Presentations (Day 2)

Content Strategy: A Framework for Managing Content throughout its Lifecycle

Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design, Inc.

Content strategy is an exciting place to be. It’s an emerging field, still open to interpretations and possibilities. As an emerging area of practice, content strategy promises to change the landscape of our work in significant ways. The definition of content strategy continues to evolve as we develop better definitions of the components that come together to form the framework that will eventually become the body of knowledge. So while single-sourcing or DITA is not, of itself, a content strategy, a content strategy could very well include these concepts.

By asserting that content strategy is the intersection of business analysis, user experience, and content development, we are laying claim to a profound change in the way we treat content. And we expect no less from the organizations that content serves. When we treat content, instead of a drain, as a corporate asset, when we look at its untapped potential instead of its cost, when we think about content in terms of consumer and corporate benefit, we are looking at content through a strategic lens.

Evaluating Content: It’s a Corporate Essential and a Content Strategy Foundation Stone

Clare O'Brien, CDA

Pre-internet content was predictable and managed by industries of specialists. It did as it was told. In these nascent post-internet days, we’re beginning to realise that pre-internet content doesn’t work online and that our audiences (markets / users) are behaving in ways we’ve no experience to predict with accuracy. But even more critical is that content value is shifting - upwards. It appears that content is at once tangibly ‘the organisation’ sought out and touched and valued by users, AND that our users are themselves generating the content that they value as useful or otherwise.

So how to judge what’s right and wrong, what works what doesn’t, what to invest in, and how to plan? CDA’s CUT Score (Content Usefulness Toolkit) is a methodology and approach that will allow us to gain real insight into the nature of content and its relationship with its intended audience and the subsequent effect on quality and value. Critically, it provides a quantitative measure of an otherwise soft target allowing organizations to evaluate online content and support budget management decisions.

I will talk about CUT’s development and outline its future application for content strategy professionals.

Content strategy and Information Architecture in Europe and European Projects

Sylvie Daumal, Duke Razorfish

Content Strategy and Information Architecture are closely tied, though certainly distinguished, at least in the US. In Europe, however, this distinction is blurred. What role is that of the information architect? By distinction, what is the role of the content strategist, if there is one? Who must be responsible for the semantic issues like nomenclature, labeling, taxonomy and metadata? The European Union already recognizes 23 languages… and European projects frequently deal with more than ten languages. Who is supposed to create nomenclature, labeling, taxonomy and metadata for all these languages? How are roles dispatched in such a context? That’s some of the issues we have to face and to fix if we want a better recognition of IA and CS in Europe.

In Plain Language and In Plain Sight Around the Globe

Deborah Bosley, The Plain Language Group

Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance. Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web, defines content strategy as "the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance." But content development must be guided by the needs of the audience: needs that the use of plain language can satisfy.

Plain language is defined as proven writing and design strategies that make it easy for the intended audience to understand and use the information. Despite language differences, many countries have embraced the use of plain language: South Africa’s constitution was purposely written in plain language so the people would have access to democracy; the governments of New Zealand and Australia require plain language in most public documents; and the U.S. recently has reformed its financial system and included requirements for plain language in many financial documents. Not only have some governments embraced plain language, but corporations also know that plain language increases trust and customer loyalty.

This presentation will focus on the global plain language movement by presenting examples of this initiative, supporting these claims with research, and emphasizing the importance of plain language in communicating with the public whether as citizens or consumers.

A “Do It Yourself” Guide to Content Strategy

Jonathan Kahn, Together London

You're a web professional: a designer, developer, information architect, or strategist. Your team has the web design disciplines covered: research, strategy, user experience design, standards-based development, and project management. But something's going wrong with your projects; the user experience just isn't meeting your expectations. You're reasonably sure you know why: there's a problem with the content.

You realise that your team could use some help from the discipline of content strategy, but for whatever reason, hiring a dedicated content strategist isn't a feasible option. So what can you do to add some content strategy to your projects?

Learn how web professionals can practise content strategy for ourselves, through advocacy, improved design processes, and community engagement. And when we have the luxury of a dedicated content strategist, learn how we can engage with the discipline in our everyday practice.

Do we « Speak » Content Strategy in France?

Muriel Vandermeulen, We Are The Words

In one of Moliere's famous plays, "The Bourgeois Gentleman", Sir Jourdain discovers that "he has been speaking prose all his life, and didn't even know it!". It seems that French-speaking editorial strategists have experienced the same confusion recently...

Content strategy may have been considered as a critical emerging discipline in the English-speaking market place over the past year, but on the French-speaking one, in Europe, it has not. Why? Is it maybe because "content" as such is more often referred to as "data" in French? Or is it because when addressing issues of usable, awesome and interactive information, French information specialists do not use the word "content"? Or is it simply because we have been practicing editorial strategy from the beginning of the Web?

What lies behind the words "editorial" and "content" strategy? Are the concepts so different from one culture to another ? And do these cultural differences really impact the way we treat data and information?

Exploring Editorial Strategy

Jeff MacIntyre, Predicate

Online, everyone is a publisher--but, uh, what does it mean to be a publisher online?

It means getting an editorial strategy. As it turns out, the exploding field of interactive content strategy is inextricably linked to the history of publishing--and the future of publishing looks a lot like content strategy.

What's the value of editorial strategy? What's editorial content, anyway? How does it relate to the broader fields of content strategy and user experience design--and why should you care?

Learn from a field expert about the emerging intersection between content publishing, programming and product strategy online by studying real-world best and worst practices. This session will include an overview of the role of editorial content specialists and their key deliverables: the product strategy, editorial calendar and style guide.

Banging the Big Drums

Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

In March of 2009, twenty content strategists from around the United States came together in Memphis, TN for the first on-record public meetup devoted to content strategy. It was an historic day for our field, as it sparked an international (and, today, exponentially-increasing) interest in content strategy.

Just one year later, a much larger group of "useful, usable content" advocates will gather at Content Strategy Forum 2010. At this early stage, the importance and impact of content strategy has yet to be recognized within our own organizations. If we're going to "kick-start and build a feeling of attachment, responsibility, and respect towards content" (Richard J. Ingram, "The Content Strategy Advocate"), we need all the support we can get from each other.

If you attend the Content Strategy Forum, you're joining the conversation in its very early stages. Right here, right now, we have the opportunity--and responsibility--to share our collective knowledge, no matter what our background or area of expertise. Technical communications. User experience. Publishing. Marketing. Communications. IT. Our content processes and products will only evolve if we commit to open, regular communication within our own community, as well as to ever-expanding outreach throughout the web professional industry. Tools, process, perspective, passion. It's time to bang the big drums for content strategy.

Designing a Holistic Customer Experience

Joyce Hostyn, Open Text

Customer experience is the sum of the experience a customer has with a business, across all channels and touchpoints. An experience always exists and always generates an impression, but seldom by design. No wonder only 8% of customers report their experience with a given company was superior.

What’s the problem? A product is designed in R&D then thrown ‘over the wall’ to marketing whose focus is on promotion rather than education, integration, and refinement. Product information is too often seen as a necessary evil rather than part of the larger experience. The services and sales organizations gear up to sell and service the customer, creating their own content along the way, and often in ways that are inconsistent with the R&D and marketing impressions that have already been created. Too often this silo’d approach results in fragmented experiences and dissatisfied customers.

What would happen if all these groups saw themselves as collaborators working to create a content strategy designed to deliver a superior, holistic, customer experience across all customer touchpoints and all stages of the customer lifecycle? How can we get to this ideal end state?

Localisation in Your Content Strategy

Kenneth Yau, Baddit Ltd.

If everyone speaks English nowadays, why bother with any other language? Why bother with any form of English other than US English? Is there even just one form of US English?

There is no lowest common denominator language. There is no neutral choice of language for your content. If your content serves more than one cultural group – identified by nation, language, ethnicity or even sports team affiliation – you should care about localisation.

This session will explore how to integrate localisation and internationalisation into your content strategy. Along the way, we’ll consider the importance of localisation and internationalisation, the effects of your localisation choices on how users and customers engage with your content, how localisation affects other user experience disciplines and other business functions, as well as practical considerations for your localisation process.

Content Analysis: Know Thy Content

Colleen Jones, Content Science

To know your content is to love it. Content analysis is an essential part of many user experience projects that involve existing content. Examples of such projects include migrating a Web site to a new platform or design, integrating multiple Web sites into one, or assessing Web content for reuse in a new channel. Just as you can’t nurture a garden without regularly inspecting its plants and flowers, you can’t care for your content without looking at it closely. You must become familiar with your content to judge whether it’s effective, understand how it relates to other content, identify ways to improve it, and more. This presentation will walk you through content analysis basics, offering plenty of practical tips and examples along the way.

The Writing on the Wall: Content Strategy at Facebook

Sarah Cancilla, Facebook

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India. Facebook’s biggest natural resource? Content. Each week, people share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content in 70 different languages.

Being bold and moving fast are core to Facebook’s organizational culture, but those aren’t concepts typically associated with content strategy. Can content strategy succeed and thrive in a risk-taking, rule-breaking culture of constant innovation? How does content strategy scale to simultaneously meet the needs of teenagers, political organizers, entrepreneurs, game-enthusiasts and grandmothers worldwide?

When more than 99.9% of content is user-generated, what’s there to strategize about anyway?

Join Sarah Cancilla for an inside peek at what it means to practice content strategy at one of the most popular destinations on the Web.

There’s No Semantic Web without Content and Data

Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish

In 2001, Time Berners-Lee laid out a vision of the next evolution of the Web. Nearly a decade later, whether you call that evolution Semantic Web, Web 3.0, Linked Data, or the Giant Global Graph, it’s clear that change is accelerating. But the nature of that change can be confusing, because “Semantic Web” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

This presentation will clear up the mystery by explaining, in non-technical terms, the underlying concepts of the Semantic Web. Then we’ll explore how these concepts are being used on the web today, and where they’re going in the near future. Finally, we’ll discuss what all this means for people practicing content strategy.

Mobile Content: The Return of Shovelware?

Erin Scime, HUGE

In the 1990’s, the term “shovelware” was a way of describing how print businesses ported their content to the internet without any re-editing, reformatting or real thinking about which content type would be the best medium for their message. Today, our industry has devised standards around “webifying” content so it is useful and meaningful for the screen environment.

But now that content has a home beyond the desktop, mobile content is in danger of becoming the next form of “shovelware.” What can you do to stop this? This presentation will put more definition around mobile content and show you how to communicate the need for a mobile content strategy. To add a practical spin on the theoretical, I’ll share new research findings on mobile content and provide some insight on how to achieve a higher return on your mobile content investments.

Some questions we’ll answer:

How is a mobile content strategy different than a site content strategy?
How should the need for in-the-moment content be satisfied?
How do mobile design imperatives and limitations define the delivery and digestion of content?
How can mobile and desktop screens work together?

Panel Discussion: Content Strategy in Europe

Jeff MacIntyre (moderator), Clare O'Brien, Sylvie Daumal, Jonathan Kahn, Elizabeth McGuane

What can the state of content strategy in Europe today tell us about its future? How will European content strategists evolve and uniquely thrive at solving specific challenges? An esteemed panel representing a diverse range of European practitioners and advocates will take stock of the prospects for this field of practice: their career paths towards becoming content strategists; the growing venues for selling content strategy; and the opportunities for advocating it across national and disciplinary boundaries. As the inaugural Content Strategy Forum draws to its close, the panel and conference audience will engage in a dialogue on the sunrise of content strategy in Europe.