create or use data you don’t have to have.

More: Think about priming — if someone says “chicken,” it doesn’t take you long to process “egg,” but if first you hear “goat,” your brain is slow to process “ghost.” You can prime your readers by carefully crafting the content.

Confab | Curation: Beyond the Buzzword

Following are my notes….

Steve Rosenbaum was a filmmaker in September 2001, and the events of 9/11 taught him that individuals can tell their own stories better than the professionals can. The important part we can add is a filter, a curator, an organizer. He’s also the author of a new book titled Curation Nation.

He says the “me web” is ending — the era of needing something, going to get it. Now, he says we’re entering the “we web” — where everyone contributes.

He’s using everyone’s favorite quote from Eric Schmidt, about how much data was created through 2003, and how now that much is created every 2 days.

Rosenbaum points out that the amount of data flowing past us every day is unmanageable.

Rosenbaum rejects the idea of ‘quality.’ Can that be judged for everyone? Uses the example of Google Places accidentally getting axed by the Panda update — because it was using the same kind of aggregation that Demand Media does. So how do you judge that Places is good, and Demand is bad?

Love this story: Now Rosenbaum is telling about how our definition of sharing and permission are getting tweaked as we move toward more curation. He wrote a post for Mashable recently, and 6 lines of it quickly showed up on another site, with him listed as a “contributor,” and a link back to the full post. His initial reaction was, Hey wait a minute! And then he realized, That’s great!

Rosenbaum says curation has 3 components:

  • Choose your digital clothing. Your endorsements, likes, RTs and posts matter; you’re curating your online persona. This point is so important. People who are indiscriminate in their curation aren’t valued contributors.
  • Listening is more powerful than speaking. Gather, organize and filter good stuff.
  • In a noisy world, customers embrace clarity. Your visitors will make content for you, and curation tools can supercharge your editorial instincts. Lists tools like Pearltrees, Keepstream, curate.us, paper.li, Storify, Scoop.it.

Create your own curation equation for user-generated content. Consider your voice and your sources. What kind of information do your customers need?

I’m at Confab this week

There have been a number of web content conferences over the years, but it’s safe to say that Confab, in its first year, is going to be home to content strategists for years to come. I’ve met so many “people like me” already, and the universal acclaim seems to be that we are all delighted to have an excuse to get together with other content strategists, to commiserate, to share ideas, and to figure out better ways to create and manage content to improve the user experience on the web, mobile and everywhere else.

Sessions I’m planning to attend today:

Curation: Beyond the Buzzword by Steve Rosenbaum
How do we manage the firehose of information? What should humans do, and what should machines do? Great questions here….

How to Create a Data-Driven Content Strategy by Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare
How do we manage analytics and data to improve content?

Testing Content by Angela Colter
Colter had a really popular article on testing content on A List Apart at the end of 2010. I bet this session will be packed.

Johns Hopkins and the Health Care Content Conundrum: Aligning Business Strategy with User Goals by Ahava Leibtag and Aaron Watkins

Ditching my paper planner: Lessons in online organization

Somewhere around 1994 or 1995, a friend introduced me to the Franklin planner. From that time, I was rarely without one. Over the years, I got bigger and smaller versions of the annual planner, depending on the size of the bag I liked to carry and how much stuff I was trying to organize, but until this spring, I haven’t been without it. I’d go so far as to take it to church on Sunday mornings [they make announcements you need to remember!] and to dinner with friends on the weekends. I learned long ago that my brain is an unreliable short-term storage device, and like any kind of device this need good maintenance for this reason I decided to take natural supplement from thehealthmania for the brain.

I have purposefully avoided most business travel the last 2 1/2 years, while I was pregnant with and nursing my youngest child. I made a day trip here and there, but I avoided being gone overnight. [When I went to South by Southwest last year, I took my mother and both my daughters….exhausting and lots of fun, but not sustainable for your average trip.] But now my youngest has turned 2, and she does just fine when I’m on the road for a few days. So this spring, I booked several conferences I’d been wanting to attend to better network within the content strategy/IA/UX industry.

For quite some time, I’ve been lugging around a 15-inch MacBook Pro, an 8″ x 10.5″ x 2″ Franklin planner, and many days, a 14-inch [but damn heavy] Dell. After one trip this spring, I realized what I’d known in the back of my head for a long time, even as I carried all this stuff around in my car every day:

This is stupid.

I tend to be an early adopter on technology and I’m really comfortable with it, so I can’t give you a rational explanation why I was still carrying all that stuff around, especially the paper part. I’ve just always been in the habit of writing down what I have to do, so it was easier to continue to use the task system that has served me well for more than 15 years.

So after having to take way too much Advil to soothe my screaming neck and shoulders this spring, I decided it was time to go cold turkey on the paper planner. I’m also planning a computer change later this year, so I’ll have a much lighter, more portable machine when I’m on the go, but I knew the paper planner was a big part of my “stuff” problem.

The technology I’m using so far:

  • Google Calendar: I use Google Calendar for both my home and work life organization. My husband and I started using it several years ago, before we got married, to keep track of all the schedules for the family. It is great, but offline access was a problem when I was traveling.
  • BusyCal: I bought BusyCal for the Mac. With BusyCal, I can sync back and forth seamlessly with my Google Calendar, so my husband, my employees and everyone else [through my Tungle.me account] can stay up-to-date on my whereabouts. When operating a large team or remote employees, it’s necessary to have a real-time employee monitoring software to have insight into their work. So many staff now work from home too now so using the top employee monitoring software is vital for keeping track of what they are doing and keeping productivity high. BusyCal gives me offline access and a few more task features than Google does. I use BusyCal for my personal task lists. [Why not iCal? This program is free on my Mac, but I’ve never liked it. My initial problem with it, several years ago, was that it only supported 6 or so colors for your calendars. At last count, I’m following or managing 20 calendars, so 6 colors didn’t cut it. Now, iCal does seem to have support for plenty of colors, but there’s still something about it I don’t like. It was worth it to me to pay for BusyCal, but your mileage may vary.]
  • Basecamp: My company uses Basecamp to track projects, tasks and to-do lists. I love it and use it daily, but I feel like I’m shoehorning things in when I put personal items here, or try to track appointments, so I’m still using other tools for these purposes.
  • Moleskine notebook: Not only did I use my planner to keep track of appointments and to-dos, but I also depended on it for meeting notes. I got a large Moleskine notebook to have for this purpose, but I’ve noticed the same problems that Michael Hyatt details here. You’ve got to get those handwritten notes into your online system if you want to be able to track and manage the information. So I’ll likely look for the EcoSystems notebook he recommends [all pages are perfed for easier removal/scanning] when I finish this Moleskine.
  • Evernote: Here’s where I’m starting to feel like I don’t fully have a handle on my new system. I’m using Basecamp, BusyCal and Evernote to manage different kinds of information. I feel like it should be easier to consolidate, but no one of them seems to be exactly perfect for my needs. I am currently using Evernote for meeting notes, but I feel like I could use it better. I’m eagerly reading posts like Michael Hyatt’s helpful ones on using Evernote to get organized to continue to inspire me here. [If you’re thinking that Michael Hyatt has become my personal productivity guru, you’re not far off. He has great insights on this topic.]

The upshot? I’m online, but I don’t feel settled yet in my new task system. The one thing I HAVE been largely successful at over the past few months [preceding my paper exodus by a bit] is getting my task list out of my email inbox. So I’m making progress, but I’m not done yet.

What are your best tips for managing calendars, tasks and information?