Category: Content strategy

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/

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.

Get mobile, like yesterday

[This blog post reads like the unsolicited plug that it is.]

I absolutely love when I go to a presentation or seminar expecting to have a good time, or network, and I also come back to the computer lots smarter than when I left, as the stakes are higher here, all the time. I should have known that would happen today, because I knew I was going to hear Tim Moses of Sitemason talk about mobile apps. But still, he got me.

Tim Moses and a bunch of other guys I went to college with started Telalink, one of the first ISPs in Nashville, back in the mid-1990s. They sold it 11 years ago, and most of those guys have gone on to continue to do really interesting things with technology. Telalink’s impact on technology and entrepreneurship in Nashville cannot be overstated — there are an army of programmers, network guys and innovators who came through the doors of Telalink in its few short years as a company.

After Telalink, Tim and Thomas Conner went on to start Sitemason. Sitemason is a great content management system for many mid-size websites. It has a lot of functionality that honestly, you’d expect to pay a lot more for. One of the things they have focused heavily on is mobile compatibility — and not just mobile browsing, but mobile apps. One of the neat things about Sitemason is that your content management system can power your iPhone app as well as your website, bringing apps into reach for many companies.

So at today’s Nashville AMA luncheon, Tim talked about the dramatic changes in the mobile market in the past 3 1/2 years, since the iPhone was introduced. When you think about how many people with plain-old cell phones have 2-year contracts in the U.S., and then you realize we haven’t even been through 2 complete contract renewal cycles since the iPhone came out [and far less since the Android platform was introduced], the market penetration of modern smartphones is astounding, and it’s only going to grow.

If you have any doubts about how critical your organization’s mobile strategy is, please give Tim a call. I suspect he’ll be very nice, but he doesn’t leave any doubt in my mind about how badly marketers in particular need to get mobile in their sights.

More is practically* always better

I was talking with some friends today about their nonprofit website. We were talking about a bunch of other stuff about creating community, building a network, etc., and they said, by the way, how often should we be updating the site?

Love this question. Partly because I have a better answer than I ever have before. It’s one of those questions that editorial folks like me love to bat around, as if there were a “right” answer.

So before I give you the “right” answer, just remember, the real answer is “it depends.”

So the answer I gave is, today, information is flashing past all of us much faster than any human could hope to absorb it. If you want to have any hope of competing — with your competitors, with Facebook, with TV, with Netflix, with text messages and iPhones and Angry Birds — you have to throw as much out there as is humanly possible while staying true to your mission.

The more nuanced answer is, you also have to mind how you’re delivering your content. Because in practically no situation is 100 posts a week on Facebook the right answer. Are you hitting people at the right time, in the right medium, with the right info?

But too much is so rarely the issue. Look around here….I’m terribly stingy with my own blog posts….resolving to improve that situation posthaste. The point is, so few people are putting out too much stuff. The danger of that is rare. So get out there and start sharing!

*Practically: The only situation is which more is NOT better is alas, a situation I do see from time to time, and that social media sadly enables. People who are out there spamming their poor audiences with irrelevant content should be drawn and quartered. There’s enough real information we can’t sort through — don’t muddy the water with spam, no matter the medium.

BarCamp Nashville: See Us Saturday for Content Strategy Throwdown

UPDATE: The panel went really well, according to the backchannel on Twitter, anyway. BarCamp will soon be releasing audio, and I’m hoping ours will be available, but in the meantime, you can get a feel for the panel from comments we have shared on SlideShare or from the resources we listed on Delicious.

ORIGINAL: I’m moderating a panel on Saturday, Oct. 16, at BarCamp Nashville. This event is astoundingly free — would be worth a decent conference fee, and all you’ve got to do is figure out how to park in downtown Nashville [meters now charge on Saturdays, parkers beware].

If you’re wondering about this whole content strategy business, and whether it’s the latest hype, or the way to transform your web projects, see us Saturday at 12:30p in the RockBar.

It’s not too late to register for BarCamp Nashville 2010.

Here are a couple other presentations I recommend, but there are lots of great ones:

When you need content strategy: Content hack-a-matic

I spend a decent amount of time explaining to people in the web industry when they need content strategy. [Answer: on every project, of course.]

And so I thought I’d put together a few situations that arise in real life….those times when you really need your friendly neighborhood content strategist on speed dial. Here’s the first:

You’re trying to unwind your hacked-together “content management system” and implement a real CMS. Sure, you started off with good intentions. Your site structure made a lot of sense when you first built it….a few years ago. And ever since then, when you’ve added something new, you discovered the content system/blog software/hacked-together pieces-parts can’t quite handle it….so you’ve just added on some new software or technology or something to make it work. Perhaps your site itself actually looks good. But it’s gotten to the point where you’re terrified to even look at the site, because you know you can’t hack anything else onto it, and simple text changes eat up your day.

First, if you’re in this situation, you’re not alone. Many, many other organizations’ websites suffer from the same problem. But if you’re ready to figure out how to make content maintenance easier, get a content strategist to help.

What a content strategist can do for you:

  • Audit your content to figure out what you have
  • Determine the types of content you have
  • Determine the kind of information [metadata] you need to have for each content type
  • Recommend how to use this info to set up a system that will make your content work for you
  • Craft or improve a content workflow that fits your organization
  • Help you find and migrate to a tool that makes all this possible and automates manual tasks

My BarCamp Nashville session: Content Strategy…Or Else

Here’s the promo I just added to the BarCamp Nashville site:

Content strategy’s quite the buzzword these days. But what does it really mean? Does incorporating content strategy mean your web projects are going to be shiny and glorious? [Don’t we all hope!] Or that they’ll be more expensive, take longer, and get more complex? [No!]

Content strategy is the underpinning of a sound web project, and chances are, you’re doing some of it already. Learn the pieces/parts of content strategy in this session, from business goals to audits to information architecture to content retirement planning.

You’ll leave knowing how to be more intentional about your content. You’ll know how to prevent the train wreck that derails many a web project. And you’ll have all the lowdown on the latest web buzzword.

Please sign up now—it will be a great way to learn about how content strategy can improve your web projects.

A persona-hating content strategist

I’m about to open my can of crazy talk, so forewarned and all that.

Content strategy is still evolving as a discipline, and the toolkit that strategists use isn’t set in stone, though I think we’re starting to come to some agreement about what’s useful. Building personas is a standard marketing practice, though, that long predates the web. And personas are a tool that many marketers, content strategists, information architects and other web professionals use today to validate their web strategy.

And though I’ve been annoyed by marketers who cling to their personas for years, I’ve just recently gotten to the point where I have to get this off my chest.

I’m not opposed to a persona that’s based on real research and demographic information about your customer base. But I so rarely see that in practice. What I see a lot of are the rose-colored personas of the demographic you wish you had, or that you think you have, but actually don’t.

The problem is, even in today’s world of overwhelming data, we’re still basing a lot of our marketing decisions on our guts. And while that often feels right, research will tell us that it doesn’t always lead to the right decisions.

What’s the solution?

You absolutely have to know your audience. Period.

You need to spend time with your customers. You need to walk in their shoes, both as they use your product or service and as they live their lives. There’s just no substitute for real knowledge of your market.

And sure, if it helps you to put real data and real observations together into a persona named Shelly or Bob, go for it. Just don’t make up an imaginary person and think it’s going to clarify your strategy. It takes real information to make a persona useful.

You’ve got information. Do you have content?

It’s a common refrain, professed by organizations large and small to their content strategists [or perhaps explaining how everything is under control]:

Oh, we’ve got lots of content. We just don’t have it on the website. We just need to put it up there.

Sometimes, it’s even true.

But what happens far more often is that the organization has a lot of information, little to none of it web-ready.

This is not always a popular statement, but information isn’t the same as content. For your web content to be effective, it must be designed and edited specifically for your business purposes, and optimized for web reading to meet your audience’s needs.

Information does not magically become effective web content by the circumstance of appearing on your website.

Another related, unpopular point: People with access to information and Microsoft Word do not automatically become writers.

I think I sound more negative or critical than I intend to do. If it seems like I’m talking straight to you, let me just encourage you by saying that you are not alone. Many, many organizations are dealing with these issues.

Often, we get into a situation like that because we’ve left the content until the end.

Save yourself from the content/information dilemma:

  • Craft a strategy for your content with your business goals in mind.
  • Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that your information is web-ready.
  • Get experienced web writers to work with your topical experts to shape your information into web-ready content.