The framework used here can be depicted as:

Content design
The cumulative effect of activities that form strategic approach to content, to achieve a business or social goal. This includes the decisions from both the content architecture and content development sides. (A Wikipedia definition for design is “…a roadmap or a strategic approach for someone to achieve a unique expectation. It defines the specifications, plans, parameters, costs, activities, processes and how and what to do within legal, political, social, environmental, safety and economic constraints in achieving that objective.”

Content architecture
The construction of content to allow content to function within a technological framework. Content architcture is the cumulative effect of activities and decisions in specifying the implementation of content types, content flows, and content models.

Content type
A set of building blocks that create semantic context for a specific unit of content, describing a technical structure and associated behaviours of those elements that allows reliable processing by computers.

Content flow
The representation of the elements of a content type into the various outputs within a presentation, plus the technical specifications that allow the implementation of business rules. Assumes the technical specifications are described from the perspective of the content type within some sort of content management system.

Content model
A representation of the aggregation of all the content types used in a specific project, plus the technical specifications that allow the implementation of business rules. Assumes the technical specifications are described from the perspective of the presentation within some sort of content management system.

Content development
The construction of content to allow content to function within an editorial framework. Content development is the cumulative effect of activities and decisions in specifying the implementation of editorial quality, editorial structures, and content genres.

Content genre
A set of building blocks that create social context for a specific unit of content, describing an editorial structure.

Content genres signify predictable reading flow. Examples of content genres are procedures, white papers, case studies, agendas, minutes, business cards. Readers predice that a business card has a name, position, company name, company address, and one or more telephone numbers.

Editorial structure
A socially-enforced structuring of elements with a unit of content.

The structure is social because there are no technology constraints to enforce the structure; there is a social agreement to use elements in a particular way. For example, writers may agree that business card elements should always appear in a particular order: name, position, company name, company address, the direct number for a landline, followed by a mobile telephone number.

Editorial standards
Editorial standards refers to the quality standards of the content.

Editorial standards can include mechanisms such as style guides, branding guidelines, or writing conventions, such as writing for accessibility or search engine optimization. Editorial standards are generally enforced by policy, though can be enforced through technology such as spell-checkers and content quality software.

We’re at a similar stage in the content strategy field. Here’s a rough recreation of a discussion between a group of professionals that include a content strategist, project manager, developer, CMS integrator, and user experience professional:
CS: The writers are using template A to do this and template B to do that.
CMI: It’s all the same template.
UX: No it’s not. This template goes here and and that template goes on that page.
CMI: But those pages are the same template. The modules are just different.
PM: We contracted for a maximum of eight templates. Is this one of those templates, or is this something different?
Dev: It’s the base template, with variations based on modules.
UX: By module, do you mean widget?
CMI: What’s a widget?
UX: The thing that goes on the page with the tabs where the writers put these four types of content.
CS: Just to clarify, the UX guy isn’t talking about content types.
CMI: But that has nothing to do with the template.
Dev: I think you are calling it a widget when it’s just another kind of module.
UX: So the thing that works this way in the right rail has the same name as the other thing that works a different way in the center column?
CMI: Yes, because they all go into a template.
CS: Whoa! Hold on. Can we do a round of definitions before we go any further?

It turned out that each person in the room had a different definition of what was meant by content type, module, and template. No wonder we couldn’t come to a speedy decision. Fifteen minutes later, we ended up with a common project vocabulary that we could use to discuss the many moving parts of the project. One of the more interesting outcomes was the conclusion that the word “template” could not be used without a modifier. There are CMS templates, UX templates, and editorial templates. In fact, the writers adopted the word “stencil” as a confusion-reducing alternative.

The topic of vocabulary has arisen a number of times recently. While preparing a workshop for a client, my research uncovered a wide range of vocabulary discrepancies that made it difficult for me to convey concepts easily to a multi-disciplinary team. I could talk about “object-oriented content” to explain topic-based content to a developer familiar with object-oriented programming, but when the developer didn’t want to attend a workshop that included content typing (because he thought typing meant how to type, as in use a keyboard), I knew it was time to tackle the topic.

In a discussion with the co-author of my book, Noz, Urbina, we engaged in a similar discussion. The resolution came after a screen-sharing session where numerous screen shots were carefully labelled and annotated. As Noz and I discover quite often, we had both been working through similar issues at the same time. We built on each other’s work, and will each publish a post about the topic with the definitions we particularly feel strongly about.

In my next article, I will present a vocabulary that creates a foundation for content strategists.

Margot Bloomstein, a prominent content strategist, recently said something that got my attention: “Curation is an act of creating new meaning by combining existing content with new perspective.” Think of a natural science museum, and how they organize their exhibits to promote contextual understanding. They may organize their content by geographic location – for example, grouping all rocks and gems by region. This promotes an understanding of the range of geological diversity by region. Other exhibits might have their content grouped by “like objects” – for example, all samples of diamonds or all granite, to contrast and compare the types and quality of a particular type of stone. These groupings of content give visitors different contexts, and different ways to understand the same artifacts.

Cities have a similar need to present information that “tells a story”, and this is precipitating a move away from departmental content silos to contextual content. For example, the City of Vancouver states its intent to become the greenest city in the world by 2020. The concept of “going green” affects an array of departments and transactions with the city, from changes in trash and recycling to green building practices, from promotion of trees and urban gardening to the promotion of public transit and urban cycling.

There is an abundance of content related to the Greenest City 2020 initiative is aggregated in a single place, so that residents can understand all the ways that individuals, businesses, and the City, can contribute to a green city. Having the content consolidated into a single place provides a particular context. The content covers a ten-point initiative: a green economy, climate leadership, green buildings, green transportation, a zero waste initiative, access to nature, clean air and water, local food, and a lighter footprint. It is the mother lode of content for the environmentalist, but could be overwhelming to the casual website user.

However, the content is being curated in a way that helps people understand this city-wide initiative in context. We can look at the example of a bike and pedestrian bridge that was part of a public transit initiative crossing the Fraser River that separates Vancouver from the suburb of Richmond. The construction of a public transit line from downtown Vancouver to Richmond is part of a larger initiative with a green component. The attachment of a pedestrian bridge to the transit line allows cyclists and pedestrians to cross the river in a safe and pleasant way, and encourages walking and cycling as part of the carbon-reduction aspect of greening the city.

The project started out as the “proposed bike bridge” as part of the Cambie Corridor project back in 2008 was in its planning stages. Then, when the project was complete in 2009, the bike bridge was the “new bike bridge” and its description became part of the day’s news. Now, a few years later, the feature is simply “the bike bridge” and having the content in the area of the website where Vancouver describes its cycling routes, pedestrian walkways, and where the bridge and its features are described provides a different context to visitors who may not head for the Green Vancouver area but are keenly interested in cycling.

If that example doesn’t resonate, think of the furniture giant, IKEA. Their catalogues are a good example of content curation. The catalogues have pages of storage units, pages of accessories, and pages of specific furniture types – sofas, chairs, tables – so you can contrast and compare like products. Those same items are often shown on “room” pages, where a particular room type is staged, with a storage unit, a sofa, a chair, and a couple of tables, so you can see how those items in context of a living room, bedroom, or den.

In organizations that don’t depend on their websites for their livelihood, there is often a mandate and clear responsibility for one department – perhaps even an assigned author – to create content while the project is in its planning stage. Then there will be clear responsibility for one department – and an assigned author – to create a news release when the project goes live. But there is often no clear responsibility, nor authorship, to transition the content to its best place(s) on a website for the long-term. In corporations where website content has a direct effect on the bottom line, there is immense attention paid to the presentation of content in whatever context will promote product perusal and ultimately sales.

This is where content curators come in. This is part of how an organization tells its “story” and provides perspective on itself, its products or services, and its operations. The writers with responsibility for the overall story, mandated with keeping an eye on the entire body of content, need to have the view, the authority, and the vision to be able to keep on top of content throughout its transitions, and ensure that the content is present, accurate, and in current context. This is no small feat, as any content strategist will tell you. It means maintaining liaisons with all stakeholder groups, and being able to do the content justice as it move through one content lifecycle and into the next iteration.

The idea of content curation is nothing new to communications professionals, whether it was known by that term or by jargon of another industry. What is changing is the growing amount of content that organizations are expecting to have curated. Content “clean-up” has a much different connotation than content curation. The former has been treated as a low-level task, given to a junior staff member or even an intern. That latter is treated as a task worthy of a senior staffer, who understands the corporate vision and digital strategy, and can implement it through careful content selection and placement. In a time of growing complexity of content variations – different geographic destinations, different languages, different platforms, different interfaces – organizations are discovering that ensuring this responsibility is held at an appropriately senior level is a good investment.

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.

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.

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?

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:

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

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

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