Unstructured content

What do we mean when we say structured content, first of all? It may help to understand what unstructured content is. When you read a website or use an app, you can’t tell what the content looks like on the back end, where writers and editors input the content to the software that runs the site. Once we started creating software — often a content management system or a CMS — to help writers update websites, we created forms for them to use to add the information. For a long time, the forms looked like this:

In fact, many of the forms still look like that.

Even in the beginning, this kind of form didn’t work. In the beginning of the internet, many of the writers working on the web came from print. We were used to writing something in a Word document, and either formatting it there, or importing the words into a desktop-publishing program that allowed us to control format, so we had total control over what parts of the work caught the reader’s eye first, or what seemed most important, or what was a quick takeaway, or what color and how big the letters of our headline were over the background image.

So we wanted parity in the online world. We demanded, and got, WYSIWYG editors for our digital work. [Those are the what-you-see-is-what-you-get formatting tools like the B, I, U, alignment, and other formatting tools available in Word, many other programs, and also on the back end of many websites.] And for a while, many editors were happy with that.

Those of us who came from a more tech-centric viewpoint, or who were tech-curious, and kept worming our way into programming meetings and hitting up our developer friends to teach us some Java on the side, realized that there were more options. The problem with the body field has been well defined by now, but this problem is not necessarily common knowledge outside the content strategy and programming worlds—in the business world. To help you see the problem, and to see the opportunities available from structure, let’s start with some examples.

Structured content examples

A quick example of structured content that everyone understands: Recipes. Recipes typically come with information in several parts: The title, the ingredients and their amounts, the step-by-step instructions. You might have additional information like nutritional data, servings, recipe author or source, images, and categories like breakfast or vegetarian.

A movie listing is another great example. Movies have a title, a description, a cast list, a theater, a start time, a producer, and on and on.

Now, it’s not just that recipes and movies have these parts that make them structured. We could take all of that information and slap it into a body field.

We’d need to add some code to the recipe so that it would show up in an understandable way online, but we could do that.

And even so, it’s still not structured — because the computer doesn’t understand what the information is yet. The computer just knows: Here are some bold words. Here is a headline. Here are some italic words. Here are some more words. Here is a line break. And it will render them as such, and to the user, the cook making the soup, everything looks fine.

Structured content

What happens if the cook is expecting guests for dinner and wants to increase the soup by 50%? If the content isn’t structured, the cook has to do the math and hopefully remembers how to multiply fractions. But if the content is structured, the cook may be able to enter a number of servings she’d like to make in the recipe app and have the recipe instantly update to give her new amounts for each ingredient. To make that happen, we need a lot more than a body field on the back end. We need something more like this:

Then the recipe app can perform all kinds of operations on its information, because it understands that some of those fields in the soup recipe are numbers. It can also update nutritional information when data changes, and all kinds of other things, if you design it to do so.

Going beyond the obvious (and into your business)

Creating recipe apps that calculate ingredients based on the number of servings needed is an excellent use of structured content. But if your content doesn’t appear to have a natural structure like a recipe, you might be thinking none of this applies to you.

Structured content can do more than allow you to operate on the numbers buried in your raw data, though. Structured content:

• Decreases repetition—Increasing accuracy, reducing the possibility of human error, and improving efficiency
• Provides helpful focus and a predictable, professional experience for consumers/readers/end users of the content
• Optimizes operations by helping content creators focus on the essential
• Makes your content easier for search engines [on your own site and the big ones like Google and Bing] to analyze and use

When I help companies create structured content, I’m often helping them find those less-obvious examples of structure, and they may have many different goals in mind. Here are some common goals for structured content work:

• Make it easier to find relevant information quickly
• Reduce duplicate content
• Reduce the time it takes to create and update content
• Make my content available in many different forms, in a way that works in all those different channels
• Categorize content effectively for users
• Make it easier to analyze what content my audience wants and what content is effective

Those are just a few — there are many more reasons to structure your content.

Two kinds of content structure: Internal and external

I also think about different types of structure that relate to content. Some of the structure is internal to the content itself—a single recipe includes a title, ingredients, and instructions, so those are all part of the recipe. Each of those elements is a bit of internal structure—and we can’t have the recipe without all its ingredients, or steps, or its name.

On the other hand, once we have a recipe, we might categorize it by the meal when we most often eat that dish, or we might tag the recipe by the occasion when it is served. I think of that as external structure—It would still be a good recipe for coconut cake if we didn’t know you recommended serving it for dessert or at Christmas, but that external structure adds to our understanding and gives us greater context.

When you think about your organization’s content, you may have internal or external structure opportunities, or both. Most business people that I talk to initially only think about the external structure, asking questions like:

• Where should this go in the navigation?
• What other content is like this?
• What products is it related to?

All of these are good questions, and they can help us build navigation, and tagging, and taxonomies of information that make content more useful. But they don’t get at the internal structure of content.

Creating internal structure for text-based content

Many times, we miss opportunities for internal structure in text-based content. For instance, think about a software product description. Software products might not have dimensions or a number of pages like a physical product, but they do have features. What if we described those features in bullet form — short phrases? That would be helpful to the user. We could separate those features into individual fields, and then we can re-use each feature somewhere else on the site — perhaps in a comparison chart. If we remove a feature, or update it, we can update that information in one place in our CMS, and it will update the product description page and the feature comparison chart.

If we have a lot of press releases on our site, we probably identify a media contact and their contact information on each one. If our media contact gets promoted and now we have a new person we’d like the press to call, we might have to update hundreds of old press releases — if we had put the media contact information in the body field on each press release. But if we made “media contact” its own type of content, and just referenced that on the press release template, then when Katie gets promoted and Sam takes over media contact duties, we swap her name and info with his in one place, and the system updates it everywhere automagically. That’s the power of structured content, in a very simple demonstration.

Better customer information through structured content

One of my favorite secrets about structured content is this: When you use structure to create content, often your customers have a better experience. I like to create an outline of any type of content before I begin, thinking about my business goals, the audience goals, and how I can best match the two. I consider my message, how I can most effectively convey that to the audience, and how I can demonstrate to them clearly and quickly that I understand and identify with their needs. Once I know all of that, then I’m ready to create content. Often, the back end is more complex than a body field — sometimes to create semantic meaning in a way that helps machines understand and use the content, and sometimes in a way designed to ensure that I create the right content for my audience, even if the end result looks as if it could have been built in a body field.

The rise of data-focused applications

Most people engaged in ecommerce, supporting a database of products, realized a long time ago that they needed to store their product information in a standardized way. [To be honest, most of the structure around products probably started for inventory and bookkeeping purposes, but marketers figured out how to make use of that data.]

As digital applications have developed agility over the past few years, and smartphones have everyone’s customer demanding instant answers at their fingertips, many organizations have realized that organizing their information in a structured way makes it more dynamic, even if they aren’t selling products from a database.

If you’d like to understand how to create content for chatbots or smart speakers, you’re going to need to get into structured content, as well.

The skillsets you need for structured content

If you are ready to consider how structured content could help you meet your business goals, or better serve your audience, you’re not alone. But you may need new skillsets on your team to achieve these goals. At a minimum, you need a structure-oriented content strategist on your team. Content strategists come in different flavors. Some focus more on messaging, business goals, and editorial calendars—and they are often involved in content marketing, or UX/product content writing. For structured content, you want a strategist who understands information architecture for users and for backend design—the one who works with database analysts and UX designers on product development. That might be the same person who can plan and create great lead-generation content for you, but it might not.

Once you’ve designed your content structure, any good writer can use that structure to meet your business and audience goals, but it makes sense to evaluate your structure from time to time to consider new opportunities, as well.

The post Structured Content Design: Meet Your Business and Audience Goals appeared first on Creek Content.

Register today for the Now What? Workshops and you’ll be able to improve your content skills in several areas:

Creating content structure: This is the workshop I’ll be teaching. We’ll talk about how to find and build in structure to your content, for a more reliable user experience, to simplify content operations, to give you more insights into what your audience needs, and to improve opportunities for analytics.

Digital writing: Brain Traffic senior content strategist Scott Kubie shares tools, apps, tricks, and best practices to improve your digital writing workflow and results.

Accessibility: I love this topic so much. Blend Interactive user experience architect Corey Vilhauer shares his insights into how content creators can improve accessibility for all members of your digital audience.

Customer data and journeys: Here’s a topic we could all spend more time on: Using analytics for insights instead of just numbers. Looking forward to this one from Cossette strategy director Jon Crowley.

These kinds of in-depth workshops have been pivotal to my professional development over the years, and I think they will make a big impact for you if you are responsible for content, marketing, or the customer experience in your organization.

Look forward to seeing you there!

The post Register Now for Content Structure Workshop at Now What? Workshops, April 25-26, 2018 appeared first on Creek Content.

I’m seeing lots of trend stories this year about chatbots and other AI-linked projects. And hear me say: Some of you ought to be jumping on that! But my concern is that in the marketing and digital professions, we have a history of chasing the latest shiny object without first validating our audience’s need for the geegaw of the month. And that’s how you end up underengaged on 6 different social platforms or creating a website with thousands of pages and no visits.

So I’ll agree you ought to make a professional New Year’s Resolution—as long as you include something about getting to know your audience better as part of that. What challenges is your audience dealing with? What problems do they have that you may be able to help solve? What kind of information is hard for them to find? What connections can you help them build?

It’s 2018, and the answers to some of those questions are definitely going to involve technology, no matter what you do. If you’ll start from an audience-first perspective, you’re much more likely to find the work that really serves your prospect and your customer—and therefore, makes your organization more successful.

The post Watch Out for the Trend Stories; Play Your Own Game appeared first on Creek Content.

Something you might not know about me: I’m a raving fan of the movie “The American President.” There are so many sections of that movie that I could quote chapter and verse, which is funny because I’m normally terrible about remembering quotes from movies, or even whether or not I’ve seen a film before. (Seriously — I can’t tell you how many times my husband and I have gotten 45 minutes into a movie, and I turn to him and say, “We’ve seen this before,” and he says, “I tried to tell you that!” Happens all the time.)

But “The American President.” That one I know. And the part I love the most is the speech Michael Douglas (as the president) gives at the end. You know the one…it includes this section: “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, because it’s going to put up a fight.”

Believe it or not, I’m going to entirely resist the urge to tell you how that speech relates to politics today. Because I’m here to talk to you about whether or not you’re ready for content strategy, and this speech definitely relates to that question.

Content chaos surrounds us

Is this familiar? You were going along about your business, and then you looked around one day and realized you were sitting in the middle of content chaos. It happens. It happens to most people in organizations of any size. There are a lot of humans communicating, through every medium imaginable, and things get complicated fast.

I’m not going to spend too much time today describing what I mean by content chaos (that might be fun another day, though…I’ll make myself a note.) But here are some situations that might resonate with you:

• Multiple departments creating content for multiple reasons
• More than one agency working on brand, design, and content
• Multiple audiences that need different things from you
• Too much content to keep up with
• Inability to describe content’s role in your organization
• Content that’s a line-item expense instead of a business asset

I could go on…but you get the idea. The first three items on that list aren’t necessarily signs of chaos, but they describe the situations that chaos loves to infect. The last three stress me out just typing them…and that’s just a small part of what it feels like to live them.

Many organizations have decided this isn’t the best way to live or work, and they’re right. But I have to confess, we haven’t done enough in the content strategy discipline to share the hard truth about this work.

Content strategy isn’t easy

Content strategy is advanced communications, to borrow from Aaron Sorkin, not just a set of tools that you can bolt on to your existing process. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. In fact, I’ve seen this so often that I’m 100% comfortable saying something that might make me super-unpopular.

You will not see benefits from content strategy unless:

• You are ready for hard truths about your business strategy and your current way of working.
• Your business is willing to do the organizational therapy to change the way you think about content, and the way you use content.
• You realize that there are entrenched systems that created your content chaos, and some of them will have to change to make effective communication possible.

Content strategy isn’t fairy dust or a magic potion. It’s not one-size-fits-all. It is hard work, and the system will resist you.

But content strategy makes it possible to connect with your audience in a deeper way than you ever have before. Content strategy protects you against all kinds of liability that you’re ignoring right now. Content strategy makes all of your communications efforts more effective.

So yeah, I’d love to talk to you about content strategy. I’d love to see you do this work and get the results. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The post Is Your Organization Ready for Content Strategy? appeared first on Creek Content.

First, a story

Several years ago, I decided that I needed to start speaking regularly at industry conferences to boost my stature in the disciplines where I work: Content strategy, information architecture, content marketing. I read a lot from others who were already speaking, and I learned that many conferences issue an open call for proposals. I started applying. I also started following people who spoke regularly, and I applied to a course offered by a fantastic speaker and leader in the user experience design field, Dan Willis.

Dan’s Cranky Talk course focused on people like me — people who hadn’t had a lot of experience speaking at industry conferences, but wanted to. In my case, I’d done a fair amount of speaking and presentations, but in smaller settings, or for different purposes. I wasn’t scared to give a presentation, per se, but there were a lot of insider secrets I didn’t know about speaking professionally in my industry.

One of the insider secrets I learned is that speakers are just like the rest of us: They have doubts and fears, too. They’re different for everyone, of course. Some speakers are terrified of being wrong, of saying something that’s incorrect. Some (many, I think) are actually scared of public speaking. Some are fine until there’s a tech failure and then they’re ready to melt right there on stage. (If you speak, you will have tech failures. I’ll do a post on my tips for preparing for those soon!) I could go on, but you get the idea. There are a million things to be afraid of in the world, and because speakers are human, it is simply a truth that they, too, are afraid of things, just like you are.

The only difference is that they get out there and do it anyway.

Overcoming Your Fear

Now, whether you want to speak or not (you totally should), the lesson holds for any kind of content you’re creating to share your thought leadership. You may have some fear related to this, but you should get out there and do it anyway.

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite way to tackle something that seems intimidating is to chunk it up into smaller pieces. Let’s get your fear out and chop that up into more manageable pieces, shall we?

Name Your Fear

You may be dealing with one or more of these issues:

• Your organization has rules about how you use social media and you’re afraid of breaking them.
• You’re scared you’ll say something wrong.
• You’re scared someone will argue with you.
• You’re scared no one will read what you write.
• You’re scared it will be hard and you won’t have any support.
• You’re scared you’ll run out of things to say.
• You’re scared you’ll look foolish.

You know I could go on — but you get the picture. If I don’t have your specific fear listed there, just go ahead and write it down. Yeah, right now, on a sheet of paper. Just like that.

Mitigate Your Risk

Once you can identify a fear like that, you can often come up with ways to mitigate the fear. Your organization has rules about what you say and write publicly? Fine. Learn them. Ask questions. Start writing. Write your commentary on industry issues if you can’t write about your own work. We can go down that list and come up with strategies to mitigate the risk of fear for each one.

What would make me feel foolish? When I’m writing, a typo definitely would. I’m helping people with their content, for goodness’ sake! Yet, I have published many, many typos in the course of my professional writing. One might end up in this post. I will surely publish many more. But I mitigate this risk: I proofread everything obsessively, I use a spelling and grammar checking program, I fix the ones I can, and I move on from the ones I can’t. And I have enough experience to know a typo won’t kill me.

What about just being wrong? That would make me feel foolish. I have met a few people who really don’t seem to be bothered by being wrong. I find them fascinating, but I’m not one of them. When you make your living helping other people make decisions, you don’t like the feeling of being wrong.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been wrong before, too. Sometimes, I’ve been wrong in public. And just like the typos, it’s going to happen again. But I can mitigate this risk, as well. I triple-check facts. I click links to make sure they work. I look for a second source. And I think about what’s happened when I’ve been wrong before. Sometimes, I’m embarrassed. Sometimes, there’s a problem that I have to fix. Sometimes, I need to apologize. Sometimes, it’s not even a split-second big deal and I just move on. Not once have I died from being wrong.

It’s Not About Right Or Wrong

But many times, when someone disagrees with me, I’m not wrong (and neither are they). I just see things a different way than they do. Sometimes, I’m the only one who sees it the way I do.

Let’s think about that scenario a little more. You might look foolish if you’re the only person who sees the situation the way you do.

What were we after again? Oh yeah, thought leadership. Can you be the leader if everyone else is standing beside you? Well, OK maybe. I’m not suggesting you have to be contrary or argumentative to provide leadership. But you do have to do at least one of two things: Provide a vision others can follow, or help others create a vision together. In both of those cases, you have to be willing to say the thing no one else will say. You have to be willing to ask the hard question. You have to push others to take off their blinders and consider another viewpoint. That’s what thought leadership is.

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

I’m not the first person to mention this to you, surely. But when you’re providing thought leadership for your industry, by definition, you are saying things other people aren’t saying. You are seeing things in a different or perhaps unpopular way. You will be uncomfortable. That’s what you’re signing up for.

Two things about that:

• It gets easier the more you do it. Just like public speaking, publicly writing about what you do and what you think gets easier the longer you do it. I can’t guarantee your fear will go away. I can guarantee you will learn the best ways to manage it for you.
• You will learn lots more lots faster. When you write and speak a lot, you will be wrong. Over and over again. And you will learn from it, every time. You will get better at what you do far faster than any other way I know. Frankly, we ought to talk more about speaking and writing as learning tools a lot more. Yes, practicing your craft is critical. You can’t stop doing that. But practicing, speaking, and writing about your craft? Triple-whammy, guaranteed to make you better.

The post Dealing With Fear in Thought Leadership appeared first on Creek Content.

• You can give back to your professional community.
• You can teach others who aren’t as far along or who have had different experiences than you have had.
• You refine and increase your own expertise when you write, teach, and share with others.
• You open the door to new opportunities when more people learn about you and your expertise.

Some of you may be reluctant to toot your own horn, but let me encourage you to set that aside with this reminder: No one else is in charge of promoting you and your expertise. You are the brand manager of what Tom Peters first called in 1997 “the brand called You.” Your boss — no matter how much they love you — won’t do it. They’re busy worrying about their own brand.

I always loved the idea that my work might speak for itself. It’s not that that it can’t; but in our overly cluttered media landscape, my work is a tiny voice. (And frankly, doing the kind of work I do, my work is often invisible and requires explanation to the outside observer, including prospective clients.) I need to amplify the impact of my work, and you do, too.

So, writing for thought leadership. Let’s do this thing.

There are only two hard parts:

• Learning to capture your ideas
• Getting into a publishing routine

Fortunately, neither of these two challenges are really significant barriers if you know how to handle them. I’m going to let you in on one of my biggest life secrets:

Any time something seems intimidating, you haven’t chunked it into small enough pieces yet.

Capturing your brilliant ideas to create thought leadership

I talk to people all the time who say, “I know I should be writing, but I don’t have any idea what to say.” That’s BS. Everyone has something to say. I suspect it’s more likely:

• You’re scared to say it. (Read my post on dealing with fear in thought leadership.)
• You’re scared it’s not original.
• You’re not looking at your ideas as content.

Let’s talk more about the first two challenges soon — I’ll link this post to future posts as soon as I can — and let’s deal today with the third barrier: You’re not seeing your ideas as content. Let’s chunk that into a process you can follow.

1. You’ve got to have an idea.
2. You’ve got to recognize it as a publish-able idea.
3. You have to capture it.
4. You have to put it where you can use it when you have time to write (podcast, video blog, create a presentation, etc.).

I’m crossing off Item 1 right now. You are human. You do work. You have ideas.

1. You’ve got to have an idea.

Done. However—and I don’t minimize this because it stumps even the most prolific creators at times—you may not always recognize your ideas as worthy of publishing. At the risk of turning this from a blog post into a book, I want to dive into this a bit.

See the publishing possibilities

First, a story. Several years ago, Megan Pacella and I put together some work for a client. It’s the kind of thing we do every day around here. We certainly thought about the work and were intentional about it, but we didn’t think of it as anything out of the ordinary. We went to the meeting, presented it to the client, and they gushed. Yes, gushed. They thought it was brilliant.

We talked about it afterward, and I’ve referred to that moment many times since that day. We all need those reminders that we may actually be very good at what we do. All those hours studying and thinking and honing our craft really do add up to something. And they are very meaningful to your clients, your team, your organization, your whoever-you-serve.

You are most likely having those kinds of moments all the time…you’re doing something fantastic but it’s become like water to you and you can’t see it that way.

So step 1 is, think about the things you do every day: Things you do that are routine, or your special way of doing it, or something new you learned. Any of these will work.

Capture those ideas

You need to make those ideas available to you when you sit down to write or create. For many years after I trained myself to recognize those ideas, I didn’t capture them. Inevitably, they arrive when I’m in the middle of something else: Working on a deadline. Driving the car. Showering. Cooking dinner. Whatever. I can’t write a blog post right that minute.

There’s not a right way to capture and save those ideas, but there is a right way for you. There are only two requirements: The right way must be accessible when you tend to have the ideas, and it must be available when you get ready to create.

Here are some simple ideas. Which one will work for you?

• A small blank notebook and a pen that you stick in your pocket or purse everywhere you go.
• Voice dictation to your phone’s default note-taking or reminder app.
• Voice dictation to a special program like Evernote.
• Email-to-draft post for your blog.

There are millions of other options, particularly if you start thinking about technology like IFTTT. It doesn’t matter which one you pick. Pick one. Try it for a month.

Write down/dictate/email/whatever every single passing thought you have. If you think, I was pleased with how that worked…write it down. Or, I need to remember to tell Sam about this…write it down. Or, I could use that fact in my presentation…write it down. Or, I disagree with the perspective in that article…write it down.

Keep going

Here’s an important part: Do not stop capturing ideas. The more ideas you capture, the more you will have. These ideas will spawn new ideas. They will get together in your notebook and procreate.

Once you are in the routine of capturing ideas, pat yourself on the back. You have won a very hard battle! Use inertia to keep yourself going. Never stop capturing ideas, even if you’re not working on a new piece right now. You will be soon.

Get into a publishing routine for your thought leadership

The other tricky part is turning those ideas into a form that’s accessible to the world around you. Most of us trap the vast majority of brilliance in our own heads and do not share it with anyone else. No one. Stop it!

You’ve probably heard writing compared to opening a vein and bleeding; I’ll say that’s true in the positive and negative senses. Yes, you can get it to just flow out of you. Yes, it may take some life force from you.

I return here to my thoughts above about chunking up your work. If you’re not already in the habit of writing/creating regularly, you have to schedule this time on your calendar. (Even if you are in the habit, you probably need to schedule it, because anyone who’s got something worth saying is probably also busy.)

When it is time, sit down to write. Pull out your notebook, or open your notes app, and read through your ideas quickly. Pick the first one that strikes you and start writing.

Ignore the editor’s voice in your head

Here’s where you may run into trouble quickly: You start to critique your own work as you write.

• “I don’t have enough to say about that.” (There’s no rule about how much you have to say.)
• “I don’t like the direction this is going.” (No rules about starting one place and ending up in another.)
• “That’s not what I started out to say.” (So change the title to what you did say.)
• “Somebody wrote about this better before.” (Soooo many options here. Link to what they wrote and add your insight. Share the part where you disagree. Quote a sentence or two from their piece and explain why you think it’s so important that everyone read it.)

The point is, when it’s writing time, it’s not editing time. Those are two separate times. When you’re writing, your goal is to put the ideas down on paper. Metaphorically speaking. Only Alton Brown gets away with using paper in his online thought leadership publications in 2017. (Seriously, the man comments on tweets with post-it notes. It is simultaneously brilliant, meta, and bizarre. Well worth the follow.)

#IronChefGauntlet pic.twitter.com/lTfHLFeInA

— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) April 17, 2017

Thought leadership publishing schedule insight

I’ve got another “doh!” idea for you. Your creation schedule and your publishing schedule do not have to be the same schedule. You can sit down on a Sunday afternoon and crank out three blog posts for the week and schedule them to post at the times you choose. You can collect articles you’ve liked all week long, and set up links to them with your commentary to publish on LinkedIn or Twitter over the next few days. Or you can do it as you go, if your schedule allows.

Despite not always taking my own advice here, I highly recommend using a regular publishing schedule, no matter what your creation schedule looks like. You can experiment to find the best creation and publishing schedules for you, of course. But I like getting little things out daily, medium-sized things 1-2 times a week, and at least one large piece a week—to make a real impact.

Here’s a critical piece for me: I need reminders. It is super-easy to put off the work when you are your own client. But remember the adage about paying yourself first? Same goes for thought leadership publishing. Schedule your time first and protect it. Your organization succeeds when you gain stature in your industry. You succeed when you build your network by publishing. It all adds up. Do not put it off.

What are your tips?

I’m curious to hear your tips for identifying ideas and publishing work to demonstrate your thought leadership. I’d also love feedback on other things that are significant barriers to you in doing this work. I’d like to share ideas on overcoming them in future columns!

The post Writing to Demonstrate Thought Leadership appeared first on Creek Content.

I was fascinated by this. Most of the people who reached out weren’t my followers before and had never interacted with me before. I suppose they were searching the public timeline for people who need them. When it comes down to it, although the developer I selected was in Nashville just like I was, I found the services I needed by posting online and seeing what happened.

As we build relationships with others via social media, it’s worth thinking about how you go about building trust online. Why was I comfortable immediately working with the developer I selected? In that case, while I didn’t know him before, he was from my city. After a quick check online, I realized I knew the school where he’d received his training well. What if I’d needed his work for a client instead of myself? I could have made one phone call to get a personal reference on him. What if I hadn’t known people running his school? I would have looked harder at what he posts online and other evidence of his expertise. I would have needed more evidence of his trustworthiness.

When you use social media or publish a website, for yourself or for your job, what are you doing that inspires trust? How much do you reveal about yourself? I’ve seen many well-publicized cases where making personal information available online becomes dangerous, but I confess I usually err on the side of revealing a fair amount about myself. I’m in business, after all, and people have to be able to get in touch with me for us to work together. That’s easy to say when I work in an industry segment that’s less likely to be controversial. But you don’t have to be in politics or gaming to deal with a stalker—their terror is agnostic to that.

The Takeaway on Building Trust Online

Do you represent a brand or organization that interacts with the public, or with others in your industry? Take an objective look at how hard it is to find a person and make a connection in your organization. Many organizations err on the side of gatekeeping, locking down employee directories, including email addresses and phone numbers, for both security and competitive reasons. I understand why they do, but I also know that those organizations make it harder to establish and build trusting relationships.

Where do you fall on this continuum? Do your online decisions represent you and your organization accurately? How are you building trust online?

The post Building Trust Online appeared first on Creek Content.

• Andy Crestodina
• Rand Fishkin
• Carrie Hane
• Colleen Jones
• Ahava Leibtag
• Neil Patel
• David Meerman Scott
• Jon Wuebben

and lots more! Best of all, everyone can go to this event, because it’s all happening online. That’s right—wherever you are, you can get the latest insights on content marketing from May 22-June 2.

My session focuses on creating a strategy for your content marketing efforts. We’ll talk about:

• Understanding your audience and their needs
• Setting business goals
• Selecting tactics to reach your goals
• Iterating on your work

Register Today for the Summit on Content Marketing

No matter where you’re going to be May 22-June 2, you can take advantage of this great opportunity. Register for the Summit on Content Marketing today, and you can watch my session on May 31, as well as dozens of others from fantastic content marketers.

The post Join Me at the Summit on Content Marketing appeared first on Creek Content.

I’ve worked in health care off and on for my entire career, but continuously since I started Creek Content in 2008. Health care is its own little unicorn in a lot of ways, and the industry would be the first to tell you that it’s different from everything else. One of the ways it demonstrates this is by its very name: If you’re in health care, you spell the name of your industry as healthcare. (You’ll notice that I typically don’t; yes, I’m an iconoclast, but also an editor at heart. Either way, I’m going with m-w.com and every other American and spelling it health care. My SEO rankings will no doubt hate me for it.)

As I’ve worked on the strategy for this book, one thing became obvious early on. There are a LOT of different audiences for a book about health care and content:

• Writers
• Editors
• Marketers
• Product designers
• Technical staff
• Clinicians
• Business people

I could make that list a lot longer by segmenting several of those categories even farther, but you get the idea.

As high-tech as health care is on the delivery side, it’s simultaneously come very, very late to the party when it comes to using technology in the business. Make no mistake—the industry is right in the middle of catching up, and the amount of tech spending going on in health care delivery and in the business of health care is significant.

For a variety of reasons, a lot of the catching up feels just as frenzied as you might expect.

That’s where I think content strategy should come in. You might think that’s a pretty niche idea to throw at a broad business problem, but I’ll argue it’s actually a great way to tackle the challenges that technology and innovation are presenting for health care today.

Content is information provided for an audience. When you start there, you realize a lot of content is being created, licensed, and provided to many audiences in the health care process today. And if we’re not managing that strategically, we’re rapidly losing control of our assets and perhaps the entire situation.

In health care, the issues are even more critical; they literally can be life or death. It’s essential to get the right information in front of the right audience at the right time. So content strategy matters a lot.

My book makes the business case for content strategy in health care. Right now, I’m writing, talking to people in health care, and writing some more. I’m making some plans for how I’d like to publish and share the book, and I’m hoping for a fall release date.

Join My Email List and Be the First to Read My Book

I’d like to keep you updated on the book. If you want to hear the latest (and have the chance to keep me accountable as well!), make sure you’re on the Creek Content monthly email newsletter list. You can sign up here.

The post Content Strategy for Health Care: The Book appeared first on Creek Content.

And that’s part of the opportunity; content strategy is a disruptive force in most organizations. We were aligned around products or services or a production team and a sales team, not around intellectual property assets.

Make no mistake—no matter what business you’re in, you have content that is an intellectual property asset.

And that content should be overseen by a chief content officer.

I love the work done by Joe Pulizzi and his team at the Content Marketing Institute, and I give them a lot of credit for beating the drum on this idea for several years now. They’ve got an updated job description for a chief content officer that’s well worth your time.

This job description only goes partway toward what I think many organizations need, however. I do most of my work on product-related content, and CMI understandably focuses on marketing specifically.

I’m an old-school marketer who thinks of marketing in the broader sense of developing products and bringing them to market, so my thinking lines up there, but I’ve seen a number of organizations that don’t use marketing mindsets in their product development work. (Fortunately, I think the digital revolution is changing that, and I give the user experience design world the props for it. Those of us in UX and related disciplines have been pushing audience understanding as the first step in our cycle for a long time, and I think it’s making a difference.)

Regardless of what we call our work, I think it’s essential for every mid-size to large organization to have someone acting as the chief content officer.

The chief content officer must speak for the content—the content as a business and IP asset, the content as the way the brand promise is delivered to the customer, the content as a well-managed operations hub.

The CCO is a strategy officer for the business and collaborates with a multidisciplinary team to determine how content fulfills the brand promise. The chief content officer influences technology choices. The CCO ensures the marketing, technology, design, product and other related teams are aligned with subject matter experts, including the legal team. The CCO finds opportunities that didn’t exist before, from engaging repair staff with content needed to do their work to reducing calls to the 800-number with genuinely helpful help content to envisioning digital apps that engage customers in new ways. The chief content officer ensures the organization speaks with one voice, by sharing brand and style information for content creation.

I’m curious: How well is your organization managing its content? Does it have a holistic view of this work, or is it handled piecemeal in different silos? (Don’t feel bad if that’s the case; you are not alone!)

I’d love to talk to organizations looking to do this work better. Today’s technology makes it possible to do content work very well, and to truly make content the asset many of us have long believed it to be. Let me know if I can help your organization think through these issues.

The post You Need a Chief Content Officer appeared first on Creek Content.