Daniel Eizans: Content Strategist, Geek

Sometimes, first dates can leave us with mixed feelings. We take special care to make sure no hair is out of place, that we smell nice and do our best to make sure everything goes according to plan. First dates can be an expensive, exhausting and – depending on your skills – either be a very rewarding or entirely dissapointing experience.

Practicing content strategy for the first time is very much like a first date. It requires careful planning, a lot of get-to-know-you-type conversations and, ultimately, will probably cost you a little more money than you expected it to. If all goes well, that strategy will pay off and bring many years of happy returns, but like any new relationship, content strategy takes time, examination and refinement.

It’s here that many strategies, and relationships for that matter, fall down. If we don’t account for reflection and refinement, we can’t determine how successful we could really be.

Good content strategists start with an audit and inventory of all the content you currently have. This process can be done specific to your online properties, if you’re looking only at the Web/Mobile/Location mediums or acrosss your entire organization at the enterprise level. From that initial audit and inventory, gaps should have been identified and opportunities to refine existing content to fit existing or new audiences (personas) would have been properly communicated to the you, the client.

Executing the production of new content according to our strategy would be the next step. If they’ve done their job, your content strategist will have synched up with your analytics team and determined some success metrics for our content. And with metrics, content that’s on strategy and a usable site in place, everything should go swimmingly right? In theory, absolutely. Here’s how you go about testing to find out if that’s really the case.

So, here’s how you start setting up for the review of those success metrics to determine how to further test and refine your process and existing content.

1. Test to find out if your content is easily consumed

You spend time testing your Web site’s usability, shouldn’t your content get equal treatment? Some kind of test needs to be put into place to test the viability of your content. It’s not as simple as increasing clickthroughs or user time spent on your site, though that will provide an initial baseline as if it’s even being found.

Start with basic questions. Is the content readable? Is it too long (this applies to video or text) Do your users understand it? Could re-wording things be the key to creating influence? Is your message solving your user needs or potential problems? These are all questions we can start to answer with A/B Testing, or simple focus groups. You can be as scientific (think A/B testing, Eye Tracking or utilizing fMRI) or as basic as you want (Usability Testing, User Interviews) to be when it comes to testing for whether or not your content can be easily consumed. The name of the game here is not to launch and leave it, assuming that our strategy is the right one.

2. Take Personal and Situational Behaviors Into Consideration While Testing

Are your personas working hard enough for your content strategy? Did the content strategist account for personal behaviors when developing a content plan? What situations were generated as potential scenarios that require content? If context were acconted for in the up front planning, we’d have already accounted for factors beyond basic socio-economic and media consumption habits and looked at our content as a task or fuciton that helps address a need to a specific user situation. If we haven’t, that should be accounted for in testing for refinement as context will always make our content more useful, meaningful and relevant to users.

Test, refine and test again
This process is never over. You have to keep at it. As content strategists, we owe users increased levels of context and usability. Our job is to not only get them to our Web sites, but to make their lives easier, answer their questions before they have them and leave them feeling satisfied with the overall experiences on our sites. Content is the vehicle to that satisfaction, so we need to keep testing it. Just like that relationship… we’ve gotta keep on keepin’ at it.

Photo used under creative commons license. Photographer: Stuart Bell

For the first time in my professional career, I took a pretty big leap. I told a room full of very, very smart user experience professionals at Internet User Experience 2010 that I believe content strategists are not doing enough to adequately prepare for the next big thing. I also mentioned that I believe that Context, not content, is the real king when it comes to the web.

I’m happy to report that my thoughts and early stab at setting up the foundation for Context Strategy were both well received (see slides below).

Still, I’d like to reiterate that this process still needs refining and that we need to start finding better ways to account for personal behaviors (personal behavioral context) and personal situations (personal situational context) in order to take content strategy to the next level. When we combine personal behavioral and personal situational contexts we have the basis for what we’d potentially need to create a contextual based content strategy.

My next steps are to start exploring fields for content audits and persona development to begin accounting for context, while researching tools (including Eye Tracking, Functional MRI and biometric data) that can be synthesized on a project by project basis. Like I say in my presentation, I really need help formulating this discussion to get to a place where we can all start creating more meaningful content for users on the Web.

Comments on my presentation or the idea of Contextual Content Strategy in general are more than welcome. Let’s hash this thing out people!

I’m very excited to be able to announce that I’ll be a presenter in the Content Strategy sessions during the sixth-annual Internet User Experience Conference this July. While I’m speaking as a member of the content strategy community, I’ll be providing a heavy dose of context as the focus of my talk will be “Context as a Content Strategy.”

Basically, my presentation will attempt to shine more light on content’s oft overlooked spouse, context.

As web designers and user experience professionals we are all aware of the importance of content and we consider how this material is used, but more often than not we don’t consider what actually makes it up. Is the material too difficult to understand? Have we provided adequate background information on the topic? Is there another piece of content (even if this content doesn’t belong to us) that helps to support it and give it relevance?

These are the questions all content strategists and content developers need to begin considering prior to the onset of production. In order to achieve this process, content strategists and site owners must begin to be more critical of content during heuristic reviews, content audits and gap analyses to account for contextual improvements that will make content more relevant for visitors.

My IUE presentation attempts to begin to define how content strategists can evaluate and plan for content through a more specific contextual lens through examining how the brain processes, accesses and stores information and what factors content strategists can begin to consider when planning for supporting content and creating deeper, more meaningful content plans across multiple devices (iPad, Smart Phone, Laptop, Desktop, Etc.).

If you’re not familiar with IUE, the multi-day event covers most aspects of web site design and strategy, including user experience design, graphics, branding, social networking, accessibility, effective web writing, the migration to mobile, and enhancements that drive customers to your site.

I’m absolutely honored to have my own little spot and will be joining a panel discussion on content strategy as well with a bunch of smart cookies that include Chris Moritz (digital content strategy manager at C-E, Shauna Nicholson and many more. If you’re interested in attending my talk, I’ll be speaking Monday, July 26 (time is still TBD). Following my presentation will be the content strategy/content management panel. I’ll announce those details as I get them.

There’s still time to register, and if you can make it, you’ll no doubt be treated to a lot of interesting talks and learn a whole lot more about some really innovative things going on in the digital space.

Hope to see some of you there!

I have a confession to make. I’m starting to care less, and less about creating content strategies for marketing campaigns and Web sites and starting to care more and more about how the content we produce is computed by the brain.

Today, I’d rather eschew my marketing hat entirely and focus on something I’d ultimately like to take on through research – the creation of an entirely different form of content strategy that shapes content planning, creation plans and governance models based on data that comes from how the brain processes, learns, stores and utilizes information that publishers present to it.

I’d loosely definine this practice as “Contextual Content Strategy.” This goes so far beyond the idea of creating useable content that I wonder if its something that can be taken on with sincerity. To be honest, without extensive neuropsychological study or neuroscientific discovery, I doubt that the level of detail I’d want to achieve could be obtained, but I have always contended that true “contnet strategy” must look beyond the web and focus on how people learn and put information into context. I contend that that context should be brought down to the most specific of levels and appeal to individual brain functions.

I was first inspired to start looking at content in this different fashion after listening to a Tom Wujec talk about “three different ways the brain creates meaning.” Wujec gave this talk in February 2009 at the annual Ted Conference. He highlights a variety of brain functions throughout his discussion but nets out on the point that while we can comprehend and take in data through seeing or through discussion, we make meaning by seeing. Meaning, for most people as he puts it, is derived from an action of “visual interrogation.”

Three key takeaways:

1. Images (I’ll interpret these as being either static or motion assets) should be used to clarify meaning
2. Create Interaction with images to create relevance
3. Augment memory with persistance

This certainly isn’t a new concept, but it does call to attention a different reason for carefully selecting a graphic, illustration or animatic in that the visuals, coupled with copy can create deeper meaning and create a higher level of contextual relevance. More often than not, I’m finding that most content strategists become bored down with a metric rather than trying to determine if something is actually effective in its purpose. This is perhaps the most troubling thing for me to overcome when it comes to content strategy.

To me, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to believe that we’ll soon begin focusing on creating content based on how we know that it will be processed by individual clusters of firing neurons and the brain based on where it is consumed, the time of day, the type of device it’s delivered upon, the consumer’s physical location, cognitive state, etc. For the most part, all of these things are readily available to be indexed in databases. We can store that information, parse and compute it and create a custom set of delivery options that will resonnate directly with the way a particular individual learns, stores and connects with content. At this level, we’ll be able to be relevant to a consumer by understanding individual needs.

At the very least, we need to start thinking more proactively about versioning our web content based on devices beyond laptop/desktop/mobile/tablet technology and taking the various states of the user into mind when we’re creating contextual support for the content we’re producing.

These are the questions that good contextual content strategists will need to be answering in the future. The marketing persona and SEO can only do so much. Eventually we need to start thinking much deeper, into the way people consume information on the micro level in order to be truly useful, and in my opinion, the time for planning and worrying about those things starts now.

Brain Image used under GNU Public License. Source : http://www.loria.fr/~rougier

Aside from providing a point of view and plan for creation, governance, and delivery of content, the most important thing a content strategist should be able to provide its client is context for what it produces. Our job as a content strategist is not to sell a huge content creation approach. We owe our clients the effort of providing better context for the content they provide consumers.

This post (or maybe rant is a better word) comes on the heels of reviewing some very good presentations and explanations of what content strategy is and others that physically make my stomach turn over (Read As: If I see one more giant content marketing presentation disguised as content strategy I’m gonna go crazy!).

There are too many content marketers out there disguising themselves as content strategists. There, I said it. I think a lot of these small shops are out there selling content marketing as the end all, be all to a brand’s problems and saying that they back it up with content strategy, and it’s just not true.

Good content strategists must help to define the context for content that is created and published before suggesting a huge increase in volume and promising brands that relentless publishing will help them to become a “thought leader.” To be perfectly frank, without context, content marketing and content period, is lost on readers.

I like how Tristan Harris frames up context:

“Context is information that informs your understanding of the world, literally allowing you to derive more meaning from an experience.

I liken context to being what a detailed recipe is to someone who has never baked a cake before. Without the context provided by the recipe, all we have is whatever is in our refrigerator and (possibly) our personal experiences with tasting a piece of cake. As strategists, we must define ingredients that relate to content production before it begins and provide the relational elements and materials to make sense of the different pieces of content. This provides contextual relevance to the people consuming the content, thus providing them greater understanding and deriving more meaning from their experience with what we’ve provided.

These elements might include stuff we already think about:

• Keywords
• Categories
• Hashtags
• Source
• Taxonomic Data
• SEO

Or some stuff we might not, but should be considering:

• Geo Location data
• Voice of the related content
• Structure & Design of contextual support

Context guides the content and frames it, but it also needs a true voice. ENTER THE CONTENT STRATEGIST!

So much of contextual info is provided as related links, footnotes or through other experiences that fall short of painting a complete picture. As such, it lacks personality and ends up being easily ignored by people just might need it most. This is where the content strategy discipline really needs to work its magic.

We need to start building context into our messaging strategies, our governance plans and into our analysis of content. It should be examined, amended and revised as often as possible.

We put so much time into layering in the SEO, the product information and the message into content, that we forget that often times people need context for the topics we’re covering and that’s why content marketing programs can often fall flat on their face.

Help provide me content that is relevant to where I am right now. Does the delivery, message or voice of your content need to vary based on the time of day I’m reading it? These are all things we need to begin to consider as good content strategists. To eschew context is plain lazy and it’s a disservice to the people we’re trying to help (and in that statement I mean end users and our clients).

So, if you’re one of the content marketers or so called content strategists I’ve mentioned above, start thinking about context before you start recommending a massive play for content creation. We might better solve our client’s problems, by auditing and inventorying their current content and really analyzing how we can give it more contextual relevance to their users.

Ok. I’m going to step off my soapbox now.