Content Strategy Applied 2012 (#CSA12) took place in Richmond on 1st & 2nd of March 2012 hosted by eBay and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry.
As some of you will know I am very into SEO & Social Media and have always wondered about content strategy and whether it was in fact more than just a buzzword.
I have to say I was astounded at how much I didn’t know about what is considered content strategy which delves much deeper into information architecture and user experience than just overblown copywriting.
(You should go follow some of the clever people that attended #CSA12 from this list.)
Key Take-aways for me:
- Content Strategy must prove ROI either saving or making money
- Content can make *serious* money
- Formatting content in the right ways can save vast amounts of money(!)
- The only brand owned content users are interested in is manuals
- Successful Content strategy must solve a problem for users
- Breaking down internal silos to solve user goals rather than departmental ones
- Decide on common actions performed by users and make site serve its purpose
- Content strategy is as much in deletion of content as creation
- Content strategy guidelines can be cool
Return on Investment (ROI) of Content
Of course it’s the question which comes back to haunt most social media marketers:
“What’s the ROI?”
Scott Abel Kicked off the two day event with a case study which could prove ROI per page. He stated that content marketers are required to understand the maths of their content to make a business case!
He showed how http://www.ifixit.com/ use repair manuals as a way to sell their products. Creating content which adds value to the user and then selling them the parts required for each fix.
Interestingly this case study also had a strong need for a mobile-first content strategy. “Try breaking your laptop and then going to the internet for fixes”. So the team at IFixit created their own XML standard for procedural manuals (http://omanual.com/).
The ROI of their content can be calculated easily; you know how much the writers and photographers were paid per page and how much each article generates in revenue.
That is measurable ROI, per page, per writer.
Rachel Lovinger @rlovinger showed metadata isn’t just meta descriptions but the semantic and admin metadata we (I mean that I) sometimes take for granted. It also highlighted just how granular you can make metadata.
The session became more fun when we had to categorise Superheroes with metadata (clearly one of the most important being cape or no cape!) and shared an impressive inforgraph of superhero powers. Anyway… I digress.
We heard that 4food had to tag 1,500 recipes from scratch, but upon completion saw a massive 25% increase in traffic!
Track that in your pipe and smoke it.
Saving Money By Formatting Content in XML
A later session brought about an epiphany moment for me which was this – content strategy can save you vast amounts of money when translating it across multiple channels and devices.
This coupled with a later session by Noz Ben Urbina @nozurbina brought about an epiphany for me. He showed just how easy massive savings are when translating content from one platform to another by keeping content in presentation neutral formats like XML/DITA.
Not only does it make this process easy it makes it easily accessible to new formats – because frankly, who knows what the next shiny new device format will be? (Although my bets aren’t on the iPad cooker top, coming anytime soon).
Successful Content strategy must solve problems for users
A couple of the talks at #CSA12 really gave some insight into case studies of big sites that had to be completely overhauled or consumer insights which stare businesses in the face, and yet are still ignored.This is something we all know, right? We create content only to solve a problem. Except sometimes things go amiss.
Noz Urbina showed us very quickly using Google Instant suggestions that many of the most searched terms around products are reviews and manuals. Whilst brands can’t dictate what is in a review, they do provide manuals. He also asserted that clever consumers now are looking for manuals before they buy – so guess what document has become your best new friend for sales!
I didn’t attend the liverpool.gov.uk/ talk – but saw that they had refocused the UI based on the top 100 actions performed by users. Having a quick click around, you just realise how much time and thought has gone into this!
It makes so much sense and I can’t help but feel many smaller businesses could make much more efficient sites by understanding the top 5 actions any user may want to complete.
Content strategy is as much in deletion of content as creation
In the same vein Rahel Baillie @rahelab told us about the City of Vancouver website where they consolidated 65,000 pages (37,000 html pages and 27,000 PDFs) into less than 5,000 pages. This is just incredible – the content wasn’t just deleted or edited, but large chunks entirely reworked to fit the new structure.
She reaffirmed though that whilst it is everyone’s job to create content – it needs to be someone’s responsibility to edit/delete it too. A matter of governance (a word which tends to be disliked by content strategists it appears).
One of the key battles that Rahel described was to break down the silos. The strongest way to do this is to identify & train the best people across departments then to handover the content strategy to them with simple documentation.
Content strategy guidelines can be cool (or… err… useful)
DeAnn Wright and Angela Boodoo (who had ironically lost her voice, whilst trying to talk to us about tone of voice) have spent a lot of time ensuring eBay’s tone of voice is helpful and easy to understand whilst solving it’s users problems. It was interesting to hear that they wanted to develop a global tone of voice but had difficulty translating humour and human touch to all languages and cultures.
The key to the tone of voice guidelines seemed to be that it focused on HOW things should/shouldn’t be said rather than WHAT should/shouldn’t be said in any given situation.
There is also a big push to rewrite the Terms and Conditions into plain English as they currently do not sit with the rest of the help documentation.
Lucie Hyde has also put a lot of time into the Quality Assurance guidelines behind eBay’s content creation process.
It was genuinely fascinating to see that the eBay’s Content Quality Checklist ensures that every element of content created passed the criteria, including: Linguistic & grammatical correctness, Brand tone of voice guidelines and usability.
Especially wonderful, after hearing how the process overcame initial friction and has now proved itself to have had a massive impact on customer satisfaction (and understanding).
What I’ve taken from #CSA12
It really is about making content the heart of what we do – no matter the platform we should be designing around content that solves problems for our users, so it can either make or save us money.
I met a bunch of really great people at #CSA12 and I really hope I get to come along next year to see how the industry has moved along.
Content Strategy – Recommended Reading
All photos courteousy of Nicky Adams Photography.
