The Emerging Discipline of Content Strategy I was asked ... - Typepad

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Large businesses (including Facebook, Disney, Verizon, Ebay) ... Marketing (including Social Marketing). ... The idea of
The Emerging Discipline of Content Strategy I was asked recently by a client to put together a workshop on digital content strategy. My own version of what content strategy is involves fulfilling customer needs and achieving business goals by answering the kind of questions that have always been important for content: what's the story, who should hear it, how do you make it easy for them to do so, and what do you want to happen once they've heard it? But it's the kind of subject, it seems, that is not short of different definitions. Some talk about "the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance" (1). Or then there's "using words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences" (2). Or one of my own, simpler favourites: “achieving business goals by maximizing the impact of content”(3). Richard Sheffield, who recently published 'The Web Content Strategist's Bible' (4) defined it as "a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process". Itʼs a little confused. Large businesses (including Facebook, Disney, Verizon, Ebay) are hiring people who have Content Strategist on their business cards. But I'd be surprised if they do the same thing. Yet it seems that everyone is agreed on at least one thing – Content Strategy matters. Several trends are driving this: the growing significance of the 'owned' and 'earned' segments of the new media ecosystem; the collapse in the barriers to publishing that mean many more client companies becoming publishers in their own right; the ever more complex ways in which digital content can be distributed, consumed, used, and interacted with. But, indicative perhaps of its growing significance, there are some useful interpretations beginning to emerge. At the recent Planningness Conference in New York, Karen McGrane from Bond Art & Science defined Content Strategy (5) as sitting at the nexus of User Experience (including Information Architecture), Technology (incorporating content management), and Marketing (including Social Marketing). The talk incorporated a useful delineation of the content strategy process involving content planning (messages, features, tone of voice, application of resources), analysis (what can be re-used, re-purposed, thrown out, curated), creation (roles, responsibilities, guidelines, quality control, and governance (ownership, updating, benchmarking, performance, measurement). One of the models for content strategy that I like comes from Yahoo (a nod here to the guys at We Are London), who established a framework for every piece of content they produce based around the four key principles of Find, Use, Share, and Extend:-

Find:- making content accessible, available, discoverable Making content findable has become one of essential foundations of any content strategy. Research by tech consultancy IDC estimates that the 'digital universe' grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). To put that into context, according to The Guardian that's enough to fill 75Bn iPads and is a digital output equivalent to the entire population of the Earth tweeting continuously for a century (God forbid). And this is forecast to expand over the next decade by a factor of 44. Eric Schmidt has described how between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created, the same amount that is now generated every two days, and that rate is accelerating. The Economist has called it ʻThe Data Deluge' (6). The point is that the days of being able to upload a good piece of content to the web and expecting it to be found are long gone. An effective model means judicious use of metadata (data about data), tagging, and linking, and adopting a distributed, not destination, model for digital publishing. Making it as easy as possible for people to find your good stuff - going to where your audience are, rather than expecting them to always come to you. Disaggregation and Re-aggregation is now a key principle for how digital content works (this is true for all forms of digital content - music, video, text, image) so disaggregating content to enable people to access and reassemble it as they wish, and re-purposing content for the different ways in which people might want to interact with it, becomes essential. Use:- the content is fit for purpose, high quality, fun, relevant Stan Rapp said 'Ask not what your customers can do for you, ask what you can do for your customers'. The idea of brand utility, where brands look to provide a useful service or a helpful application in order to give people something they actually need without demanding an immediate return, has been popular for a while. Making content and data useful means that it too becomes a service. Examples include Fiat Ecodrive, which used data collected from your car to tell you how to drive in a more eco-friendly way, or something as simple as French Connection's YouTube channel which uses Annotations, YouTube's clickable video technology, to create the first ever personal shopping experience on the web. Hal Varian at Google has said that the ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - is going to be one of the most important digital skills of the next decades. And that value comes in many forms. The Guardian Zeitgeist project uses a combination of analytics and social media metrics to gain realtime feedback on what content is trending, which is then used to present a hierarchy of content back to the audience in a completely new interface .

Meanwhile, the expanding realm of data visualization becomes ever more sophisticated. For their last Video Music Awards, MTV partnered with Stamen Design to create a huge twitter traffic visualization that showed real-time rankings for the number of tweets around particular artists and reflected back to the audience the conversation that was happening through 2.3 million tweets around over 100 different artists. Share:- spread-ability and share-ability Mark Zuckerberg once said "The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to foster communication." The increasing significance of the social web in driving content discovery means that the share-ability of content is a critical consideration. For those that do it well, the social web has become a huge referrer second only to, and in some cases more important than, Google. Facebook is a massive content sharing ecosystem, with more than 5 Billion pieces of content being shared each week. So as Seth Godin pointed out in Purple Cow (7), if the web is a mass of conversation, then our job becomes to create content that is remarkable. Designing content to be remarkable and spreadable requires an investment in combining great quality of content with insight into the motivations for why and how people might want to pass your content on. The most spread piece of content of the past year, Nikeʼs Write the Future film for the world cup, combined a number of key ingredients. The spot  was fantastically high quality, entertaining, topical, complex and multilayered. It was anticipated, but designed to reward multiple viewings, and surrounded by elements that allowed fans to discuss, debate and get involved. But in a critical move, Nike broke with convention and chose to premier the film on Facebook and YouTube so for two days, the only place that you could get to see it was on the very platforms that people were using to share it. Extend:- the extent to which it can be interacted with, commented on, engaged with. The internet is a does medium. So good content rewards interaction and involvement. This requires smart thinking about the type of content your audience are really going to spend time with, but also interfaces that get out of the way, facilitate interaction, and content, services and applications that are scalable and portable. When Google and BBH wanted to promote the speed of the Chrome browser, they could have just created a bunch of ads that talked about fast download speeds. But instead they created an interactive ʻrace across the internetʼ – a fun game that sat on their YouTube channel and pitted users against each other for how fast they could solve simple puzzles (8). Networked distribution requires thinking about not only the distributed social

platforms on which you place your content, but what happens after that and how that social ecosystem inter-relates. The Guardiantech Twitter stream has 1.6 million followers. The average twitter follower count is around 126. So if only 1% of @guardiantech followers retweet a link, that is an additional potential reach of over 2 million people on top of their own follower count. For every tweet. Thatʼs quite a platform. Our interpretation of what content is, is broadening beyond recognition. And the ferocious rush of the media ecosystem (whether bought, earned or owned) towards complexity is as unrelenting as it is unstoppable. So it seems that the emergence of a better definition of what content strategy is, is overdue. But at the centre of it all is the content itself. So the further back in the content creation process this kind of thinking is incorporated the better. As Derek Robson of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, has said: "People engage with ideas, not channels. Ideas drive channel behaviour". You can read Neil Perkinʼs blog at neilperkin.typepad.com, and follow him on twitter @neilperkin Sources & references: (1) The Discipline of Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy/ (2) Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data by Rachel Lovinger http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/content-strategy-the (3) Content Strategists: What Do They Do? Dan Zambonini http://contentini.com/content-strategists-what-do-they-do/ (4) "The Web Content Strategist's Bible” Richard Sheffield (2009) (5) How To Do Content Strategy by Karen McGrane http://www.slideshare.net/KMcGrane/how-to-do-content-strategy (6) The Economist: The Data Deluge http://www.economist.com/node/15579717 (7) Purple Cow, Seth Godin (2004) (8) Google Chrome Fastball http://www.youtube.com/user/chromefastball