Intentional Design Inc.

Public-sector content, web development and content strategy, and career cautions for writers

There hasn’t been much new content on this blog in the last couple of weeks, but there has been material published elsewhere. Here is a brief round-up.

The Content Wrangler published a “state of the profession” rant about writers who have jumped on the bandwagon of content strategy without going the work the understand the nuances of content production on large projects. Read Know Your Stuff’ or Stop Pretending To Be Professionals.

I was part of a panel discussion at the Gilbane Boston conference, and instead of doing yet-another-panel, my co-presenters and I decided to stage our presentation in the form of a three-act play. Watch One Project, Three Strategies: : What Teams Need to Know About Design, Development and Content Strategies for Content-driven Initiatives. (54 minutes, and the sound quality is iffy but if that doesn’t bother you, you’ll enjoy it)

The Content Marketing Institute published an article about how the goals and production of public sector content is similar to that of the private sector. Read How to Climb the Engagement Pyramid with Public Sector Content.

Data Conversion Labs published an article explore some of the ups and downs of making online books that are both usable and attractive. Read e-publishing.

The ROI of content

For as many years as I can remember – and I’ve been in the content business for a very long time – management treated most content production as a necessary evil and the content itself as a throw-away commodity. Content coming out of the marketing department was given more credence, particularly when it involved catchy tag lines and big, colourful pictures. The rest of the content, though, ended up in the same category as packaging: something that the consumer didn’t care about, and certainly not part of the core activity or product.

It took the Web, where content is the front door to products and services, where reputation is based on reviews, and where it turns out that accuracy and quality of content regularly sways reviewers, to turn the tides on content. The idea that content contributes to the bottom line is no longer a novel idea. I can’t really blame management for their skepticism; after all, what has been rather thin in public discourse about the benefits of content is the actual ROI.

It’s easy to understand that discussing the ROI of content can be a little fuzzy. Content comes in many forms, and affects the bottom line in complex ways. Also, ROI can different things in different industries. In the private sector, the ROI of content may mean its contribution to profitability. In the public sector, the ROI of content likely means efficiency of delivering services. In both cases, content projects may be measured against IRR (Internal Rate of Return) – the amount of savings realized by investing in content processes.

Key Performance Indicators

To understand how to measure content ROI, we need to discuss in a general way what content is intended to do. The common goal of any content is to change behaviour. Here are a few ways that content can accomplish that:

• Persuade consumers to purchase a product, through a description of benefits and explanation of features.
• Persuade constituents to respond to issues in a particular way, by explaining the issues and offering suggested responses.
• Reduce service calls by anticipating queries and ensuring that sufficient and accurate content is available.
• Allow the public to get answers to questions or problems in a self-serve  way, by providing helpful information.
• Increase engagement, whether that is constituent engagement or customer engagement.

In each of these examples, the behavioural change resulted in a benefit to the organization, whether it is to sell more products and reduce service calls, or by helping constituents be better informed or fulfill their civic obligations.

Business Drivers

The most common motivations or business drivers, expressed in very general terms, are:

• Increased revenue. Does the content help generate sales?
• Brand loyalty. Does the content help manage organizational desirability – whether that be to increase corporate trust in the private sector, or public trust  in the public sector.
• Risk management. Can accurate, quality content minimize inadvertent product misuse or minimize risk of lawsuit?
• Extension of market. Does the content allow the organization to extend to new markets?
• Operational efficiencies. Does the content reduce the number of customer support calls or make some operational aspect more efficient?
• Process efficiencies. Does a particular publishing process reduce the cost of content production?

Examples of ROI

How does this play out in terms of hard costs? Measuring ROI can be tricky because there is not always a direct cause-and-effect relationship between publishing information and seeing results, so figuring out how the benefits are manifested takes keen observation and a willingness to look at all types of content and multiple types of benefits. Take a look at some examples that I’ve come across in the last year or so.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was cited by the Content Marketing Institute as reducing costs drastically by changing the way that they presented content to consumers. This organization noticed that an average of 30% of their 4 million annual service calls were about a single problem: customers could not figure out their monthly bills. The average customer service call costs $25 (the range is from $5 to $50), so reducing the number of calls  means reducing 1,200,000 calls. Even after calculating the investment to rework the content, presenting it to customers in a way that increases their comprehension could mean a significant cost savings – a modest estimate would be upward of half-a-million dollars.

A company that creates processing solutions for community banks calculated that a change to their publishing processes, which allowed them to promote collaborative authoring by a number of authors, track content use across multiple products lines, and to re-use content more efficiently, saved them over $100,000 within the first year, and allowed them to significantly increase their production capacity.

A company that manufactures small utility vehicles reported that at least once a year, someone would misuse one of their vehicles in a way that would result in a lawsuit. The average lawsuit was $4 million, with 25% of that automatically involving the manufacturer.  These lawsuits happened no matter what content they produced – there will always be someone who is determined to drive a vehicle recklessly – but because of the quality of their documentation and fanaticism about accuracy, the manufacturer had never lost a lawsuit, for an estimated $1 million savings annually.

When a municipality offers leisure courses, they find themselves competing with the private sector for popular offerings, such as fitness classes, sports sessions, and children’s activities. It reasons, then, that they stand to lose more revenue if they don’t offer up content – descriptions, prices, locations, schedules, and so on – that ranks high in search engines, and allows people to find the leisure activity according to their particular criteria: the course they want, in the location they want, at the time of day they prefer, at the price they find acceptable. The ROI is highly situational here, and depends on a wide range of factors, but the potential for revenue – or loss of revenue – makes a direct link between content and ROI.

The performance that organizations gets from their content continues to be affected by the amount of effort they put into its production. The effort begins with a content strategy; the success is in its implementation.

Is it time for a content strategy maturity model?

Many of us are familiar with the concept of maturity models. (We’ll ignore, for now, that maturity models come up most often when someone wants to tell us we’re trying to accomplish something the wrong way.) From Carnegie Mellon’s capability maturity model, an approach to improving software development processes, to the information maturity model from MIKE2.0, which focuses on the maturity of data management, to the information process maturity model from the Information Management Center, we’ve seen enough development of content development processes to be able to make certain predictions.

Maturity models are a gauge for how developed an industry is, how established and repeatable their processes are, and how much the processes look at the future, at expansion, and strategic development. Hmmm, sound a lot like content strategy?  I posit, then, that the field of content strategy is ready for its own maturity model. It’s been around for over a decade now – in fact, we’ll see the second edition of Ann Rockley’s seminal work, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, hit the bookstores in the not-too-distance future – and we’re starting to see variations of content strategy come together into a multi-modal discipline that crosses organzational silos.

What, then, could a content strategy maturity model look like? Here’s one way of viewing such a model:

I’m very interested in feedback from practitioners. Your thoughts?

Getting ROI by Using Lean in Content Production

A couple of weeks ago, I was at UserFocus in Washington, DC, and a poster caught my eye: Karla Turcios discussing a Lean UX Style Guide for a project with the Nature Conservatory.

It was interesting to me to see how Lean has made it into this area because at first glance, Lean is all about production line efficiencies, and here it’s being applied to a discipline that is far from production line, and couldn’t be effective without a certain amount of creativity. And creativity is hard to streamline in terms of “reducing waste.”

The idea of applying Lean principles to a service environment isn’t new, however. In 2004, Lean was just starting to be adapted to areas beyond manufacturing. I worked on a project where we applied Lean principles to the production of content, where the savings were great and the ROI was stunning (though as Scott Abel always warns: your mileage may vary).

My client and I turned our success story into a presentation. As the question of ROI comes up continuously, I thought I’d post the presentation to show how a rigorous examination of even a small area of content production can yield significant results.

How Far to Lean (goes to Slideshare.net) or view below:

Defining Content in the Age of Technology

If I were to define content through a formula, the technopower would look something like this (and thanks to Joe Gollner for his help in articulating this):

Why I say that is because of a concept borrowed from the financial industry called asset amplification. In the context of financial markets, asset amplification describes how changes of wealth in financial markets causes amplification because of follow-on consequences. (Thanks to the Journal of Financial Economics article by Wei Xiong explaining how this works.) Similarly, the power of copy can be amplified if it is placed into a robust technology framework. Once copy is placed inside of a framework, it becomes the content of that framework. Like coffee is the “content” of a cup, copy is the content within a technology framework. And like a super-hero with the appropriate gear, copy, with the appropriate framework, gets super-powers, too.

The super-power of content is the potential for follow-on consequences of copy because of the underlying technopower is what turns copy into content. Thinking back a few years, communications coordinators who organized events would type out the event details: event name, start and time, place, cost, and so on, and then spend hours copying and pasting the event into sites that would allow them to paste it into a provided text box or, even more time-consuming, complete a set of form fields that the coordinators had to fill out individually. Today, we use content feeds which allow events to be amplified with no manual intervention. This is done through the technopower of the underlying technology framework.

As we get away from brochureware to robust interactivity, the need for rich semantic content grows. Again, copy, multiplied by technopower, makes content which can be processed by other systems. The event example was a simple one, but there are increasing levels of complexity, from “simple” publishing to the kind of interactivity and outputs that allow for successive complex transformations of content. We are all familiar with how content gets syndicated, but what may be a surprise is how much content is manipulated and transformed within a system. Each transformation provides the potential for additional amplification, and eventually provides a much richer user experience for the content consumer.

In the end, content may be nothing without copy; however, in a post-paper world, copy is nothing without content.

Previous post: Turning Copy into Content

Turning Copy into Content

If copy is the message, then what, then, makes copy into content?  In a day when virtually all organizational content gets processed by some sort of technology I would say that that union of editorial structure and semantic structure is the complement that creates content.

Let’s start with the lowly Word document. How many of you use stylesheets to write your copy? That is, use it properly. Be honest;  nobody is watching you. What I’m talking about is about applying the right tags to the appropriate headings and subheadings, applying appropriate tags for the various list types,  and so on. Why is this important? Once you save this document as a PDF, this is what allows your generated Table of Contents – you did know that you can auto-generate all of your tables of authority and references, right? – to be hot-linked to the appropriate heading. It’s part of what makes your document meet accessiblility standards. Oh, and those same qualities make documents mobile-friendly, as well.  And do you add the metadata to the properties screen, and keywords that would help with internal search? If you do, you’re in the miniscule minority that does, because you understand how using the technical side of Word can be of benefit down the road.

Moving ahead to the example we used in the persuasive genre of copy. News releases are a type of content that organizations want to share. For more years than necessary, communications coordinators have cut-and-pasted news releases into various partner and distribution service sites. However, if the copy is created in a semantically structured format – that is,  with systemic attention to detail so that  other systems can understand and programmatically process the content – then it’s possible to leverage the content exponentially to get better value from it. For this example, I’m not debating whether the news release genre is dead, or what should go into a news release. This is about how to get the best use whatever content you do create. You do this with technology, which will be discussed in the next post.

Previous post: Copy is not content

Next post: Defining content in the age of technology

Copy and content: a tale of two realities

Copy is not content. There, I’ve said it. I’ve not said anything new; others have said it – in print, even. But here’s more than a passing nod to the differentiating factors between them.

All Copy All the Time

Copy is all that stuff that we all learned to write in school. Well, actually, no it’s not. What our kindly grade school teacher imparted gave us a foundation for writing, but few of us went on to learn the skills needed to be a professional writer. And to create copy, you need to understand a number of basic elements.

Understanding how to write copy is to understand the key characteristics of major genres and their subgenres. Let’s see how much of this you learned in school.  There are two basic genres used in business:

Persuasive

Persuasive copy is that which convinces you to do a certain thing or think in a certain way. That’s why it’s called persuasive copy. The most common characteristic is the call to action. Any persuasive copy has some built-in message meant to convert a “looker” into a “buyer”. It can be the equivalent of “buy now” text, or a link to click, or an invitation to register for a free account or to receive a white paper or to contact your local politician. The writers who create this type of copy know what the rhythm is for this type of copy. They how much copy readers generally tolerate, and will ensure that they get to the call to action before they lose interest. When presented with an unfocused block of writing, their first question will be “what is the call to action here?” closely followed by “and how do you see the conversion happening?”

Within the larger genre are many subgenres. Among them is the news release. While not the most exciting of genres, I’m going to use it here because it’s been around for a long while, and we’ve all seen them, and may have even written them. Later on, I’ll use this to illustrate the differences between copy and content.

The news release genre is well-defined. It begins with an announcement line, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ,  and is followed by a release date and location. The writing follows the “pyramid” style, where the most important content is contained in the first sentence and the boilerplate – the description of the company and contact information – is at the end. In the middle section is the elaboration of the succinct description in the introduction, and includes the call to action. The call to action is subtle; the news release reports on some upcoming event, product release, or initiative with information on where to buy tickets, when the product will become available, or how to get involved.   It’s all about the editorial, leading to  a  conversion  of some sort.  In the public sector, the conversion is a change in behaviour; in the private sector, the conversion is a buy.

Enabling Content

Enabling content is the  instructive or educational type of copy that helps you complete a process or task. It’s the “how to” – from setting up a piece of equipment to registering for an account, to paying your taxes to ordering a passport. It’s also the text within the software application that tells you about the menu item you choose, and the knowledge base files that demonstrate how something works.

Within this genre, we have many  sub-genres. The most recognizable genre is the procedure. This has a well-defined schema: heading, a contextual introduction, numbered steps, and a conclusion that explains the success state. Each numbered step begins with an active verb, uses the given-new contract technique, and when appropriate, is followed by a feedback statement to demonstrate the expected result. It’s all about the outcome.

The things that writers intuitively understand and build into their copy comes a combination of training, experience, and skill. The difference between amateur writers and trained professionals is apparent because the training is what brings the strong understanding of their craft. But that craft is creating messages. My argument is that this is copy because it pays attention to the message.

 Next post: Turning copy into content

Content that RAITES

Once upon a time,  pre-internet, that the measure of good content was the four Cs: clear, correct , concise, and complete. In the information age, content has developed a geeky side, and the more we expect of content, the more geeky it has become. We want custom views and personalization, mobile views and mobile app views. We want e-book and tablet views. We want interactivity, and we want it not just multi-channel, but cross-channel as well.

Perhaps it sounds like the editorial side is not as important, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s the combination of the editorial and technical sides that makes content work. In my current work, we coined the acronym RAITES as a way of remembering the qualities that content should have to be considered web-worthy:

• Relevant.  To the point. No blah blah about best in market, world-class, robust. Tell the readers what they want to know, right away.
• Accurate. Be right, of course. Also Be sure that this particular piece of information is what the user expects to see in this particular place.
• Informative. Tell readers as much as they need to know to fulfill their need. Not too much, but not too little, either.
• Timely. Publish the content at the appropriate time; that means giving readers enough time to act on it. Then put the content on a review timetable to be checked periodically.
• Engaging. Make readers care. Give readers a call to action. Avoid boring.
• Standards-based. The content has to be structured and shaped in a way that it is able to integrate, converge, syndicate, meet accessibility standards, and be mobile-optimized.

Tall order? Not really. What separates professional writers from the “doing this off the side of my desk” staff who happen to write as part of their “real” work is the ability to create content that RAITES.

The Brief Content Audit

Cleve Gibbon generously contributed this article about the brief content audit, for the series of content strategy deliverables.

Successful websites grow to satisfy their customers’ needs.  At some point, someone needs to really know in detail what content they have.  Maybe as part of a re-design project? New technology? Company merger/acquisition? Changing the solution provider? It’s time for a content audit.

A content audit determines what you don’t know about your content.  Regardless of the site size, an open ended content audit will, according to Parkinson’s Law, expand fill to all available time.  Don’t do this.  A results-driven content audit will yield both valuable and actionable insights.  And by keeping it brief, it can be completed with significant reductions in time and cost.

What to look for, briefly

A brief content audit focuses largely on the quantitative site aspects to answer the following key questions:

• Substance: What content do you have?
• Structure:  How is it organised?
• Workflow: Who creates/consumes it?

A couple years ago, this used to be enough. Today, content audits should go one step further to include the following:

• SEO – How findable is the content? What keywords and backlinks are being used?
• Metadata – What data is being used to support how the content is organised?

How to do it, briefly

What content do you have? Use tools to download the external facing site.  They exist.  For example, httrack.com if a free website copier that allows you to download site(s), filtering by asset type such as PDFs, videos, audio, html.

How is it organised? Write/buy a script that can be used to parse the download logs and extract the page title, URLs, asset type and present it in a content inventory spreadsheet format.

Who creates/consumes it? Use analytics, web logs and other tools to determine how content is consumed and interview internal staff to work out how content is created, managed and measured.

Why do it, briefly

If left unchecked, websites get messy.  And the more you don’t know, the less likely you want to know. A content audit shines a light on your content. For larger content sites, there is just not enough time to do a full audit.  In these circumstances, a brief content audit can be used to capture enough information to provide the required evidence for a more detailed version and/or just to highlight key content trends.

Brief-Content-Audit

Tools

• Website copier (e.g. www.httrack.com)
• Website log analysers (e.g. www.weblogexpert.com)

Why content strategy: explaining its value proposition

When you’re involved in a trending field, it may seem like everyone in the world is involved in the conversation. For content strategy, there are blogs, Twitter streams (#contentstrategy), Facebook pages, Google groups, LinkedIn groups, and organizational SIGs (special interest groups). You can say “I’m a content strategist” and someone will reply “ooh, great, what kind of CS do you do?” It’s easy to think that the world is on the right path, and the world will be a better place because we’ve discovered the holy grail of web usability: better content.

And then reality hits. The professions whose roles are to make a project happen, the “adjacent professions” – project managers, business analysts, creative directors, engineering team leads, software development managers, program managers – are, for the most part, blissfully unaware of content strategy as a profession. They don’t realize why it’s important, don’t know the benefits, and don’t understand where or how we fit into the picture. Too often, I’ve been parachuted into a project for a month or two, expected to churn out a couple of content matrices, and call it a content strategy. The project got value, but a content strategy? I think not.

There’s still a lot of room to explain the value proposition of content strategy at its most basic level of ROI. Here’s a recent run at it, for a professional “outsider” audience:

http://www.tcworld.info/tcworld/content-strategies/article/whats-the-buzz-about-content-strategy/