10 December 2014

Throughout 2014 focus has turned more and more to the value of having a formal content strategy.

Most organisations now accept that content is the essence of    all their communication and publishing activities. But few go to the trouble of working out an integrated strategy.

In the broad field of content marketing, surveys earlier in the year by CMI, Altimeter Group, McKinsey and others found that only a small percentage of organisations had a strategy. Later on, CMI’s 2015 annual research showed most organisations had a verbal strategy, but not a formal documented one. Those who had documented their content marketing strategies turned out to be more effective.

What is the best way to produce a single, unified content strategy that benefits the organisation as a whole, and makes practical sense to everyone involved? The cue is in ‘dovetailing’.

What is dovetailing?

To dovetail: to join or fit together neatly and harmoniously 

A dovetailed strategy is a specially integrated strategy. But in many large organisations the process is neither neat nor harmonious. Lacking centralised direction and unity, specialist teams tend to steer their boats independently. Often their so-called strategies are just vague lists, without clear or coordinated goals.

In his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt points out that good strategy is rare, largely ‘because there are strong forces resisting the concentration of action and resources’.

Roger Martin, co-author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, writes: ‘Strategy is a singular thing; there is one strategy for a given business – not a set of strategies. It is one integrated set of choices.’

As a plan for creating, delivering, governing and measuring content, a content strategy should be relevant to most people in an organisation. This can only happen if it dovetails with broader strategic planning.

All-round listening

While a content strategy must support top business, marketing, communications and divisional strategies, these are sometimes very complex. Ironically, the most pressing issue in communication management until 2017, identified by The European Communication Monitor 2014, is the challenge of linking communications and business strategies.

For content strategy, the linking challenge is wider. Consultation involves not just marketing, communications and channel specialists but product and subject-matter experts throughout divisions. Insights come from many other functions, especially user experience, customer experience, design, technology, accessibility, search, metadata and taxonomy, analytics, and more.

A formal content strategy ideally needs a champion at Board level. In some organisations the door is wide open. In others there is resistance, with senior managers behind the digital times. In New content thinking, old-world organisations, Kate Kenyon recalls other problems.

Organisations should try to bring together ideas and resources across teams in an open-minded way. While digital boards, steering groups and centres of excellence are now common, there’s still scope for innovation. We can learn from Grant Thornton, for example, who recently used crowd-sourcing to encourage employees across the world to contribute their suggestions and experience to the global corporate strategy.

To help coordinate strategies, large companies can benefit from a small team of ‘top strategists’ to share the business vision and strategy properly, explain top goals and agree supporting ones. It means being fully aware of politics, rifts and turf wars, and finding firm solutions. Ultimately they are integrating several different strategies into one.

The role also requires a cutting-edge understanding of what’s possible. As Ron Bronson astutely wrote: ‘No longer can we envision strategists as merely the people who make the battle plans, but instead as tactical experts who have been in the trenches long enough to understand what works and what doesn’t work.’

From vision to goals

The first step in working out a formal dovetailed content strategy, after extensive research and analysis, is to define a practical vision that everyone can relate to. It should clearly complement the top business vision. This is your chance to ‘dream a realistic dream’ for the content strategy, and inspire everyone in the process.

Some people prefer the term ‘content strategy statement’, purpose or mission. Whichever you choose, make the wording short, clear and memorable.

You then need to shortlist a handful of top goals which collectively help make your vision for the content strategy become a reality. Each goal should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.

How far ahead are you planning in your strategy? Five years, one year, six months? Rahel Bailie and Noz Urbina wisely advise against ‘boiling the ocean’ and trying to do everything at once, by separating long-term and short-term goals.

Every content strategy will be different, according to the needs and make up of the organisation. There is no ‘one size fits all’. Typical top goals often headline planning in areas such as:

• content marketing
• content governance
• globalisation and localisation
• content monitoring and auditing
• new and re-launched channels
• create once, publish everywhere intelligent content
• and many more

A dovetailed content strategy adapts to tie in with other strategies, and the teamwork involved. Take audience research and analysis, for example. Maybe the organisation has already covered everything necessary, or a marketing and communications strategy has identified what is lacking. But most likely this area will need developing further within the content strategy.

Layers of strategy, tactics and activities

Your third step is to provide each top goal with a strategy to meet it. This means working out several tactics and activities,    to which different teams will most likely contribute.

If your organisation has a template for setting out a strategy,    it’s much easier to present the strategy and to compare it with other ones in the making. This helps identify further areas for dovetailing.

Otherwise the mnemonic PASTA BEAR can help you single out the main parts of a strategy. It includes the critical success factors and key performance indicators you should build in to measure outcomes and return on investment.

You have probably often heard, or been involved in, heated discussions over what’s tactical and what’s strategic. In an integrated strategy, strategy and tactics spiral. What’s considered a tactic at a higher level in the organisation often becomes a strategy at a lower level.

For example, take a sales goal of signing up 50,000 people a year for a training course. The marketing strategy includes making more people aware of the value of the course. This requires a range of supportive tactics varying from messaging to improving website content for search ranking.

The teams carrying out the different tactics should make them more precise in order to fulfil them. Ideally they should translate them into their own SMART goals.

A tactic for improving website content for search ranking, converted into a SMART goal, might be: to ensure that specified URLs feature on page 1 of Google within three months. The team then needs to work out a strategy and further tactics to show how they will make this happen.

While it may not be practical or even worthwhile to document so many layers, team meetings can be used to at least discuss and record activities. What’s most important is checking everyone shares the direction set out in the strategy. Lack of clear purpose can be detrimental in many organisations.

Sealed with a kiss 

The final step is to draft the content strategy as a formal document for comments and final approval. Writing it will help you organise it clearly and to present it as a guide that’s easy to follow.

People often ask how long the document should be. Aim to kiss it (keep it short and simple), perhaps using visual diagrams as well as words. Try to outline the essentials within 5-10 pages. You can link to other strategies it dovetails with, and include appendices to show cascading tactics and activities.

While tactics and activities can flex, the vision and top goals should stay the same until you decide to formally change and re-document the strategy.

Working out a formal dovetailed content strategy takes a large amount of thought, collaboration, knowledge and practical expertise. But its clear direction provides crucial strength and unity. As research continues to tell us, your organisation will depend increasingly upon one.

See too:

How to prepare a single, unified content strategy that’s truly strategic (DRCC)

The essentials of a documented content marketing strategy (CMI)

Culture of Content (Altimeter Group)

Image sources

Dove: HD Wallpapers Cool

Chessboard: Sofrep

4 February 2014

Last November I ran a workshop at Content Strategy Applied 2013 on ‘How to prepare a single, unified content strategy that’s truly strategic’, with the help of a bear that loves pasta.

Brainchild of Lucie Hyde, Director of Global Content at eBay, the two-day conference stands out for its practical focus and featured case studies. It’s now held annually in both Europe and the USA.

Speakers at CSA13 in London came from organisations such as Virgin, Facebook, Time Out and Bupa. They were joined by world-renowned content strategy experts like Scott Abel (host), Ann Rockley, Kevin Nichols, Rahel Bailie and Noz Urbina.

Aim of the workshop

The aim of my workshop was to show participants how to pull everything together into an integrated strategy that wins respect, and is clearly understood, from Board-level down.

Key takeaways were:

• Why content strategy needs to live up to its name
• What to consider when preparing a unified strategy, including other groups and strategies to coordinate with
• How to present your strategy, following a clear measurable formula

This included:

• Looking at different approaches and ways of presenting strategies, while identifying organisational norms
• Clarifying terms such as strategy v tactics, goals v objectives, output v outcome, critical success factors, key performance indicators, return on investment, and more

The bear necessities

Strategy can often seem complex and dry, so it’s important to lighten the load in a way people can relate to.

A few weeks earlier I noticed that people were tweeting about a ‘strategy bear’ at Content Strategy Forum 2013 in Helsinki. It turned out that Kristina Halvorson had used some stunning photos in her keynote to show how a big brown bear had decided on a particular strategy. To meet its goal of survival, rather than raiding a campsite for food, it had chosen to go down to a river to catch fish.

With due acknowledgement to Kristina, in my workshop I introduced a bear who prefers pasta to fish.

‘Pasta bear’ is a mnemonic for a basic formula for a strategy. It stands for:

• Purpose/vision/mission
• Aims/goals/objectives
• Strategy
• Tactics
• Activities

and:

• Budget
• Evaluation
• Analytics
• Return on investment

You can see how this works in the slides below.

In the last part of the workshop, attendees worked in groups to start applying the formula to an organisation urgently needing a unified content strategy. This was a mock company called Drink Organics UK.

I will be writing more about the necessities of strategy shortly.

Many thanks to the organisers of CSA13 for a great conference, and to everyone who attended my workshop. Thanks too to Scott of ‘Content at Large’ who, in his write up of CSA13, kindly confirmed how memorable the Pasta Bear is.

If you feel like swinging  along to ‘The Bare Necessities’ from the Jungle Book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dhSdnDb3tk

Image of the Pasta Bear adapted from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6AS9feZ6z0

Cartoon picture at the top from: http://bearriverhomestead.com/2012/12/12/taco-pasta

6 May 2013

Three years ago I produced a simple diagram to show how content strategy supports communications strategy.

Many people have referred to various versions of it, and I was honoured that Kristina Halvorson included the original in her keynote presentation at Confab London 2013.

Content strategy has become so much more important since 2010 that I have now completely changed the diagram. It tells a new story of integrated strategic communications, multi-disciplinary teamwork and cross-organisational collaboration – with content strategy in the centre.

You can see the new diagram at the end of this post. Please read on first.

A unified content strategy

A unified content strategy brings together many components, as well as content marketing. It supports and complements the goals of business, marketing and communication strategies. And it links with various types of communication channel strategies, whether a full digital strategy, social media strategy or individual website strategy.

Content strategy is the now the backbone of multi-channel corporate publishing. And this has a broader remit than ever before.

While content strategy plans for creating, delivering and governing content through the most appropriate channels, it provides a repeatable system for managing and monitoring content throughout its lifecycle. It also looks ahead to future-proof our communications for delivery in a range of digital contexts, whether multi-screen and mobile devices or augmented reality.

Multi-disciplinary teamwork

Content strategy in large organisations involves many types of talented people with a variety of expertise. Some are more editorial, visual, structural, analytical or technical. Some specialise in particular communication channels or functions, such as user experience and search. Some are more mainstream marketing and communications oriented, or work in other divisions.

Moving forward depends on the right leadership, working together with mutual respect − and avoiding turf wars.

As several research studies have shown, in many organisations you will see a range of new digital and content job titles, as well as new boards, steering groups, centres of excellence, editorial committees, etc. There is a huge call for better teamwork and change management.

A recent report by the Altimeter group highlighted the need for organisations to organise themselves for content, and to set up a ‘content authority’ with ‘cross-functional and multi-divisional visibility’. I especially agree with their view that ‘strategy should be aligned company wide’.

The diagram

Here is my new diagram showing integrated strategic communications, with content strategy in the centre.

28 February 2013

In travelling to ICC2013 in San Francisco, I had one main aim: to learn as much as possible from pioneers in multi-device corporate publishing.

Choosing between the wide range of talks and workshops was really hard. I managed to fit in 26 presentations, and would happily have gone to them all.

Here are a few of my takeaways, based on:

• team work and content strategy
• how to support 800 devices at once
• ‘create once, publish everywhere’
• getting closer to people’s real communication needs
• ebooks for working professionals: when ‘content is the law’

Team work and content strategy

Successful multi-device corporate publishing depends on strong team work, especially between communication, content, user experience, design and technology specialists. While responsive design is a great step forward, first you need to work out and agree a content strategy for your organisation.

Ann Rockley stressed at the start of the conference that content must be ‘device neutral’. We have neither time nor resources ‘to create the wheel over and over again’.

‘Intelligent content,’ she said, ‘is structurally rich, semantically tagged, discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.’

Many people use the terms ‘intelligent content’ and adaptive content synonymously. While the former supports the latter, as Michael Boses pointed out, ‘adaptive content is not the whole realm of what intelligent content is about’.

Michael’s minimalist definition of intelligent content is: ‘Your content + information added to aid automation’.

‘As soon as an organisation learns it can automate stuff by adding intelligent content, it gets really keen,’ he added.

Noz Urbina fears that the team work and ‘integration needed to manage multichannel publishing is beyond the capabilities of many organisations today’. The biggest barrier, he said, is still silos.

But examples of good practice are gradually emerging.

How to support over 800 devices at once

I was keen to hear Daniel Jacobson, Director of Engineering for the Netflix API and former Director of Application Development at NPR, talk about how to Set your content free.

Daniel explained that he prefers to see content management in terms of ‘capture’, ‘storage’ and ‘distribution’. Although all three operations are equally important, in this presentation he would focus on distribution.

Using both Netflix and NPR as case studies, he showed how they took different paths towards liberating content, but with similar conclusions.

Netflix is focused on being the best global internet streaming video provider. It has:

• more than 33 million global subscribers
• in more than 50 countries and territories
• consuming more than 1 billion hours of streaming video a month
• on more than 800 different device types

In 2007 Netflix was only streaming video on computer-based players. They had lots of systems that could share with one another, but the content wasn’t particularly portable. So in 2008 they launched a ‘one size fits all’ API (Application Programming Interface).

Changes in audience, and a huge growth in traffic to 42 billion requests a day, meant they had to completely review the infrastructure. This included looking at how the device types varied – especially in screen size, memory space and controlling functions – and how to separate content from display. The solution they eventually arrived at was to build a specially customised API.

‘Create once, publish everywhere’

Wind back 14 years to 1999 when Daniel joined NPR – America’s National Public Radio. In the next three years there were four significant website redesigns. Some were visual; others in the ‘underpinnings’. For example, early on the content was basically just titles and links to audio for a story. Gradually new data elements were introduced to enrich the stories.

But the systems that supported NPR sites were immature. They found that having an API was not enough. A lot of content in different databases was the same. That was when they came up with the create once, publish everywhere (COPE) philosophy – and this drove the redesign.

NPR’s goal was to focus on managing content independently of where it will live, separating it completely from its display. The model was to:

• capture content from many different points (such as human editors, feeds from internal and external sources, etc)
• store that content in a clean, modular and portable way
• then publish to many destinations

Portability (ensuring that the content can live effectively wherever it needs to go) started with multiple title lengths to allow different content to appear in different sized locations. But it also included getting rid of ‘dirty markup such as tags that could not be rendered by iPods’.

Once adapted in the system, the content is made available through the API.

As Martin Belam of the Guardian said at CS Forum London, ‘Get the content model right for an API … and you can really live the dream of separating content from presentation and “create once, publish everywhere”.’

Getting closer to people’s real communication needs

This was an implicit theme during the conference, but I loved the way it stood out in practice in a presentation by Michele Zwiebel of Breastcancer.org and Derek Olson of Foraker Labs. Their talk was called: ‘A mighty content strategy for a tiny non-profit helps millions of people with breast cancer every year’.

The aim of Breastcancer.org is to help women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer ‘embark on a journey’. This means making the right content available to them whenever, and on whatever device, they want it.

Put yourself in the position of being told by a doctor that you have cancer. Most likely you will be terrified. An appointment with a doctor lasts an average of seven minutes.  Sooner, rather than later, you or your family will get on the internet to search for more information.

There are several types of breast cancer, as well as treatment options, so the team looked especially at how to personalise content. You can see how they did this on a ‘partner site’ called mybreastcancercoach. It features a questionnaire ‘designed to help you better understand your type of breast cancer so you can focus on the information that’s most relevant to you’.

The site encourages women to ask their doctors the right questions. But it gets even more specific. Patients can use in their appointments a specially designed smartphone app called my cancer coach which includes ‘note-taking, audio-recording, and questions to ask your doctor’.

Immediately afterwards they can access Breastcancer.org on their mobiles for more information, and join in the popular discussion boards.

Compare this approach with the augmented reality of Pearson’s DK Eyewitness Travel apps (featured in Adam DuVander’s talk). The golden key to both is anticipating people’s real communication needs.

Ebooks for working professionals: when ‘content is the law’

In his keynote on The implications of intelligent content for ebooks, Professor Robert Glushko pointed out that ‘the content of an ebook depends on the capabilities of its ereader’.

‘Ebooks can be enhanced with video and audio embedded within the files for on and offline viewing,’ added Matthew Cavnar. But multimedia is only supported by some devices. ‘A really rich ebook will probably only reach the iPad primarily.’

Joe Gollner focused on the need for working professionals such as doctors, accountants and lawyers to have electronic access to their specialised information, on whatever device they choose.

In the case of lawyers, he raised eyebrows by telling us that: ‘The law is only what is written. If it’s not written down it does not exist.’ In effect, ‘content is the law’.

Lawyers need to constantly refer to a huge volume of complex written knowledge and depend on it being up to date, complete and authoritative.

Joe told us how a client had asked him to build a law ebook for Kindle. As a tall order, they also wanted to it be delivered on a Blackberry. He was joined on stage by André Dubé of the Professional eBook system to show how they rose to this challenge.

Professional ebooks need to ‘leverage intelligent content’, Joe summarised, to provide essential features such as a smart table of content, high-precision search, advanced bookmarking and annotation, and navigation history. ‘Graceful handling of very large texts’ is crucial in the ereading experience – as is ‘facilitating interaction among professionals’.

With Joe’s extra experience of legal content, his conclusion wasn’t surprising. Another huge challenge for us in 2013, he said, is ‘breaking bad content’.

Finally

ICC2013 was an excellent conference, and well worth travelling to from the UK.  Another big thank you to the conference organisers, Ann Rockley and Scott Abel.

You can find most of the slides on ICC2013 Slide Central.

Look out for details about ICC2014. If you get the chance to go, I highly recommend it.

31 January 2013

For someone who hates flying, crossing the world just to go to a conference is a Big Thing.

ICC2013, in San Francisco from 7-8 February, promises to be worth every millimetre of the journey. Its focus is helping organisations better understand the emerging discipline of corporate publishing:

the standards, methods, and tools needed to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right format and language, on the device of the customer’s choosing

As we all strive to keep up with the mobile web, and work out our digital content strategies, this couldn’t be more timely.

What is intelligent content?

The Intelligent Content Conference stems from the pioneering work of Ann Rockley, often called the mother of content strategy. In her book Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, co-authored with Charles Cooper, Ann defines intelligent content as:

 content that is structurally rich and semantically categorized, and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable

Anyone involved in content strategy needs to learn how to adapt content for different screen sizes and devices. Intelligent content supports adaptive content – and this practical conference will provide huge insights.

What ICC2013 covers

Ann and co-organiser Scott Abel have brought together a wide range of impressive presenters. The programme is so rich in case studies, featured presentations, mini-workshops and product demonstrations that it’s really hard to choose between them.

The three tracks are:

• It’s About The Content. Dedicated to the king – content – in all its forms: words, photos, graphics, illustrations, video and more.
• The Mobile Web, eBooks, and Apps. Featuring talks about adaptive content, responsive design, tablet computing, interactive eBooks, mobile apps and websites.
• Corporate Publishing. Addressing the techniques, approaches, standards and challenges associated with effectively creating corporate content that meets organizational goals

Presentation titles include:

• Set your content free: How to support hundreds of devices at once
• The future of tablet and mobile publishing
• Intelligent content starts with an intelligent content strategy
• Generating revenue across multiple screens
• Creating a governance framework for flexibility

ICC2013 is an exceptionally sociable event. It even includes an extra day after the main conference for a tour outside San Francisco with forest hiking and a picnic.

No wonder the event is sold out!

Follow my tweets @dianarailton and #ICC2013.

28 January 2013

It surprises me how few managers in marketing and communications departments factor in the cost of their employees’ time.

‘We only keep a record of our external costs and travel expenses,’ they say.

‘Do you know how much your own time costs?’ I ask. ‘No idea!’ they usually reply.

You can only assess the true value of a communication project, and its return on investment, if you monitor the time of everyone who works on it. Not just your contractors. Otherwise you’re kidding yourselves and your organisation.

Employees’ time should be built into every layer of strategic planning. No marketing strategy, communication strategy, digital strategy, content strategy or internal comms strategy is complete without it.

Why we pass the buck?

While we have to keep to strict external budgets, internal time is usually already accounted for. Often finance departments prefer us to keep out of it. And most of us are far too busy anyway.

The cost of internal time can be hard to work out quickly and accurately without compromising accountancy details. You will most likely have to approximate and, if you’re not careful, this can be misleading.

But even a rough idea has to be better than no idea. Many types of calculations are based on approximations.

If you can attempt to show how much a communication process or change is worth to your organisation, including employee time, everyone will take it much more seriously.

Boards, directors and senior managers need numbers. Not always hard numbers – but numbers that quickly help them recognise value and make decisions.

A simple four-step process

Here is a simple four-step process for working out the approximate cost of internal time. We’ll also look at some of the variables you need to be aware of. Then I’ll sum up the full formula in four short lines.

Step 1: Ask your finance or HR department for an uplift figure

An uplift figure shows how much employees cost in overheads on top of their salaries. Uplift tends to range from 1.25 to 4 times a salary, depending on the organisation. For example, an uplift figure of 3 on a salary of £50,000 is £150,000.

If an uplift figure isn’t available, see if you can agree on an approximation.

When the UK Government started working out the cost of all their websites, if department figures were unavailable they used a standard uplift figure of 42% or 2.84. For an annual salary of £50,000, this comes to £142,000 – which some people find surprisingly high.

In the recent figures Cabinet Minister Francis Maude released on the cost of government transactions, I noticed a lower uplift figure of 23%, or 2.46. This still brings a salary of £50,000 to £123,000.

Step 2: Find out about salaries, but tread carefully

If you are a team manager, you will know about your own employees’ salaries. Otherwise you may have to resort to salary bands for job levels.

Often you can get an indication of whether people are on an upper or lower band, depending on their experience – but it’s important to limit any guess work and be consistent.

Multiply the salaries by the uplift figure and you will have an approximate annual cost for your team, both individually and collectively. This will probably surprise you too.

Step 3: Establish how many days you work a year

To work out a daily and hourly rate from an annual salary + uplift figure, you need to deduct the days you don’t work, such as:

• weekends (usually 104 days)
• paid public holidays (say 10 days)
• paid annual leave (say 25 days)

Some people have more annual leave than others, depending on length of service – so you need to agree a safe number with your finance or HR department.

Then there’s sick leave. A few days off sick or for compassionate reasons usually only means lost time and no extra costs. In contrast, extended sick leave probably demands temporary cover – and that will come under the uplift figure.

Often an average of ten days’ sick leave is referred to, which may seem high. If we include this in this calculation, we have to deduct 149 days from the 365-day year, leaving a total of 216 days. Again you will need a steer on this.   

Step 4: Agree on the number of hours you should work

This is an especially thorny issue! How many hours are you meant to work? How many do you actually work? And how much of this time do you waste?

We’re not robots so some time wastage can only be expected. I’ve heard organisations estimate productivity as 90%, 80% and even 70% of paid-for time.

From a company perspective, wasted time includes things like: arriving late, leaving early, sorting out mistakes, taking breaks, over-socialising with colleagues, project gaps, computer problems, personal use of the internet and social media, poorly run meetings, ‘spacing out’, and so on.

Of course some people more than make up for low-productivity time and work horrendously long hours. Few people work a simple 35-hour week, especially as they go up the ladder. But work/life balance is important and arguably they should do.

So, as usual, we need to compromise and it’s best to keep this simple. I suggest you work on a conventional seven-hour day – but, again, you must decide within your organisation.

The full formula

Annual salary x agreed uplift figure = yearly cost
Divided by agreed average number of working days per year = daily cost
Divided by agreed average number of hours per day = hourly cost
Divided down more if necessary

Example:

Salary of £50,000 x 2.84 uplift figure = £142,000 a year
Divided by 216 = £657 a day
Divided by 7 = £94 an hour
Divided by 60 = £1.60 a minute

How to apply the results

Approximate calculations like this help us focus on everything we do.

Think of that last meeting that went round in circles. Say it was attended by four people on salaries of £25,000, £50,000, £75,000 and £100,000. It lasted two hours and cost your organisation nearly £1,000.

Of course we’re not going to start counting every minute. But we can at least predict that project A will cost roughly x amount of employee B, C and D’s time.

You can also use the formula to estimate internal time savings. These can be astounding and quickly run into seven figures. You need to be careful how you present them though, as James Robertson forcefully argues for intranets.

Content strategy brings about huge time savings. The ‘create once publish everywhere’ approach to content strategy for mobile is one of numerous examples.

Content governance processes should save time while increasing efficiency. Say you have 500 content providers in your organisation on a variety of levels and salaries, and each currently puts in about 100 hours a year. If a new process saves them just 10% of this time, based on an average salary of £50,000 this is worth £470,000 a year.

To quote the European Communication Monitor, ‘return on investment is the ratio of financial profit resulting from a communication activity against its actual cost’.

When it comes to internal time, actual cost might be approximate cost. But it is still an essential cost.

Look out for:

Russell-Oliver Brooklands, author of the popular ebook The Uncommon Sense of Internal Communication, has been working for many years on a detailed financial auditor to measure internal communication time costs. He is currently offering free trials for a limited period.

Melissa Rach, co-author with Kristina Halvorson of Content Strategy for the Web, has an interesting presentation on Content and Cash. Hear her direct at Confab London 2013.

Rahel Bailie and Noz Urbina have just published a new book: Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brands and benefits. This looks at return on investment on content projects.

23 August 2012

It can be hard to choose between the many digitally-oriented conferences on offer all over the world.

If I were an in-house digital communications manager, with a good budget, I would definitely go for the Web Effectiveness Conference (WEC).

Described as ‘the conference for online corporate communications’, it stands out for the calibre of its presenters – all senior communications professionals in large organisations across the world.

Organised by Bowen Craggs, authors of the Financial Times Index of corporate web effectiveness, the conference focuses on strategic and operational issues around complex web estates. Governance, content, social channels, mobile, apps and other emerging trends are all on the agenda.

Sadly the doors are shut to me. WEC is vendor and sponsor free, so attendees can network without ‘consultants and agencies getting in the way’. This is understandable, but also a pity because many of us simply want to learn.

But the conference report for WEC Europe 2012, held in Budapest in June, makes fascinating reading. Here are some brief takeaways on digital strategy, content strategy and web governance.

Presidential lessons in audience engagement  

Digital strategist Julias van de Laar referred to how the Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign made the most of digital channels to reach and engage supporters. Organisations can especially learn from its good practice in messaging, storytelling and audience targeting.

To ensure consistency and clarity, only a select few at campaign headquarters defined the messages. Everyone else had to follow these ‘to the letter’.

Crucially, storytelling techniques were developed throughout the campaign so content related to audiences emotionally, without boring them.

The Obama campaign was ‘data driven’. To learn as much as possible about potential audiences and where best to target messages, the team studied a combination of existing databases (such as the national voter file) and real-time social media data.

Out-of-control web estates    

David Bowen drew on research for the 2012 Financial Times Bowen Craggs Index to show some web-estate howlers.

He noticed that Hewlett Packard, for example, had two newsrooms on its site – with the same content. While one was on an older template than the other, the two had sat side by side for over a year.

When it came to careers, Procter & Gamble confused jobseekers with three different video profile sites and two separate Facebook pages. And Walmart initially moved its careers section from the corporate site to a standalone site, with no link or overlap to bridge the gap.

David pointed out that ‘it is surprisingly easy to discern the internal politics of an organisation by analysing the makeup of its website’.

Also, some companies are so distracted by managing social media channels that they are neglecting their core websites.

Breaking down silos at Siemens

Siemens has been tackling a perennial governance issue that many of us can identify with: how to stop barriers building up between departments.

Head of online communications Florian Hiessl showed how the corporate comms department was reorganised to provide speed, openness and interesting content/storytelling. It now has:

• a content and message centre, where 60 people focus on developing content
• a target group centre, dealing with the media, customers, prospects and employees
• a brands and channels centre

This internal structure is bolstered by a new central newsroom, situated in an open-plan building where 80 employees work together by topic rather than department. Members come from media relations, video and photos, online, events, etc.

Smith & Nephew’s digital communications steering committee

Thanks to Bryan Smith, director of digital communications, Smith & Nephew‘s web estate now has a two-layered governance system.

This ties in with the needs of corporate comms rather than IT management, and provides clear structure, authority and purpose. It consists of:

• a digital communications steering committee that informs, advises and authorises
• multiple operational working groups that execute, prioritise, unblock, manage and escalate

A clear hierarchy now comes from the chief executive down to site administrators and project managers. They in turn report into working groups looking at the internet, intranet and social media.

Guidance and policy documents are available ‘at a glance’ on a digital communications intranet.

This method of governance sounds similar to the digital board and digital centre of excellence structure I referred to in my presentation at Confab. It’s also interesting to compare it with other governance models, such as the make up of editorial advisory boards and customer experience management.

Social media content in one place at BASF

At BASF, the world’s leading chemical company, social media was experimented with internally before externally. All social media content is now integrated into the main corporate website, ‘with no duplicate content elsewhere on the site’.

Social media accounts can only be opened after approval from a central communications team, explained Patrick Schmidt-Kühnle, manager of global online and employee communications.

Unilever locks out its country-site managers  

Unilever is huge. It products are used by 2 billion consumers every day and its site visited by 20 million people a year.

Like many other large organisations, its web estate was fragmented, said Neil Atkinson, head of global communication channels. By 2008 hundreds of sites were brought together under a single content management system. And a country sites network was set up (68 sites for 95 countries), conveying a single message.

But there were still problems. Last year, for example, it became clear that 40% of home pages had not been updated in two months. And about 85% of sites had more than one error per page.

Neil put this down to having no visible leader and no one at director level leading site development. Site editing was often left to junior, inexperienced and transient staff.

In response, a country website network manager was brought in to supervise the 68 country sites. And for extra support, a one-hour-a-day service team was made available.

As part of a ‘freeze and fix’ policy, country site managers were temporarily locked out of the admin tools while the central communications team audited all the sites. This involved:

• reducing 35,000 errors to 7,000
• removing 40,000 unused website items
• removing 3,500 unused pages

The country site managers were only let back in once they had passed a competency test.

Burning the house down at GlaxoSmithKline

Five years old in 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s website was behind the times and in need of a redesign. ‘Time to burn the house down,’ said Simon Quayle, director of digital communications.

The first step was to establish the mission. Extensive stakeholder engagement research was carried out to draw in senior managers and get them to agree on this. Internal and external stakeholders were consulted on what the site should do.

To avoid the pitfalls of design by committee, members of a small core project team sought feedback informally on a one-to-one basis.

The design strategy was coupled with a content strategy. Before the redesign, the web team had cut down the content from 11,000 pages to 3,000. The new site has 2,000 pages, including 600 press releases. As a never-ending process, it is constantly being refined with the help of analytics and customer feedback. 

Content-driven variations between apps and mobile sites 

Referring again to the 2012 Financial Times Bowen Craggs Index, David Bowen pointed out that Europe leads the world in developing usable corporate apps. But the mobile web can be likened to the internet of the late 1990s.

In an analysis of 21 mobile sites, he found minimal standardisation and little consensus on best practice. The amount of content to provide ‘is open to debate’. Shell, for example, squeezes everything from its corporate site onto its mobile one, while Oracle links back to the main corporate site.

Comparing a company’s mobile site, iPad and iPhone apps side by side, David noted that:

• careers and corporate social responsibility content is most likely to be on apps
• while most corporate mobile sites and apps focus on a single kind of stakeholder, investors and the press may be served by both
• when visual impact is important, content may well come on an iPad app with its larger screen

Good examples are Barclays’s app for graduates, Siemens’s corporate app and Citibank’s iPad app.

Other conferences to look out for

More Web Effectiveness Conferences follow. WEC USA 2012 is being held in Chicago on 27-28 September. And WEC Asia 2013 will be in Hong Kong.

Other conferences I’ve noted, before the end of 2012, include:

• Exclusively Intranets, London, 3 October
• Content Strategy Workshops, Portland, USA, 9-10 October
• Content Strategy Forum 2012, Cape Town, 26-27 October
• Strategic Internal Communications, London, 6 December

No doubt there are many others I haven’t heard of.

What’s on your shortlist?

17 June 2012

South West Corporate Communicators is a LinkedIn group I set up a couple of years ago. The aim is to bring professionals in the area together, while reducing the need to travel to London for quality events.

We now have about 450 members, working in a cross-section of corporate communication activities. Many major organisations are represented, especially at senior management level. 

On Monday 25 June we are having our third summer meet up, at the stunning Royal Crescent Hotel in the heart of Bath. This is going to be an extra special evening – and there are a few places left if anyone else would like to join us.

Neville Hobson

Our special guest is Neville Hobson, one of the top European opinion-leaders and influencers in digital communication for business. He’s a well-known blogger and podcaster, with over 25 years’ experience in the full spectrum of corporate communications (public and media relations, marcom, internal comms, investor and financial relations).

The Big Online Picture

Neville has kindly agreed to give a short presentation and lead a discussion on:

‘The Big Online Picture: Where today’s digital landscape is going – looking at the web, mobile and social media.’

It will cover trends that matter to communicators, such as: looking across the social web, mobile and social business including social networks and behaviours, cloud computing, the law and the web, tips and how-tos, and calculating your risks.

Discussion topics

Neville is asking in advance for discussion topics. So, whatever you’re especially interested in, here’s your chance to bring it in.

So far they include:

• Integrating social and traditional marketing and communication – the pros and cons.
• How do you identify and engage with influential voices online?
• How and when do you introduce social media into your organisation?

Schedule

From 6pm: Drinks and networking in the hotel’s lovely gardens. If the weather’s against us, we’ll be in the overlooking Montagu room. As at all SWCC events, you can be sure of a warm welcome and plenty of introductions.

6.45-7.45 (approx.): The Big Online Picture with Neville Hobson.

More drinks afterwards for anyone who would like to stay on, and maybe order food.

Cost

£6 on the door. (£5 + VAT, receipts given.)

Cash bar.

If you would like to come

Please either join SWCC and add your name in the discussion there, or contact me direct.

By the way, if you’re a member of the CIPR or CIM, you can earn continuing professional development points by attending.

1 June 2012

Confab 2012, the leading content strategy conference in the USA, was top class. Huge, well organised and packed with great minds.

Held in Minneapolis, the home city of Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, the programme shows the breadth of content strategy as a developing discipline.

You can find slides from many of the sessions on Slideshare, and the editors of Contents magazine have collated the conference reports.

My presentation was on Content strategy, communications strategy and digital excellence. Here are the slides, with some explanatory notes and links for further information.

I hope the discussion will continue, and would welcome any comments.

Notes

Animals

Each animal or bird picture makes a point, but mostly to lighten things up! I was also inspired by Strategies of the Serengeti by Stephen Berry, and a visit to Tanzania last year.

Key points

Part 1: Digital excellence depends on team work. Effective team work, and a unified content strategy, depend on integrated communication management. (slides 1-77)

Part 2: Communications strategy and content strategy are complementary. But content strategy must live up to its name and be seen as truly strategic. (slides 78 to end)

Part 1: The need for integrated communication management

While focused business units are necessary, silos and power struggles can prevent an organisation reaching its business objectives.

Traditionally there have been turf wars between marketing and public relations.

Ironically public relations has suffered some reputation problems. The European Communication Monitor 2011 found that the term was discredited in most of the 43 countries that took part in its survey. People tended to associate it with spin doctoring and propaganda. 

Earlier this year the Public Relations Society of America completed a major crowdsourcing campaign to come up with ‘a modern definition for the new era of public relations’.

Corporate communications is much broader than PR. There is a natural overlap between marketing and corporate communication activities and the two often come together as one department.

‘Digital’ and ‘digital communications’ tend to be used loosely. If we regard digital as web enabled, it can include nearly all forms of corporate communications. This means that the digital communications manager (a widely emerging role) may have a broad job specification, but in some organisations it focuses most on social media.

Communications directors

Responsibility for integrating the different communication functions ultimately lies with the communications director.

Ideally this person should have a 360° knowledge of all the different parts involved, with the vision and ability to draw them together. Several other excellent qualities were suggested by attendees, including a tough skin!

Both the European Communication Monitor 2011 (ECM) and the Business Leaders Communications Study 2012 (BLCS) showed that most communications directors reported to the chief executive. Over 40% of the 95 communications directors participating in the BLCS sat on the board.

The most important issue until 2014 to the BLCS respondents was the ‘number and complexity of key audiences’. In the ECM it was ‘coping with the digital evolution and the social web’.

While most of the communications directors participating in the BLCS appreciated the importance of social media, 1 in 10 failed to see its relevance. This shocked many commentators on the study who branded them as dinosaurs.

But this was nothing compared to the ECM where nearly 6 out of 10 professionals ‘did not believe in social media’. (No doubt we will see a big drop in this in the 2012 survey.) ‘Controlled online activities’, however, were relevant to most.

A new model of communication management

‘Command and control’ is growing out of fashion as a method of communication leadership. Instead, a new digital model of communication management is developing to keep pace with social media and the need to foster collaboration between communities. The chart in slide 57 by the Community Roundtable summarises the gradual transition.

One of the good questions raised by attendees was: ‘What is the difference between user-generated content and community-created content?’

Community-created content refers more to the social and collaborative tools shared by working groups, such as forums and wikis. As these develop, there is a growing need for ‘community management’, described by the Community Roundtable as ‘the discipline of ensuring productive communities’.

For those moving forward with social intranets and the digital workplace, it can be frustrating when some internal communicators prioritise corporate news over social.

Digital boards

In her survey and report of Digital Workplace Trends 2012, Jane McConnell noted ‘a major evolution in governance is the emergence of the digital board’. 17% of the organisations represented in her survey had set one up, with others planning to do so.

The digital board takes responsibility for strategic decision-making, leadership and coordination of both internal and external communication channels. It also enables different business functions to become more involved.

In a later article, Jane put forward two possible models for digital boards: designated and representational (slides 64 and 65).

As Lisa Welchman has also emphasised, the only way to overcome power struggles and encourage collaboration is to ensure involvement at the very top.

Whether the communications director is able to lead such a board may depend on the individual, and from organisation to organisation. But it is an opportunity for content strategists to take a pivotal role.

Digital centres of excellence

Digital centres of excellence, or their equivalent, are emerging in more and more organisations.

In a 2010 study of how companies organise for social media, Jeremiah Owyang noted that ‘most commonly, companies launch a centralized cross functional group (often known as a Center of Excellence) in order to serve the various business units with a common set of services, templates, software, and knowledge’. The diagram in slide 61 shows this.

A recent research and best practice guide by Econsultancy marked a similar trend in multi-channel digital marketing. ‘An increasing number of businesses have centralised their digital expertise into a digital “centre of excellence”. For those companies who moved early to establish a centre of excellence, a proportion have progressed to combining centralised and also dispersed digital marketing in a so-called “Hub and Spoke’ arrangement.’ (See slide 72.)  

T-shaped people

The Econsultancy guide also identified the need to recruit T-shaped people to work on digital projects in multi-disciplinary teams.

T-shaped people are hard to come by. Apart from having a strong vertical digital skill, they need to understand and empathise with the broader context of work in their department, and with other digital skills. Like management consultants, they have strong interpersonal skills and are quick to collaborate and take part in ‘collective idea-making’.

Many content strategists have this T-shaped ability. And a digital centre of excellence, possibly feeding into a digital board, is a prime place for a central team of content strategists to show just how much they have to offer.

Part 2: Content strategy must live up to its name

Nowadays there are far too many separate strategies, partly because of silos. And the word strategy is often used loosely, when ‘process’ would do as well.

A few organisations have a strategy department, or coordinating strategy officers – and many of the strategies tossed around would not be taken seriously by them.

While it is generally accepted that organisations need a business strategy, and usually a communications strategy to support it, whether they need a content strategy can be more questionable.

Measurable results

We still need to prove the value of content strategy, and at the highest level. To do so, it helps to understand how important measurable results and numbers are to senior managers.

As Les Potter wrote in The Communication Plan: The Heart of Strategic Communication, ‘the only purpose for communications strategy is to achieve measureable results that help the organisation achieve its vision /mission’. A communications strategy, he says, should therefore focus on results, not activity.

One of the ways a content strategy can complement a communications strategy is by bringing in activity as well.

Strategies come in many different shapes and sizes, and there is no fixed methodology. To keep to the type of format recognised by many business and communication managers, I suggest the PASTA model outlined in slides 98-127.

PASTA stands for Purpose / Vision, Aims / Goals, Strategy, Tactics, Activity.

One central strategy

While the purpose of a communications strategy is to support the business goals, it will include any particular issues the organisation is facing, and refer to specialist communication functions. 

Content strategy will support the goals of the communications strategy through detailed content planning, delivery and governance, especially through digital channels.

In preparing the communications strategy, it’s crucial that the communications director should consult and draw in different specialist units – bringing all their plans together under one central strategy.

Digital excellence

Overall a central team of content strategists, working alongside other communications and digital specialists, can provide a wealth of cutting-edge expertise.

As we continue to develop this, leading the way in complex multi-channel publishing, an organisation’s digital excellence will depend more on more on such team work.

by Diana Railton

In the last few weeks I’ve seen a wider variety of references to content strategy than ever before.

Pinterest content strategy, Google+ content strategy, mobile content strategy, online newsroom content strategy, blogging content strategy, intranet content strategy, website content strategy, digital content strategy, social community content strategy, Twitter content strategy, search engine optimisation content strategy, video content strategy – and more. 

Behind many is a strong understanding of content strategy as a developing discipline. But sometimes content strategy is only used as a buzzword – a catchy, glossy term to latch on to. 

Spreading wide

Content strategy is also becoming topical in strategic communication management.

In a recent issue of Communication World, the magazine for communication management published by the International Association of Business Communicators, it stood out in two excellent articles on content curation.

One was by Ann Handley, co-author of Content Rules, and the other by Shel Holtz – a name familiar to many in corporate communications.

Under the heading ‘The rise of content strategy’, Shel eloquently introduced the concept of content marketing. He also explained why ‘every organisation needs to start thinking like a publisher’.

Several recent articles on new trends in PR and marketing echo this. ‘One of the most important things that publishers do is start with a content strategy and then focus on the mechanics and design of delivering that content’, wrote Business Mirror.  

This theme is of course supported by three new books on content strategy: Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, Content Strategy at Work by Margot Bloomstein and Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper.

Integrating strategies

As organisations keep up with rapid developments in digital communications, they are having to re-think methods of communication management. Teams working in silos often develop their own independent strategies – and this can be counterproductive. 

A challenge for communication directors is to draw out new ideas, while integrating and dovetailing strategies to the organisation’s best advantage.

In their favour is that, as PR Week US observed, ‘the opportunities and complexities of content are forcing divisions together in efforts to avoid duplication, neglect, and conflict’. Many are now working more closely together through the rise of digital centres of excellence and digital boards. 

An organisation usually has one business strategy, supported by one communications strategy – but each with several complementary components. Similarly, it needs one supportive and integrated content strategy.

Drawing together and communicating these strategies is a skilled, complex task. And one never to be underestimated. On it strongly depends an organisation’s direction, drive and results.  

I will be talking about this at Confab 2012 in Minneapolis, USA.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons