Author: Laura Creekmore

IA vs. UX vs. content strategy vs. your name here

There’s an interesting editorial over at the fall 2010 issue of the Journal of IA, which I do like reading. Eric Reiss spends some time trying to place information architecture, user experience and content strategy in terms of each other. I don’t think it’s an entirely worthless endeavor, but in my opinion, he’s bitten off a ginormous challenge. We’re the people who like to organize, categorize and name things. So no wonder we don’t all agree here. Reiss has certainly put his finger on an ongoing point of contention.

A much more recent post by Erin Kissane tackles the same topic from a different angle, making content strategy more of the umbrella.

I’d draw a bigger picture though. I’d put the business strategy umbrella over the top of the project as a whole. It’s got to define your work, no matter your discipline. To my mind, then, systems, development, UX, IA and content strategy all need a seat at the table to get from strategy through to executed product. There are a number of ways to make the process work — even how to define your business strategy. And depending on which process you use, one discipline or another may take a more prominent role.

In the end, I think the argument is largely academic. The critical thing is that the disciplines of content strategy, IA and UX all seem to get more respect now. When I started working on the web, there was design. And HTML. And then content, but in the “words-go-here” variety. Things have improved a lot since then — consumers have gotten much more sophisticated in what we demand from our web applications, and those of us in the web industry have responded to that. There are still people trying to execute web projects and applications without content strategy or IA or UX, of course. But if you want your work done effectively and well, you need all three.

You might need content strategy if….

  • If you’re liberally using the phrase “Click here.”
  • If you don’t know how copyright law applies to your daily work.
  • If you don’t have a specific plan to deliver the information your customers need to solve their problems.
  • If you don’t know how your content management system works.
  • If you don’t have a content management system.
  • If you aren’t measuring your results and reacting accordingly.

I’m just saying.

Content strategy and agile development: Can they be friends?

Rachel Lovinger started a great thread at the Content Strategy Google Group about agile development. It really hit home with me because I’ve had clients who use both traditional and agile development. From a content strategy perspective, both have their benefits — and downsides.

Best about waterfall:

  • Typically has a well-defined process, and if you get in on the front end, it’s easy to define over-arching business goals
  • Everyone’s role is clear

Best about agile:

  • Fast, fast, fast!
  • Favors user stories, which suss out business goals

You cannot create effective content strategy without knowing your business goals.

Waterfall done poorly exacerbates the human tendency toward bureaucracy, both in the development process and in the long-term operational strategy. Agile done poorly swings from insignificant goal to unimportant goal, making little things happen that actually make no difference. So either has the potential to make your website/software product ineffective.

Done well, agile suits me better. I think we all like to feel progress, and agile delivers progress regularly. But when you dive into agile without the big goals written on the wall, you run the risk of doing stuff because you can, not because you should. And while you can create content for any particular goal, if you don’t know the big goal, you don’t know how to craft taxonomy or style and tone, never mind how to create page flows that deliver useful information to your customers, and deliver on your business needs.

Whatever style development you’re using, you have to start with the business goals, and you need content strategy at the table from day one.

Get some spaghetti on the wall

When people are developing a content strategy, sometimes they run into problems. That’s to be expected with any complex business process, of course. There are many places you could have trouble, but I’m thinking today about two big categories:

  • Trouble with content
  • Trouble with strategy

I’m focusing on this particular dichotomy because it leads to opposite problems: Too much content [strategy issue] and too little [content]. I’ll get you something in the next couple of days on the strategy side of this equation, but you can probably already guess where I’m headed there with spam, content farms and other unwanted content.

I don’t know if the content side is the harder problem or not, but it’s definitely a mental issue. How many times have you thought about your content situation and said, I just don’t know what to say…I’m not sure how to proceed…I don’t see how my information can make a difference…or the worst: Our customers already know everything they need to know?

I’ve yet to meet a business that didn’t need more valuable content. Sometimes we fall short on marketing, sometimes on customer support, sometimes on operations. But no matter what area of the business you touch, you need great content.

When you start a blog, and then stop, you’ve proved nothing. When you open a Twitter account, and don’t tweet, you’ve learned nothing. When you join a community, and don’t post, no one gains. When you add a help section on your site, but don’t actually give good instructions, you aren’t actually helping anyone.

How many times has your organization made a half-assed effort on content and then proclaimed it a failure?

I don’t ask that to judge — I’ve done the same myself. But we can’t expect great results from minimal effort. Great content takes expertise and hard work. Everyone’s got the capacity for both requirements, but it’s often a matter of getting them in the same place at the same time.

So it’s Friday afternoon where I am. It’s a great time to think about what you’re going to make happen next week. Plan now to throw some spaghetti on the wall next week, content-wise. I don’t mean that you should be haphazard about it — find a small project that you’ve been meaning to tackle, or a part of your product or marketing plan that needs a little love, and act on it. Get ready now so you can attack it Monday morning. Figure out now what it will take for you to judge the success of the project — and follow through step by step until you can say for sure whether it worked.

The Misplaced SEO-Content Strategy Fight

I’ve been working on content strategy and management for a good long time, so I’ve had my rounds with disreputable SEO practitioners. In the early 2000s, there were a LOT of snake oil salesmen out there. I could tell you some crazy stories, but we all love to sit around and grouse about the other guy. I’ve looked around at lots of different SEO Services, which is really important if you want to develop the SEO of your website. It involves a lot of trial and error, AB testing, and really taking your time to find what works.

To be clear: I think reputable SEO practitioners today contribute significantly to the web. Take a look at king kong sabri suby and his success story. He grew his company rapidly and is trusted by many businesses to take care of their SEO.

For some reason, the past few days have been the content strategy vs. SEO throwdown of the century. There are posts popping up all over. I’ve got my favorites, but there are some for all sides….whether you fall on the SEO or content strategy side of the fence.

But I’d argue we all ought to spend more time worrying about the problems created by spam content by Demand Media and similar companies. That’s a much bigger problem for legitimate SEO and content strategy practitioners. When the internet is overflowing with junk, that makes it far more difficult to share real knowledge, no matter which side of the fence you’re sitting on.

People that are concerned about their website’s success are encouraged to conduct an SEO audit which can help to identify weaknesses and how they can be improved upon to help the website feature higher in search rankings. For information on this service, see here – http://victoriousseo.com/services/seo-audit/

You can’t speak in your own voice if you don’t know what you want to say

Authenticity matters a lot these days. I think it matters a lot more online than it did even 10 years ago. In a world where celebrities can get their Twitter accounts verified, people are willing to pay more for the real thing. It’s so easy to spoof — to pretend to be someone you’re not.

I’ve run a neighborhood email list for more than a decade now. Back when it started, we were in a different world, technologically. But from the perspective of my email list, not a lot has changed. People who are interested in what’s going on in East Nashville subscribe to my list. They decide if they want to read the list online, or if they want a digest email or to receive each email individually. I help people with problems with their passwords, and I try to keep the shouting to a dull roar.

It may surprise you, but the volume of crazy on my list of 5000+ neighbors isn’t that different from the days when I had 300 subscribers. There are some network effects there, things that react in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated. One situation that drives most regular list members nuts is when an anonymous [a not-my-real-name member] posts something rude. And they always want me to “do something” about it.

From the cost-benefit perspective, it’s an easy answer. I’m volunteering my time to manage the list, and this doesn’t happen all that often, and plenty of polite members of the list are anonymous as well. So I’m not going to require some name verification process to join or post to the list.

But I do see the positive results of authenticity there, on a daily basis. People who are willing to put their names to their words benefit, especially when they share valuable information.

There are a number of parallels between this free neighborhood email list and the online communities I’ve helped clients manage over the years. And the authenticity rule is a clear parallel.

People who speak with a real voice — and even better, who put employee faces and names to the company brand — are rewarded with trust and loyalty, but for this, you need to learn to Communicate Like a Master. Too many companies are still hiding behind an anonymous brand identity, with an anonymous voice. I think there’s a variety of reasons you see companies doing this, among them:

  • They’re scared of losing control of the message.
  • They’re scared of their employees developing a following — thinking it will be detrimental to their brand equity.
  • They haven’t figured out how to represent their organization’s personality online in one-on-one customer communications.
  • They don’t actually have a plan about engaging their customers anyway.

Those are fixable problems, if you’ve got the will to fix them. Be for real online. It matters, and you’ll be rewarded for it.

What I do all day

I get asked a lot what I do on a daily basis. Even other people who’ve been working in digital media for a while haven’t always worked with a content strategist. I’ve read several good descriptions of content strategy in the past couple of years, from how-to book-length versions to great blog posts to Google knols. I thought it would be nice to have my own answer as a reference point for the many times I’m asked about content strategy.

On a strategic level:
We map a path to fulfill our clients’ business goals via their web content.

On a tactical level:
We create, source, publish, manage and maintain our clients’ content.

What that means:
We work with audio, video and text — or any other format that “content” can take. We might write the help section of a website or the user manual for software, or a million little tooltips that show up on a website. We might analyze the content to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. We might manage the creation of video or audio files. We might figure out what kind of content will serve our clients’ and their customers’ needs. We might take hundred-page-long PDFs and re-format them into lean I like to use SodaPDF app to read my documents, useful web pages. We might select the systems to be used to manage content, permissions and workflows. We might design the taxonomy and metadata systems to minimize the manual effort required for content management. We might optimize a balky content management system. We might inventory the content to figure out what’s even there, how old it is and where the heck it came from. We might figure out what has to go to legal and what can be OKed by the marketing department alone. We might write a style guide for the site. We might find vendors who can license their content to our clients.

I’m tempted to go on, but I’ll stop now.

Bottom line:
We’re far more than web writers or editors. We design and implement the systems that make your content work for you. It’s a long-ignored need in much of the industry, but we’re really excited to see how much the marketing, product development and communications worlds are realizing that content strategy makes their lives easier.

Online privacy reminder: You don’t have much

This quick read from the New York Times is a great reminder that your seemingly private online information isn’t all that private. While law enforcement can obtain a search warrant for even your home or business with probable cause [meaning there’s reason to suspect there’s evidence related to a crime], it’s apparently not all that difficult for it to subpoena [different from a search warrant] vast amounts of your online information, like email, social network account information and other online records.

I’m NOT a lawyer, but subpoenas and search warrants both require contact with a judge/judicial authority, to my understanding. But given continued evidence at how these tools are being used by law enforcement in some recent high-profile cases, it seems to me that even information like your search history could be easily obtained and used against you in court. Of course, if you’re just roaming perfectly legal and acceptable websites like https://www.hdpornvideo.xxx/, this should be of no concern to you. However, it is still quite concerning that your data can be accessed so easily.

Just imagine the line of questioning as the D.A. reads out your list of search terms related to WikiLeaks, Al Qaeda and terrorism. Ever go back and look at your search history? If you’re a heavy computer user, out of context, your search history probably makes you sound crazy, dangerous or both. I tend to look up any term or concept I hear about in the news, just to see the other information available on the topic. This is the kind of information — our stream-of-thought — that has been previously unavailable to law enforcement. And in a culture that breeds fear, I don’t want to have to answer for my search terms to a jury. Do you?

I need a sharable calendar with tags

Dear programmers of the world,

Here’s a problem that seems to need solving*. Please, my friends and I beg of you, please help.

My employees and I use Google Calendar. It’s great, because it integrates with Tungle.me and iCal and our phones and everything else we want to use to view calendars. Each of us has her own calendar, so we can see when someone’s out of the office, who’s in a meeting, whatever.

My family and I also use Google Calendar. I have a personal calendar category that’s separate from my work calendar, and my husband has a calendar, and my kids do. We have extra calendars for things like family birthdays that we all want to subscribe to.

About 75% of the time, this is a great solution for us. But frequently, I run into events that need to be in two places — a personal event happening during the work day, so my employees need to know I’ll be out of pocket over lunch — or a work event that runs into the evening, and my husband needs a reminder that I won’t be picking up the kids.

My taxonomic nature wants to throw a tag on that — anything I tag with “AshbyView,” say, should show up on my husband’s version of my calendar, or if I tag it “WorkView” then my employees ought to be able to see my personal event.

I cannot find that this is possible. And yet it seems SO possible.

So, dear programming friends, either tell me that I’m an idiot and to get XYZ Calendar Solution, or take this brilliant idea and let me know when it’s ready. There are families out there that would pay for this kind of information flexibility and accessibility.

*Should I be mistaken about this point — should you know of a web-based, cheap calendar that is easily sharable, exportable, on the iCalendar format and uses tags, please let me know!

Quora: Lessons in community development

My trial-by-fire in online community management came just over 10 years ago, when we launched SmallBusiness.com. I’ve thought about that experience a lot in the past few weeks, as Quora has exploded among the tech community. [Find me on Quora here.]

When we were preparing for the real launch of SmallBusiness.com, we spent weeks scouring web forums for people who were talking about small business online. There were lots and lots of them…but there weren’t easy ways to find, organize or communicate with them. So we found most of the people we invited to beta test our site by hand, searching one by one through web forums.

Long before CAN-SPAM or marketing protocols, we were very careful about how we approached prospective testers, because we were long-time web users, even then. We knew that all communities have their own etiquette and customs, and to violate those is to risk death.

At the same time, we spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how to seed the community with content so there’d be SOMETHING there when the first beta testers logged in. It was important to us to be transparent — to be real about who we were, but still to provide value to our soon-to-be customers.

And so it is difficult in some ways for me to watch the birth of Quora, because I feel a lot of it in a personal way. The people complaining on Twitter about getting dozens of emails in an hour when all their friends join. [Oh, for there to have been Twitter when we launched SmallBusiness.com!] The people wandering around saying, “What’s the point of all this? I can’t find anything on there!” And the endless critiques of its design and usability.

Welcome to website launching, 2011-style.

The really interesting part to me is the question-and-answer format, though, because SmallBusiness.com was also a question-and-answer site. It worked a little differently from Quora, but the similarities are many.  [It’s no longer the same format — SmallBusiness.com lives on today as a great wiki for small business owners, managed by “head helper” Rex Hammock.]

What I wonder now, and I don’t remember wondering 10 years ago, is whether the literal format of Q-and-A is really the best way to answer questions.

That may sound silly on the face of it, but much of what many of us are doing online is trying to both ask and answer questions. And now, after almost 20 years of working on the format of information, we’re still offering the questions and answers literally.

I’m cheered by the increasing discussions about structured content and the semantic web. But the depth of structure truly available remains small, compared to what we need. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not sneezing on the vast amounts of location information we’re using now, for instance. Or XML. But most of the value on the web is really still locked in text.

“Locked in” sounds funny when you consider how much you can find with your favorite search engine. But what you can’t do with much of the information is re-purpose it easily.

Quora doesn’t advance us down that road, but I’ll be curious to see how it fares, both as an information source and as a community.