Intentional Design Inc.

Registration now open for content strategy conference

Destry Wion of STC France says: No doubt there are some hard choices to make. Tickets are limited. The
workshops even more so. If you can make it to Paris for this historic event, don’t procrastinate with registration!

I’m proud to be one of the keynote speakers of the STC Content Strategy Forum 2010, and can tell you that there will be a fabulous line-up!

https://www.regonline.co.uk/csforum10

Consequences of not having a good content strategy

Yesterday, I bought a phone from Staples. I chose the AT&T brand, for no particular reason other than the physical interface looked like it could be straightforward and it had the features I wanted. When I got the phone home, I unpacked it, attached the base, then took one cordless headset upstairs and plugged it in, and another headset to the ground-level home office and plugged it in. Then I started to configure the phone’s options. Things went well – the schema was generally to press “Menu/Select”, scroll to find an option, then press “Menu/Select” again to choose the option, and press Menu/Select again to confirm the change.

So when it came time to changing the answering machine greeting message, I followed the instructions only to discover that there is no option to select. I tried all the little tricks to see if the option got hidden elsewhere in the menu tree, but it was definitely missing. Well, that’s fine; I will tough out the pain of contacting customer support, through the phone number in the back of the book. The phone number works in Canada – always an iffy question – so that’s encouraging, and after listening to all the preambles, I press 1 for English, enter my product number, and go through the various menus but there is no option for “menu items are missing”. It seems that all the options end up the same way, leading to an end point of “visit our website at …”.

Now, gigantic corporations all have us trained to despise having to call in; in other words: Don’t you think I’d have checked the website first if I thought I could find the answer on your website? It would have been so much easier: go to the site, choose the model number, and  But of course, the user experience was quite painful. Here is an encapsulation of the frustration points:

1. After doing a Google search for AT&T 84209 (the model number) phone, I kept getting routed to the att.com site, which was obviously US-based, and geared to telephone service subscribers.
2. I redialed the number from the instruction book and was given www.telephones.att.com as the URL. Typing in 84209 got me to a shopping area. Do I want to buy a replacement cordless battery? I must say that if I happened to know the model number of a phone I wanted to buy, I’d be in luck because the second shopping option is to buy the very phone that I’m getting annoyed over.
3. There are links to the manual and Quick Start guide, which I consulted and had the same incorrect information.
4. Filling in the Contact Us form field promises to net a response within – depending on which of the messages you believe – 72 hours (on website), 2 days (on-screen auto-reply message), or 3 days (auto-reply email) but I doubt that I’ll get a meaningful answer. It may be too late anyhow, as I’ve run about the house, disconnecting telephone bits and bobs and tossing them into a bag to return to the store.

Now, I admit that my question is not one of the top ten questions, and it might be embarrassing to put it on the automated reply options (Press 8 if the interface  doesn’t work as per instructions.) but surely someone has asked this question before, and somewhere, a content developer has tackled this discrepancy. The point is that there needs to be a strategy around content that goes beyond the basics. Now that I’ve calmed down and revisited the situation with an industry insider’s eye, the support site is lovely – beautiful colours and the navigation to the FAQs is quite simple. But when a customer is searching content, and can’t find it, then all the other niceties fall away. The laser beam focus on finding the content, which is needed to complete their task, overrides all other aspects of the user experience. Task-based analysis at its best.

So to AT&T, I would ask: if one of your questions is “Who is Charlie Johnson and why is his name displayed on my phone?” surely the question of missing menu items could be addressed, as well? This site is a classic example of focusing resources on the usability side of the support site, but not having a content strategy befitting such a site.  In this case, I did receive an email a few days later, referring me to a “real person” in another department, but by that time, my answer was, “Thanks, but too little too late. I’ve exchanged the phone for another brand.”

Seeing as how returns of electronic consumer products is a multi-billion dollar problem in North America, companies could definitely benefit from having strong content strategies, not just on their website, but across the product line, from instructions to training to their support site.

Content strategy explained: two perspectives

nForm rep Matthew Nish-Lapidus interviewed me and Kristina Halvorson, in advance of the CANUX 2009 weekend workshop in beautiful Banff, on the topic of content strategy. The interviews, in podcast form, discuss content strategy from quite different perspectives, yet there is an underlying similarity about this field of practice. In true content strategy form, the medium affects the message; listening to a podcast provides a less formal, yet rich and fluid perspective.

If you’ve never been to CANUX, you’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Being up in a resort-like mountain setting at the Banff Centre imbues the workshop with some cosmic-force creative atmosphere. There are a few days left to sign up with the advance discount, so don’t delay if you’re sitting on the fence.

Naming the “other” type of content strategy

A while back, I started a thread on the STC Content Strategy SIG to get some consensus around what to call “our” type of content strategy. This was in response to having a couple of content strategy books in the marketplace that don’t really cover the breadth and depth of what we do for our clients and organizations.

The issue with “Content strategy for the Web” is that for me, the Web a single output format.  What happens when I put the some content out on the Web, and send it to Training to incorporate into their training materials, and share it with the Customer Support group, so they can incorporate it into the knowledge base for service reps, and send it out to a PDF so it can be printed as a manual? My mandate is obviously bigger than “the Web,” but more importantly, the framing shouldn’t be by output channel.

While the term “content strategy for the Web” doesn’t say this explicitly, there are several implicit connotations: the content is marketing content, and the Web is where content consumers go to read it. The differences between content for the [marketing] Web and [marketing] print material has to do with length, look, keywords, search engine optimization, and so on.

Ann Rockley gave her earlier book, Managing Enterprise Content, the subtitle of “a unified content strategy” but the concept of “unified” is not well understood by our audiences. Unifying what and what:  Web and not-Web? Marketing and technical? When the questions I get asked start with “what do you mean by the word content?” the whole idea of unification becomes a hurdle that sometimes my audiences never get to. The type of content strategy I provide isn’t the normal definition of enterprise-wide. It doesn’t include email and ediscovery, or records management for HR, or ERP data, or any of the stuff that information-management gurus look at as enterprise content management.

Yet we know that the power to name what we do can define expectations – not to mention make search terms so much more effective! So what do we do? In an effort to frame our focus, I looked at our activities, deliverables, and scope of content, and realized that there are a couple of basic common denominators:

• The content is on the critical path. We’re not talking about email or HR records. We’re talking critical-path product content. The content is related to the product being sold or service being provided. This means product content that gets used in multiple contexts: technical documentation, training, and customer support, and marketing, as well as content that gets turned into product content, such as engineering specifications, product-related user-generated content, and content used in a social media context.
• The content either supports pre-sales purchasing decisions, or it supports the post-sales relationship between you and your customers. The content may not always be customer-facing, but it is used to build the customer relationship. Why both of these stages are important is because the pre-sales stage is like dating; and the post-sales stage is like marriage. Consumers, and perhaps more importantly, industry analysts, look to see what the relationship will be like once you’re hitched, and they do that during the dating stage. So the content we’re concerned with is, essentially, relationship content.

Joe Gollner calls it “content in the context of forming persistent business relationships.” I like this definition because it defines the content by its function rather than by its output mechanism. However, someone might posit that email exchanges between staff and customers also serve the purpose of forming or maintain persistent business relationships.

I then (re)turned to Karen Donoghue’s book, Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience, wherein she makes it clear that every successful transaction that a user has with a website has the effect of taking a step closer to a trust relationship; every unsuccessful transaction send the user a step (or two or ten steps) away from that relationship, and in some cases, irreparably damages the relationship.

Given that part of my mantra is cross-silo consistency – your content should be consistent on your site, in your print documents, in your PDFs, on your product packaging, in your service agreements, in the software interface, and wherever else it appears, AND throughout the entire lifecycle of the content – then the logical conclusion I draw is to connect my type of content strategy to the user experience. User experience helps form and retain persistent business relationships; content is a critical component of a user experience.

Then, do I call this user relationship content? I can just see the look on the face of an executive as he mutters something under his breath to the effect that his company doesn’t have a dating site. As a good content strategist, I realize the importance of crafting content to be effective for my audience. So who is my audience: the practitioners who want a technically accurate description of the craft, or the decisions-makers who are potential clients for my services?

In this case, I have to admit that I’m leaning toward a client audience, and hence the designation of content strategies for the product life cycle. Product life cycle is a term that resonates with product managers, program managers, and other mid-level to executive-level management, and all the content related to the product lifecycle – soup to nuts, so to speak, of the content lifecycle – is what is at stake in my type of content strategy. When I use this phrase to describe this to potential project sponsors, will they understand it? Will we do our field of practice justice by calling my work product life cycle content strategies? Let the debate begin!

Managing Your Online Brand: A Vancouver Workshop

It’s time for another workshop on the topic of promoting yourself and your professional brand with the responsible use of social media tools. If you haven’t gotten on the blogging bandwagon, don’t worry. Blogging is on its way out, replaced by microblogging and social media. Or is it? The music is not in the violin, the saying goes. Instead, the music comes from the way the musician plays the instrument, either eliciting the sweet strains of a symphony or cacaphonic screeching. The same applies to the social media tools you choose and use to network, advance your career, and connect with those who consume the content you publish.

The workshop in May was a great success. A friend had asked me to run a workshop because she felt she’d gotten so busy doing her work that when she looked up, there were all these new career “things” she was supposed to have kept up with, and she could use a crash course in how to figure all the pieces out. If you’re in that same boat and want to kick-start your public presence, for for yourself, your consultancy, or small business, I’ve put together an inexpensive, 1-day workshop that you can take this month.
The workshop is limited to a maximum of 16 participants, for maximum learning and interaction.

Date: November 7, 2009
Time: 8:30 to 5:00
Location: Downtown Vancouver
Cost: $120 per person (includes morning, afternoon refreshments)

Register by contacting Rahel Bailie.

How to alienate customers and drive away prospects

Part of a good content strategy is anticipating the various ways a site gets used, and ensuring that content consumers won’t be frustrated when they look for the treasure at the end of their hunt. This point was driven home to me in a very personal way over the past weekend, and sharing my experiences makes the point that ALL of your product information is marketing content.

I’ve just moved into a new place, which comes complete with a gas fireplace. I was told by my landlords that using the gas fireplace to warm the lounge area would be cozy and economical, so I pushed the button on the remote control to start up the fireplace, which was set to 74F, took some painkillers, and promptly fell asleep on the sofa. When I awoke, the temperature hovered in the low 80s, and I couldn’t figure out the right button combination to turn the fireplace off, and within a half-hour, the temperature was climbing into the mid 80s. As I couldn’t get in touch with my landlords, the next best thing seemed to be to find the information on the manufacturer’s site.

The site was completely geared toward sales. There was no telephone number to contact anyone, and the customer support side was rather anorexic. I sent off an email using their contact form, with little expectation that anyone would get back to me, as the form was also geared to sales – or at least knowing details such as the model number (and I wasn’t about to start poking around a very hot hunk of cast iron). There were some downloadable manuals, that in my fevered state made little sense, and even in my current non-fevered state, I realize now, didn’t have the information I needed.

The poor user experience continued, even after some creative searching turned up company with a phone number in the same area code as me. So do I have incredibly bad luck, or is this problem more widespread than should be, considering that the Web has been around for more than a decade? Where is their knowledge base, their forum, or at least a FAQ page? I am, after all, used to using new Web services, where  self-serve is the norm. I had every incentive to look for the information, if it were there. And in this case, where I was literally dealing with fire, I expect some sort of emergency line to get a much-needed answer.

According to Jeffrey Tarter, Executive Director of the Association of Support Professionals, “Tech notes should be the heart and soul of a great Web support site.Yet painfully often, users encounter a tangle of hard-to-understand, poorly maintained knowledge base documents that fail to solve their problems–and may even discourage users from ever coming back to the site. In fact, many knowledgebases were originally written for internal use by support reps, not customers, and hardly anyone ever seems to ask: Is this approach really working for us?”

I can answer that. No, it’s not working. It’s not working for either party. As a customer, the experience left me cold. I certainly wouldn’t buy from them, and could never recommend them in good faith. As an industry professional, I can’t imagine it’s pleasant or productive to have irate customers calling for information that support staff are ill-equipped to answer.

Treasure and the hunt: a content strategy take on user experience

The September 21st post on the popular Jakob Nielsen’s useit reinforces a perspective that I’ve been expressing for a while now, so this seemed an opportune time to articulate it here.

The people who come to your site, who are generally called “users,” come there to consume content. It doesn’t matter whether the content is text, audio, graphics, or video, and it doesn’t matter whether the content is of the persuasive, instructional, or entertainment variety. The people who come to your site are content consumers, and they have searched out, or navigated to, your site to find some content to consume.

When a content consumer comes to your site and finds what they’re looking for, they consider the endeavour a success. In other words, they went on a treasure hunt found the content “treasure” they were looking for.  When the hunt leads to no treasure, the time and mental energy spent is considered a waste, no matter how good the rest of the user experience.

Here’s a real-life illustration. Last year, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. When my sister called me from the other side of the country to tell me the news, I had all sorts of questions. As the eldest child, I’m the “fixer” and went into high gear, doing research to find answers to the questions no one had thought to ask at the time. I chose to look through the Mayo Clinic site, as they are a reputable source of information. Thankfully, I found the answers, and could provide links to my sister so she could read up on the topic, as well.

What would have been my response had I not not found the content I needed? Would I have been impressed with the navigation, the colours, the affordance on the buttons? I think not. I would have uttered a frustrated “this is terrible,” or something more colourful, and left the site in frustration.

In my case, the process of the hunt became invisible. This is because of the care that the Mayo Clinic team put into creating usable navigation and wayfinding aids.  (Had the design been flawed, the hunt would have been impeded, and that would have warranted a frustrated outcry of a different tone.) More important to me, however, was that the content that I had set out to find was actually there. It would never occur to me to wander around the Mayo Clinic site to marvel over the user experience of their site – well, actually, I would, but only because I’m an industry geek with infinite curiosity – but it would occur to me to read everything I could get my hands on about the topic at the forefront of my mind.

I relied on the clues that got me to the treasure in the most efficient way. This form of wayfinding is a critical aspect of user experience, but it is not the entire user experience. It may be convenient to abdicate responsibility for wayfinding to the information architects, interaction designers, and other user experience professionals whose work scope includes these aspects of site design, but it is certainly not effective. In other words, the user experience is not complete without good content.

Dorian Taylor, who comes from the technical side, hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Rather than designating content as something that is plugged into a decorated shell, why not endeavour to put it at the centre?” This fits nicely with a content strategy perspective, where we recognize that content is not a shell game.

Favicons

Just created a favicon for my site with a Favicon Generator. Now, to figure out where it goes on my site so it will display correctly.

Want to learn about content strategy?

Before 2010 rolls around, there’s still time to meet whatever goals you may have had to learn about content strategy, particularly the kind of strategy for critical-path product content.

• October, New Orleans, LA: Lavacon
  A conference for techcomm managers and project managers, this year’s theme is professional and career development. If you sense a career change in your near future, or are out of a job and want to move to a field with a future, I’m presenting two sessions. One is on content strategy; the other is on managing your personal brand online.
• October, webinar: Leveraging Content Assets on a Tight Budget
  Part of Aptara Corporation’s Thought Leader webinar series, you can learn how to align technology and processes with business goals, leverage existing content assets for better user experience, and creating an optimized content supply chain
• November, Banff, AB, Canada: CANUX
  I’ll be presenting a case study at this 2-day Canadian User Experience workshop. If you attend, you’ll also get the infamous Kristina Halvorson, whose keynote my presentation follows
• December, Boston, MA: Content Management Professionals Association Summit
  The theme of the trade association summit this year is open source standards. My presentation on “open source content” is a little different aspect of content strategy.
• December, Boston, MA:  Gilbane Boston
  I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on Content Modeling and Information Architectures for Content Management, which is a critical aspect of content strategy.

If you can’t complete your professional development in the content strategy area during 2009, there will be multiple opportunities during 2010. Stay tuned!

Component content management as content mashup

Explaining CCM (component content management) to clients is sometimes difficult. The concept of combining content at the component level to create topics, which then get combined to create publications – or not; sometimes, topics just remain topics – is complex to understand to people who aren’t typically involved in the production or management of content.

Ironically, one group that has a hard time with the concepts of CCM are the IS/IT groups. For a while, this flummoxed me, as I thought that an understanding of the technology side would be an advantage to understanding it. Then it dawned on me that knowing the general principles of content management could actually become a barrier. Content management has become synonymous with WCM (Web Content Management), with CCM considered an obscure niche within the broader field, and WCM does not handle content at a sufficiently granular level. The final two words, “content management” are the same, but it’s the first word that makes the functional difference. It’s a little like thinking a truck is a truck, whether the prefix is “moving” or “dump”.

The difference is a little like that. For the average WCM system, content is input directly into the content management system, and managed at whatever level the content is input – generally, at the page level. A change to made to a page, and an edit udpates the entire page.

For the average CCM system, the content is created in smaller-than-page chunks, and assembled, much like a content mashup, to create a larger-sized page for output. A change is made to a component, which can be a single word, phrase, paragraph, or larger, which is then compiled, much like a software “build”, which generates a presentation version of the specified sources. The aggregated content can be pushed out to a Web page, a PDF, or a print destination.

When we think of mashups, we think of the Wikipedia definition of a mashup, which is combining data from two or more sources to create a richer information set. A common mash-up is an address with a map, that displays that includes both components as a single, integrated screen, with more meaning. A content mashup is similar – for example, when an ecommerce retailer pulls product descriptions from one data source and the prices from a financial system to mash together and display according to the requested content.

The technology that allows content to be mashed up before making it to the end display is an XML editor. The editor allows authors to determine how the components will be mashed together, whether that be through a manual mechanism such as a content map, or automated through an information retrieval system such as a taxonomy or thesaurus.

Whether understanding CCM as a mashup application is helpful for purposes of explaining to the technical parties remains to be seen. I do suspect that the analogy will strike a chord with a certain client segment, though, and that’s about all I can ask.