HOW HAS CONFAB CHANGED THINGS AT WORK FOR YOU?

Maybe it is a different approach to content audits. Or perhaps your entire content philosophy has changed. Tell us the specifics of how you’ve been able to put your new Confab knowledge to work. Large or small, technical or editorial: it’s all fair game. Let us know in the comments below!

Now, we take to the streets (or our desks) to tackle content with a renewed vigor.

You are a Prodigious Set of Note-Takers

The volume of liveblogs and recaps from Confab is seriously impressive.

We offer our most sincere thanks for sharing your thoughtful notes and summaries. It’s especially satisfying to see Confab presentations distilled into these potent posts. (If this were a college course, we’d proudly be handing out “A” grades right now.)

If you missed a sessions or just want to compare/review notes, check out this list of posts from Confab attendees:

Overall Conference Recaps

Confab: Day 1 and Day 2 Recaps from Beehive PR by John Schneider and Bridget Monroe Nelson

5 things I'm thankful for: The #confab edition by Kristen Green

500 Confab Tweets from Day 1 (PDF) by Contentini

Dear Confab: Thanks for the wings! by James Callan

My #Confab reality check by Katie Cohen

On Confab, Conflict, and Collaboration by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Confab 2011 by Kjersti Ehrie

Content (Strategy) is King at Confab 2011 by Wiredrive

How to: Clean Up Your Sticky Content Problems by Heather Rast

Confab 2011: the first day in 20 tweets and Confab 2011: Tuesday in 20 Tweets by Fiona Cullinan

Higher Ed Takeaways from Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference by Rick Allen and Georgy Cohen

CONFAB 2011: We had our cake (and ate it too) by Susan Bond

Confabulous Quotables by Corey Mahoney

Strategy is a VERB, and other lessons learned at ConFab by Debbie Williams

10 Things That Stunk About Confab by Matthew Grocki

Impressions of Confab: A Designer Visits Content Strategists by Chris Detzi

Content Strategy Comes of Age: Five Lessons from Confab by Arjun Basu

The Content Strategy Rap (conceived at Confab) by C.C. Holland

Why Confab ’11 was a groundbreaking conference by Confab speaker Jonathan Kahn

Content Strategy Delivers (Confab: Part 1) by Joe Baz

Confab 2011 – some thoughts by Sally Bagshaw

6 Things I Learned at Confab: the Content Strategy Conference by Natalya Minkovsky

Confab 2011: Four Truths for Content Strategy by Tosca Fasso *

Confabulous: Content Strategy Basics by Elizabeth Amorose and Amanda Neville *

Session-specific notes and recaps

The Skinny on Groupon’s Content Strategy by Confab presenter Joe Pulizzi

Confab 2011: What Are Words For? by Confab presenter Erika Hall

What Content Creators Want by Confab workshop presenter Ron Ploof

It’s Time to Starting Treating Your Content Like a Business Asset by Kate Robinson

A series of Simplenote Confab liveblogs have been posted by Brian James Kirk

By Sadia Latifi:

• Confab Session Wrap: Selling Content Strategy
• Confab Session Wrap: Curation - Beyond the Buzzword

By Marisa Peacock

• Attendees Learn Why Content Matters at #ConFab 2011
• We Love Content Strategy! Here's Why! #confab
• Telling Stories, Developing Strategies for Content #confab

By Frank Marquardt:

• Confab Session Wrap: Content Rules
• Confab Session Wrap: Inside the Groupon Content Machine
• Confab Session Wrap: Eat Media Hip Hop Content Strategy
• Confab Session Wrap: The New New Content Landscape

By Laura Creekmore:

• Curation: Beyond the Buzzword
• How to Create a Data-Driven Content Strategy
• Testing Content
• Johns Hopkins Testing Content
• Ann Handley of Marketing Profs: Embrace That You Are a Publisher
• Jeff Cram: Learning to Love Your CMS
• Christine Perfetti: Essential Techniques for Measuring Your Content’s Success
• Rachel Lovinger: Make Your Content Nimble
• Launching another salvo in the content strategy-UX war
• Confab 2011 Wrapup: I Find My People

By Arienne Holland:

• How To Create a Social Network Content Strategy: ConFab 2011
• Content Is a Business Asset: ConFab 2011
• Put the Content in Content Strategy: ConFab 2011
• What Is Data-Informed Content Strategy? ConFab 2011
• How To Test Content: ConFab 2011
• Why Facebook Likes Content Strategy: ConFab 2011

By Krista Stevens:

• Message Matters: Margot Bloomstein Confab 2011
• What Are Words For? Erika Hall: Confab 2011
• Making Sense of the New (New) Content Landscape: Erin Kissane Confab 2011
• A Web Designed for Readers: Mandy Brown Confab 2011
• Kristina Halvorson’s Keynote: Confab 2011

By Stacey King Gordon

• Content strategy comes home: Kristina Halvorson’s keynote opens Confab 2011
• Respect the reader: Mandy Brown
• Testing content: Christine Perfetti
• Creating a data-driven content strategy: Randall Snare and Elizabeth McGuane
• Beware the pink goo: Erika Hall
• Selling content strategy: Karen McGrane

By James Mathewson

• Confab Impressions Part I: The Search Haters
• Confab Impressions Part II: Content as Conversations

Did we miss yours? Let us know in the comments!

(* new posts)

Some highlights:

CONFAB 2011: Monday's Top 20 Tweets by @fionacullinan

Why Facebook Likes Content Strategy: ConFab 2011 by @RavenArienne

How To Create a Data-Driven Content Strategy: ConFab 2011 also by @RavenArienne

Confab | How to Create a Data-Driven Content Strategy by @lauracreekmore

Kristina Halvorson’s Keynote: Confab 2011 by @kristastevens

We Love Content Strategy! Here's Why! by @marisacp51

Content is a Business Asset by @brianjameskirk, @technicallym

If you've got one, and it is not listed, let us know in the comments below or tweet us at @confab2011!

Spots Available for Both Workshops

These spots are for the workshops only. The conference itself is still sold out. But, these workshops will let you get in on part of the awesome content strategy action on Wednesday.

Each full-day workshop spot costs $695. Register now!

The intensive, hands-on workshop options:
• Content Rules! (with Ann Handley and Ron Ploof) Due to a medical emergency, C.C. Chapman will be unable to attend Confab.
• Everything You Need to Build—and Sustain—a Content Strategy. (with Brain Traffic)

Spots are Very Limited

We can offer these few spots only until the rooms fill up. We’d like to be able to host everyone in the world. But, neither the laws of physics nor the hotel staff will allow it.

We are offering these spots on a first come, first served basis, so register now!

Maybe you are coming early. Maybe you are staying late. Maybe you just want something to do on Tuesday night.

Minneapolis is awesome, and filled with awesome things to see and do:

• Confab’s Minneapolis page
• “Minneapolis Has It All (including Confab)” Confab blog post

There are plenty of other things to do, too. Here are some of my personal favorites:

Eat:

Hell's Kitchen With a tagline of “Damn good food,” you can’t go wrong. They’ve taken home 67 “best” awards since 2002. Try the peanut butter. Really.
Salsa a La Salsa No joke—home of the best hard-shell tacos on the planet, in my opinion. It’s only a block and a half away.

Drink:

Brit’s Pub Fancy a pint? A bit pub food? Lawn bowling? Yes--they have a bowling green on their roof in the middle of downtown Minneapolis. They have a pub quiz on Tuesday and Wednesday during Confab.
Bradstreet Crafthouse You know a place is serious about cocktails when they have FIVE different kinds of ice. A few blocks away, but what are a few steps more when walking toward cocktail nirvana?

See:

Minneapolis Institute of Arts This museum is one of my favorite places in all of the Twin Cities. They have an AMAZING Department of Asian Art. Plus Van Gogh, Monet, modern photography masters and much more. It’s a short cab ride away, but well worth it.
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden This fair-weather favorite is home to one of our icons: the Spoonbridge and Cherry. And it’s just across the park.

Do:

The Electric Fetus Ringo Starr wore an Electric Fetus t-shirt on the Grammys in 2010. That alone makes it one of the coolest record stores in the nation.
Target Target? Yes, the retail giant’s flagship store is just up the street. While it is a sight in its own right, you might want to go there simply to buy that toothbrush you forgot.
 

“PEOPLE WILL COME, RAY”
For some reason, we believe that if we develop compelling content as part of our marketing strategy, and if that content is good enough, people will just show up. But this is not “Field of Dreams”, and the web isn’t a cornfield. But it is fertile ground for you to spread your content like seeds that will eventually grow and grow. This is the type of content that compels people to share, to talk about, to spread … the type of content that widens the funnel to get more people to your website and your other web properties.

10 STEPS TO PLANT YOUR CONTENT MARKETING SEEDS
Before you’re ready to plant your seeds, you have to prepare your field. Do the right kind of groundwork to ensure your content marketing will really grow the kinds of results you want:

1. Create the Buyer Persona – Who, specifically, are you trying to attract to your website AND what do you want them to do?

2. Keyword Hit List – Once your persona is set, what are those 2 to 5 word keywords that your buyers are typing into Google and social media sites to solve their pain points? Tools like Google External Keyword Tool and Google Insights can help. (Check out my blog post on using Google Insights.)

3. Listening – Just like the greatest journalists in the world do, set up listening posts using free tools like Google Alerts or Tweetdeck to listen to the conversation around your keywords. If you have it, a reputation management system will work as well.

4. Identify Influencers – Your listening will uncover who the key influencers are around those keywords. Essentially, who is covering your market and leading the discussion (media companies, brands, bloggers, etc.)?

5. Rank the Influencers – Create a manageable list of about 20 sites that you’ll need to track on a consistent basis (We have 42.). Tools like Klout and Flowtown can help you manage your rankings.

6. Begin to Interact with the Influencers – Follow key influencers on Twitter and Facebook. Start to read and comment on their blogs. Be sure comments always add to the conversation.

7. Help your Influencers– Most influencers are looking for other smart people to help them with their message. You can be that kind of helper. Once you have identified yourself as a positive member of their community, you can reach out to them via social media or email (don’t call) to see if you can do a guest post or help with their content in some way. The first seven steps lay the groundwork for your content marketing strategy. Now you’re ready to create and distribute content!

8. Do a Community Project — Now you’ve built up street cred and equity in the community. It’s time to brainstorm and create amazing textual and video content … content that solves your customers’ pain points. A community project leverages the passion others have for your subject, and focuses it on a key project that can help your marketing.

For example, at the Content Marketing Institute, some of our community projects have included:

• Content Marketing Playbook: We integrated over 50 case studies into this playbook, many coming from influencers and customers (and we gave them a link and credit).
• Junta42 Top Content Marketing Blogs: Maybe our biggest hit. We created a ranking system for identifying influencers through this blog list. You can do this for your industry. We update this list every quarter.
• Annual Content Marketing Predictions: We produce a blog and an ebook that highlights our influencers and positions them as thought leaders.

9. Give Influencers Tools to Share their Passion – When LEGO wants to encourage fans to help with building projects, they incentivize them. Give the members of your community ways to share the passion of your message with badges or simple promotion.

10. Create an Influencer Dashboard – Remember, you’re not doing this for fun … this is marketing, so it needs to be measured. Track referral links, inbound links, social media conversations, and search volume on your keywords to see what is working and what is not.

Keep in mind that you can’t develop content and then leave it on a shelf in the garage. You need to be an active member of your community. Once that happens, your content will spread and grow … and then people will actually come and your online content will work for you, for your customers, and on behalf of your marketing goals.

Joe Pulizzi is founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which includes Junta42 and the premier content marketing conference, Content Marketing World, held in Cleveland, Ohio September 6-8, 2011. Joe can be found on Twitter @JuntaJoe.
 

-Clinton Forry

Last month, Erin Kissane wrote in App Madness and the Open Web about how the rush to create mobile apps (in device-specific formats) echoes of late-1990s browser conflicts. Web standards eventually made it easier to develop sites that (mostly) work consistently across web browsers, but the state of mobile development is still very disjointed—a completely different app has to be developed for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and various other mobile operating systems. For content creators, this often means producing the same exact content in multiple formats for multiple systems.

This is just one of the reasons that digital content needs to be created and stored independent of its platform and presentation. In Nimble, a report I wrote last year about publishing in the digital age, I stated that content needs to be able to travel freely in the digital landscape. This means that content needs to be mobile-friendly, socially-enabled, and accessible on demand.

At the same time, as content travels around in cyberspace, it also needs to retain some amount of context and meaning in order to be used properly. To succeed in this environment, content must be well structured, well defined, and well described. Let’s take a closer look at what those qualities mean.

WELL STRUCTURED
Because the content itself will be separated from its presentation, it will need to be segmented into usable bits so that each platform or device can apply the layout and styles that are appropriate for that environment. Most content management systems already do this—the title is in a separate field from the main body text, and the byline is in yet another field.

But sometimes we get lazy and put the content for an entire widget into a single field. We use HTML (or its WYSIWYG cousin, Rich Text Editor) to arrange things in a way that might look great on a web page, but fall apart in an RSS reader or mobile device. If these widgets are key to experiencing and understanding the content, they have to be just as well structured as the rest.

WELL DEFINED
All of those separate bits of information need to be exposed to various delivery platforms in a meaningful way. This means that having the byline in a separate field isn’t enough if all your publishing system does is wrap it in a few tags as it pushes it out to the website. It has to be marked up in such a way that your website, your RSS feed, and your mobile delivery platform all know that it’s the name of the author of the piece.
There are metadata standards that can add this level of detail to journalistic content, such as NewsML, a related proposed standard called rNews, and PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata). There are standards for other types of content, too:

• EXIF and XMP for image content
• MPEG-7 and Media RSS for video content
• The Good Relations vocabulary for product and e-commerce content
• Dublin Core for general content

Other standards will continue to emerge—either developed by standards bodies, or created and adopted as an ad hoc standard within a specific industry. These standards help define the content by indicating what each element of data is, not just how it’s displayed.

WELL DESCRIBED
Finally, any content, regardless of format, should be annotated with metadata that gives it context and meaning and helps platforms and systems understand how to use it. This includes metadata on the subjects, people, places, events, and products that it’s about, but it also includes metadata that answers questions such as:

• Where did the content come from?
• Are there restrictions on how it can be used?
• Is the content time-sensitive or evergreen?
• Is the content part of a larger story or set of content, without which it doesn’t make as much sense?
• When people share the content via social media, what information is provided to compel others to click on the links?

So how do you imbue your content with these qualities? In my Confab talk, Make Your Content Nimble, I’ll be talking more about the structures, tools, and other resources available to help set your content free.

Want a first crack at Confab 2012 tickets? Sign up for our email list

Follow @confab2011 on Twitter

Web Content Conference + Brain Traffic CS workshop
June 6-7, Chicago
Join Kristina, Christine B. and Meghan at this lovely, intimate conference. The price is right, Chicago is great, and our CS half-day workshop is not to be missed.

Rosenfeld Media Speaking Tour
April 27-29, Atlanta, and June 1-3, Chicago
See Lou Rosenfeld's new, amazing workshop on Adaptable Information Architecture (we can't wait to go) in both cities. In Atlanta, Steve is joined by Whitney Quesenbery and Steve Krug. In Chicago, Steve will appear with Steve Krug and Ginny Redish. Amazing. SAVE 20% with discount code TRAFFIC!

An Event Apart + Kristina’s CS workshop
June 13-15, Atlanta
An Event Apart is one of our very favorite conferences "for people who make websites." For the first time, Kristina will follow up her hour-long AEA mainstage talk with a full-day workshop. It will rock. You should go. SAVE $100 when you register for the conference and workshop.

Adaptive Path UX Week + Kristina’s workshop
August 23-26, San Francisco 
Billed as "the premier user experience conference," this fun-filled four-day extravaganza is a must for all UX-ers. DJ Spooky is a confirmed speaker. How cool is that? SAVE 10% with discount code CONFAB.

Content Strategy Forum
September 5-7, London, England
After hosting the first-ever content strategy conference last year, our friends in the EU are following it up with an amazing event that will be worth a trip across the pond! SAVE UP TO £150 with early bird discount.

Content Marketing World
September 6-8, Cleveland
The first-ever content marketing conference is a can't-miss event for marketers looking for the next big trend in online marketing. And who can resist the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame? SAVE $100 with discount code CONFAB.

Content Strategy Meetups
All the time, Anywhere
Content Strategy Meetups are sweeping the country. Attend one in your city, or start one of your own…you’d be surprised how many folks are probably waiting!
 

-Clinton Forry

The same problem keeps cropping up in web, marketing, and communications teams. You’re working on a project. Maybe it’s a time-limited campaign, a section of a website, or a specific delivery channel like email or social media. You know the project is unlikely to achieve its objectives because of problems with strategy, governance, execution, or measurement. But that higher-level stuff is outside your official scope. What can you do about it?

ORGANIZATIONS ARE LIKE OIL TANKERS
The commercial web has been around for 15 years, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at most organizations. They’re like oil tankers heading the wrong way, as if the web never happened. To quote Lisa Welchman, the web is now “the organization’s primary communications, sales, marketing, and transactional vehicle.” That oil tanker had better start turning soon, or the organization’s overall performance will suffer. And you’re hurting right now because these problems are hampering your project’s chances of success.

THE PROBLEM: THE WRONG HORIZON OF FOCUS
So what’s causing the problem, specifically? It could be any number of things:

• Organization-centric thinking, resistance to change
• Silos and turf-wars
• No realistic web strategy
• No standards and policies, ownership, decision-making processes
• Inappropriately staffed execution team
• No appropriate metrics (KPIs)

The root cause may not be directly related to content strategy. The reason your task seems impossible is you’re working at the wrong horizon of focus, to borrow “Getting Things Done”-author David Allen’s model. A typical web or communications initiative happens at 20,000 feet (areas of focus), but the problems we’re talking about are at 30,000 or 40,000 feet (goals, vision). We need to gain some height.

HOW CONTENT STRATEGY CAN HELP
But hang on, what are we doing up here at 40,000 feet? Isn’t that management’s job? Absolutely. But for some reason they’re not doing it, so we need to get better at articulating the problem in a way they can understand. Don’t worry, we’re not going to try to run the company. But we’ll start to make some organizational change.

This is where content strategy is indispensable. It’s probably not appropriate for you to start complaining about a lack of organizational strategy, out of the blue. But in the context of the requirements of a realistic, ongoing content strategy, it’s completely appropriate.

“I JUST NEED YOU TO ANSWER A FEW SIMPLE QUESTIONS...”
Content strategy is the ultimate discussion starter. Whatever project or initiative you’re working on, at some point you can bring out the innocent-sounding questions of content strategy:

• Why are we doing this?
• How does this fit into the overarching web strategy?
• How does this meet our users’ needs?
• What’s the decision making process?
• Who will write, edit, and publish it, and look after it over time?

Most organizations will have a hard time answering these questions in a useful way. If you articulate the requirements of content strategy well, your stakeholders will realize that they need to do more thinking. When that happens, seize the opportunity to switch the conversation to a higher horizon of focus. “It looks like we have a web governance problem here. How can we start making some changes?”

TURN AROUND THAT OIL TANKER, STARTING NOW
As people who care about user experience, the web, and quality content, we all need to start turning that oil tanker around. Often content itself isn’t the objective: content is the way we reconcile the user’s needs with the organization’s objectives. But talking about content strategy is essential to getting there.