CS Forum ’11 was a great success. Whether you attended or merely wished you could, you’ll want to check out the videos, audio recordings, slide decks, photographs, and blog write-ups of the conference. Knock yourself out!

Videos

We recorded all the sessions from the first day of the conference in high definition video, using a professional camera crew. You can find these videos by browsing the conference schedule for Monday 5 September.

Audio recordings

We recorded audio for two thirds of the sessions on the second day of the conference (sadly we don’t yet have access to recordings from sessions in the Miles Room track.) We now have either audio or video for all CS Forum ’11 talks. You can find the audio by browsing the conference schedule for Tuesday 6 September.

Browse by speaker or topic

You can also find videos and audio recordings by browsing the speaker pages or the topics pages.

Blog write-ups, slide decks, and photos

Don’t miss Martin Belam’s fantastic CS Forum notes, starting with this write-up of the first three talks, or grab his conference summary as a PDF or as an ePub for iBooks. Lanyrd lists 23 write-ups, and they’ve also collected 19 slide decks.

Finally, make sure you check out Rhiannan Walton’s official conference photos.

That’s a wrap

Cheers, and see you in Cape Town!

In 2011, it was cosmopolitan London.

In October 2012, the international content strategy conference will be packing its bags and heading south, for a glorious summer holiday in one of the most beautiful cities in the world—Cape Town, South Africa.

Go to CS Forum 2012 to get the latest as it happens, and keep following @cs_forum, as that’s not changing.

Here’s a little teaser of what’s in store:

• presentations and workshops by international authorities on content strategy, UX, design, and more
• panoramic mash-ups of mountains, blue skies, winelands, and the Atlantic Ocean
• music and merriment under the African night-sky
• braai chops, boerewors and biltong, washed down with plenty of excellent Cape wine
• the chance to hang out with both local and international content enthusiasts
• the option of organised sightseeing activities before and after the conference
• a uniquely South African flavour to the whole experience

CS Forum 12 is proudly hosted by August Sun.

Don’t miss it!

And we’re ready for you. Our 39 amazing speakers are polishing their slide decks, preparations at the venues are complete, and we’ve even installed a custom wireless network for all of your iPads, laptops, and phones. (Get ready to live-blog, tweet, and twitpic the hell out of this show.)

This is a truly international conference, with attendees from across Northern Europe and Scandinavia, North America, and as far away as Cape Town, Bangalore, and Melbourne. You also work for a diverse range of organisations. To take just ten: American Express, HSBC USA, Facebook, TUI Travel, Nokia, Pearson Education, Harvard Law School, the Wellcome Trust, the United Nations, and the UK Government.

So as well as listening to our amazing speakers, make sure you take the time to get to know your fellow attendees, who I guarantee will open your mind to new opportunities through their different perspectives, contexts, and experiences. We have a remarkable opportunity to learn from each other. So take it!

See you very soon. We can’t wait.

Jonathan, Randall, and Destry

Chaired by the one and only Kristina Halvorson, and featuring four of our amazing speakers, it’s a chance to gather together and discuss content strategy far and wide. And for you to voice your thoughts and ideas.

Our panel participants

Both of our headline speakers, Karen McGrane and Gerry McGovern will participate in the panel, joined by Ove Dalen and Cleve Gibbon. It’s an international panel, with people from different areas of the content strategy industry.

How the panel will work

During the conference presentations (before the panel) we aren’t taking questions from the floor. Instead, tweet any question or topic you’d like to discuss during the panel, with the hashtag #csforum11. We’ll compile a list and give it to Kristina before the panel begins.

During the panel itself, you can also tweet any questions or comments you’d like, in response to what’s being said on stage. We’ll read them out during the panel (credited, of course) for anyone on the panel to answer.

This means we won’t have audience mics, but we think this will give us a chance to discuss more questions from more people. And we’ll have plenty of WiFi for you to able to tweet to your heart’s content. And if you’re not on twitter, all our attendees are lovely generous people who will tweet on your behalf—just ask.

About the workshops

There are four half-day workshops to choose from.

Influence and evaluation

In Climb to Clout: Principles & Evaluation for Influential Web Content, Colleen Jones, author of Clout, will discuss how to:

1. evaluate content holistically, and
2. create influential content.

Participants of this workshop have the chance to submit their own work to discuss.

Persuasion

In Communication planning and measurable persuasion, John Alderman, author of Sonic Boom, will explore the principles of persuasion, and how to include truly persuasive content in your communications strategy. Read our interview with John.

Narrative

In Designing narrative content, Martha Rotter, digital strategist extraordinaire, will discuss the ins and outs of the narrative, and technology’s role in planning successful content in context. Read our interview with Martha.

Content technology

In Designing technology from content’s perspective, Ida Hakola and Ilona Hiila, founders of Finland content strategy agency Vapa Media, will enable true innovation – by creating useful content technologies in the workshop itself. Participants of this workshop will be able to lay the groundworks for new and improved content tools that may live beyond CS Forum 2011.

A building with some inspiring history

You’ll have a great setting to do great work. The IET London Savoy Place dates back to the 13th century, when it was a palace for Count Savoy. And appropriately (for us content enthusiasts), the BBC was established in this building in 1922. Read more about this historic venue.

Register now

There’s still time to book your spot in one or two of these fantastic workshops. You won’t want to miss it.

There are still tickets left for our opening night barbecue & wine reception. Join our speakers and our attendees from around the world for some seriously good grub.

What’s on the menu?

It’s Caribbean night in central London, at least on Sunday evening September 4th. We won’t stop you from going up for seconds.

For the meat lovers

• Jamaican jerk chicken – chargrilled to perfection

For the fish lovers, or pescatarians

• Red snapper – wrapped in banana leaf and BBQed with Cajun spices, lime and herbs
• Prawn roti – flatbreads topped with Caribbean prawn curry

For the actual vegetarians

• Cornmeal fritters – served with a spicy mango relish

For everyone

• Green salad – tossed lightly
• Breadfruit salad – with lime pickle dressing

For those with a sweet tooth

• Guava and pineapple trifle

For the imbibers

• Unlimited wine (Chilean Merlot & Sauvignon Blanc), beer and soft drinks

Did we mention the view?

We’ll all gather on The Deck at the National Theatre, which offers the best view in all of London (and let’s be honest, probably all of the northern hemisphere).

Here’s the view by day:

And the view by night:

The sun sets at 7:30, so you’ll have the pleasure of both.

Details and registration

On Sunday night, September 4th, from 6-11pm, join your fellow CS Forum attendees for the best BBQ in London. If you’re already registered for the conference, get yourself a BBQ ticket now, and if you’re yet to register, we still have space for you.

He attended CS Forum 2010 in Paris, and we’re thrilled that he’s joining us again this year on the other side of things, leading one of our four workshops: Communication, planning, and measurable persuasion. I asked John a few questions about his workshop and his take on Content Strategy in general.

The John Alderman interview

Destry: What is meant by a “communication platform”, exactly, and why would it be important for a company to have one?

John: Every company must alert potential buyers to the value of its goods and services; that’s nothing new. What is new is the degree of sophistication and range that the world expects, largely a result of the degree of intimate and relevant communication that the Internet has brought. The Internet is fundamentally about communication, and people using the Net have been good at creating new paths and forms for communication to take. Every company must now spend effort planning where and how it will communicate. It’s been said: “We are all publishers now” and I agree. The degree to which a company successfully communicates—as well as the style, substance and reliability of its messages, and how well it listens—increasingly means its success or failure.

I use the phrase “communication platform” in two ways. The first is to describe how a website can function as the place to put all of its communication. The second is to describe the combination of tools, procedures, and general approach that a company uses to communicate with customers, with itself, or a mix of both. Because the Internet is where most of the action is these days, that’s the general focus of efforts, but obviously communication can happen anywhere. A platform helps make it happen.

Creating that platform, in the second sense, is also where, I like to say, it gets real. You can have an approach, some abstract lines about brand, a notion of “engaging the customer” or whatever, and then with your communications platform, you can see it taking shape. Suddenly a company is no longer just about “eating every day in style” but about sharing recipes every day, tips from customers all the time, and dining secrets from a noted chef every Wednesday. I like strategy, but I love tactics, and think that bringing them together lets you know you’re on the right track.

It can be surprising, too. There was a moment when it seemed like every company started launching blogs. That changed the dynamic that most people felt with companies. It felt personal, and special, and somehow a little more trustworthy. And I think that meant people at the top were allowing themselves to be a little more human. Marketers spend a lot of money getting a human touch, when that’s really about the easiest thing we have at our disposal. And like in any relationship, companies will find that it pays to be a good listener.

Destry: What does it take to set such a platform up?

John: It begins with asking what it is you want to say, to whom, and where that happens? Or what do you want said about you and where? Then imagine the form, frequency, and flow of such a conversation. For instance, maybe you want to sell chocolate. You probably want to tell the story behind your chocolate: what makes it special, what people can do with it, what kinds there are to buy, how customers can buy them, and maybe recipes to help them make the most out of what they buy, or convince to try to new types. You might also find that your platform works best as a way to facilitate conversation, and carry it offline, rather than delivering more one-way messages. You might also find that the best way to reach costumers is to offer something they can use in their conversations, that you don’t really even need to join.

Destry: Regarding the associated tools, which ones are commonly employed, in your experience, and why are they useful?

I find it useful to create artifacts to help plan all this. A map of all of the conversations, perhaps distilled to points of persuasion, each one something like “YumYum is the best chocolate to give as a present.” How does that play out? Where and how often does it happen? Then imagining form. Is it a coupon? An video? A story of rare luxurious ingredients that will make a recipient feel special?

Destry: We’re all somewhat aware of how the field of Content Strategy is tugged around a bit by marketers, technical communicators, web/UX people, and so forth; each community bringing its own schema to the understanding of things. As a creative director in some big brand agencies—which many people might flag as “marketing“—and as someone who looks at the digital industry analytically, what do you think is going on with this Content Strategy push and pull? Where is it headed?

John: The Web is so fluid and so all encompassing that it’s natural that roles from one previously discrete field will brush up against another’s. It’s as if suddenly New York, Houston, and Los Angeles got mashed up, as a growth spurt happened on top of it. Everyone feels some confusion when they look to familiar landmarks that now only partially fit. But the map isn’t the territory, and in this territory both new and old, everyone’s description is a metaphor. The question is, which metaphor will usefully allow me to address the current state of things, and stay somewhat relevant as the world continues to shift? “Conversation” seems to me like a good place to start because it seems both realistic and human-centered, though I can see how it might weigh things in the direction of agencies who like conversations to continue, and might get a piece of creating and managing them. I will say that I’ve found “conversation” works as well for an electronics company trying to manage its brand as it does for a healthcare organization building an intranet.

Destry: To my ears, “persuasive content” sounds a bit sales-oriented, and thus a marketing thing. Is it just about selling something, or is there a deeper customer relationship to be gained from (good) persuasive content?

Trying to stop appropriation is a losing game. Besides, it’s interesting to see what happens to ideas and techniques when they’re put in a new situation.

I started using the word “persuasion” to frame and analyze types of content after attending a conference on the future of persuasion by the Institute for the Future last year. At that time the word struck me as menacing. But hearing many different approaches I realized that there’s a difference between manipulation and persuasion, and that persuasion isn’t necessarily about selling (though selling is usually about persuasion). I want to persuade myself to eat healthier, I want to persuade my friends that I’m interesting and lovable, and I want to persuade the world’s politicians that they shouldn’t ignore education. All of those can be addressed at least partially by communication. “We should have a deeper relationship” is a point of persuasion. Starting from that premise, what would you publish to convince someone of that, and then keep them believing it?

The workshop

Participants in John’s workshop will learn solid techniques and tools, like the conversation map and matrix. Content strategists (and anyone else) can use these tools to create and maintain successful communications platforms. These tools define a way of drafting testable, tunable, correctly-paced and engaging communication.

This approach will be a hands-on workshop to introduce participants to a fictional client and guide them through planning for persuasive content for the company. Participants will draft a plan for content creation, using a matrix of possible forms, audience goals, and staffing requirements. At the end, participants will have a document that can be used to create persuasive content for any occasion.

If you’re attending this workshop—and you should—John says to bring a sense of humor and a willingness to participate, because most of this will be an exercise using the tools I’ll describe and situations that we’ll imagine. Learning and having fun will be the plan; making that happen takes everyone’s participation.

Bring whatever materials/devices you use to think. Pencils and paper is great! Laptops work too. You’ll be working in groups. John says from experience that “people usually approach things from different angles, and that dynamic makes stronger work”.

What you’ll learn

You will walk away knowing:

• What a communication platform is, how it works, and why it’s important.
• The tools that support a platform strategy, like communication maps and message matrices.
• How to use these tools to test, tune, and correctly-pace your planned communication over time.

Date and time: 7th September; 8:30–12:00 (3 1/2 hours).

Register

Don’t miss this rare workshop opportunity with the smart and engaging Mr. Alderman! Register for the conference, if you haven’t already, and select John’s workshop when you do.

If you’ve already registered and want to add this workshop, do it here!

And do have a look at John’s equally smart, yellow website: Supereverywhere.

Martha: The web has definitely changed narrative, but not in the way most people expect. People think that because of the web, now everyone has zero attention span and the only way you can get someone to read your work is by putting it in 140-character blurbs on Twitter.

That’s not true.

People continue to have an appetite for reading great content—especially narrative content—but context is very important here. I don’t want to try to read your brilliant 5,000 word article during my six-minute bus commute each day because it’s more work to mentally get back into the story each time I get back on the bus and open it up again. I want to read that later when I’m at home with a cup of tea and have time to digest it all. My six-minute bus commute is perfect for scanning through Twitter & Google Reader & my e-mail because a lot of that content can be absorbed & deleted quickly.

By the way, that commute stuff is a lie, I work from home and have no commute. I still won’t read your 5,000 word essay on my four-second walk into my office, though.

Randall: How do you take context into account when you’re designing?

Martha: There are several contextual things you have control over when you’re designing content.

For example, if I’m using a 3G data connection on my phone, I don’t want the multimedia pieces of the content to download. In fact, I may even appreciate the option to read a “highlights only” version of the article with smaller photos. If I like it, I might continue reading on my large monitor when I get home, and that’s when I want the video and photo slideshow and everything else.

You can also think about what’s going on outside the content. Like the huge, blinking, bouncing ad on the page. Why do we do this to our readers? I slide the browser over to get the ad out of view. Ad revenue may be critical for a lot of news and magazines online, but we should do our readers the favor of designing so advertising can fit in their surroundings and enhance the experience. Cramming in ads annoys readers.

Randall: What kind of work are you doing at the moment?

Martha: After I left Microsoft, I wanted to do a few different things, including working with startups, mobile development, teaching and studying. So I’ve been lecturing in Dublin on web applications, taking courses on data visualisation, computational linguistics and Human computer interaction, as well as working on my own small startup projects. I’ve been busy!

For the last ten or so months, I have been working in the digital publishing space. I am a complete magazine junkie and have been frustrated with the bad attempts at bringing magazines to the web and apps lately. As you may have noticed, I have strong feelings about how I want to be able to continue to read and experience my favourite magazines digitally. I worked with Nomad Editions, where I used a brand new technology called Treesaver, which made their magazines look good on lots of devices, browsers and screen sizes. Nomad has done a great job creating new magazine titles and showing that there is a market for digital-only publications—there’s money to be made there. I’m now working on two additional magazine projects, but they’re still in development so you’ll hear more about them later.

Randall: You’ve had an interesting career. Tell me something poignant, yet hilarious (also touching).

Martha: I worked at Microsoft for 9½ years, and each time I changed roles, it was like a different company. One of the toughest but best lessons I learned was during one of our projects. My colleagues and I began designing a comprehensive testing system which would ensure every line of the code would be tested. After several tough months, we had an all-hands review. I could hardly wait for everyone to see our unprecedented system. Then, the project director crashed the software in under five seconds. I was heartbroken; I thought we tested everything. We tested everything except for how the customer would use it. Since that day, I think about the customer first and have prioritised that experience above everything else.

Another thing I loved about working at Microsoft was the geek culture. Microsoft is full of techies with great senses of humor, who love pranks. We once turned someone’s office into an outhouse. And we turned another office into a teenager’s dream bedroom, complete with pink wall paint and Tiger Beat posters. Another time we hooked up fans to motion detectors so that opening the office door would fill the room with swirling packing peanuts. Everyone I knew had some kind of Nerf weapon in their office, just in case of attack. We also had Food Friday contests where the winner each week selected disgusting things for people to eat the following week. We worked hard but we laughed a lot. Now that I work from home, I suppose I could play pranks on myself but I have a hard time believing it would be as fun.

Randall: What can people expect from your workshop?

Martha: In the web industry, we’re all starting to get a bit nervous about the amount of devices, screen sizes and capabilities of our users’ browsers and phones. Most of us don’t have the time or money to design content for every new screen dimension or every new app store.

My workshop will help us plan for content big and small: so it reaches as many people as possible while being tailored to individual contexts. We’ll talk about customising content and what technology options will best do that. We’ll also cover workflow and production optimisations.

Randall: What do you see next for the web industry? In June, Stephanie Georgopulos wrote a blog post called 5 years from now, there’ll be no such thing as a web page—do you think that’s true? How do you see online content in 5 years time?

Martha: We’re definitely moving away from the idea of “creating a web page.” Sites are getting bigger and more complex, and managing a bunch of static pages is no longer feasible for growing companies. Look at how quickly it all gets out of date!

Jim Boulton’s point was that webpages are moving from being static to being user-generated and interactive. There’s a lot of truth in that. People want to participate, they want to engage and they want to create. But that doesn’t mean that writing and content go away. There will always be avenues for people to share their writing, their ideas, their knowledge. They just might look a bit different than they do today. Content creators have to be open to the idea of publishing to different formats, designing their content differently and being on the lookout for new methods.

I think what people are going to expect from content in five years is a continuous, enhancing version of the curating that is starting to happen now with great apps like Zite. Websites will get better and better at predicting what you will read and what you will like and aim to deliver more of that to you. As a result, better writers and better content will grow their audiences and fans while other, less-valuable or poorly-written content will get filtered out more easily.

What’s next for you in your career?

Martha: One of my colleagues at Microsoft was asked in a job interview where he would be in five years. He said he had no clue because in five years ago, the job he was currently interviewing for would not exist. I love that answer. It’s a great reminder of the fast pace of this industry and the difficulty in predicting the future.

However, I went to a palm reader in India recently and he told me I was about to embark on a very successful career as a personal assistant…

Randall: You travel a lot, and to interesting places. Tell me about an interesting place you’ve been.

Martha: I just got back from a friend’s wedding in India! India is one of my favourite places; it has amazing food, unbelievable scenery, and every city is so different. This time I went to Rajasthan. I fell in love with Udaipur, which is a beautiful city with an enormous palace in the middle of the lake. The palace was used in the James Bond film “Octopussy“—it was very glamorous. The whole city is full of palaces which are well worth wandering around and enjoying. Because it was monsoon season, everything was green and blooming, and the whole city looked like it was surrounded by a tropical jungle. The food was fantastic everywhere we went, and I came back with lots of new recipes I want to try.

Louis Rosenfeld, the sage of Information Architecture, once said:

if [information architecture] is the spatial side of information, content strategy is the temporal side of the same coin.

It’s impossible to design great user experiences for bad content, no matter how compelling your designs are. We’re all taught, rightly or wrongly, that “content is king”; if you’re passionate about creating great user experiences you have to consider creating content that is not only useful, but usable and engaging too.

Rosenfeld’s abstraction is important for students of content strategy. Andrew Maier of UXBooth explains:

Information Architecture helps us decide “where” content lives, whilst Content Strategy helps us decide “when” it lives. The combination of the two helps us and our clients understand “why” it’s there in the first place.

This is where the Content Strategy Forum, to be held in London in September, is a must not only for the seasoned professional but also the budding student. If you’re new to content strategy like myself, you’ll be all too aware that something important is missing from your designs. It can be recognised on wireframes as “Lorem ipsum”. Although a boon for visual designers, “Lorem ipsum” is the antithesis of good design; no design can be complete without considering actual content.

What I’m looking forward to

The user experience design and content strategy track, for me, is a must-see set of talks with highlights coming in the form of Eric Reiss, Elizabeth McGuane and Martin Belam. But that’s not to say the likes of Erin Kissane, Relly Annett-Baker and Marko Hurst, or indeed the other speakers should be missed; they certainly shouldn’t. The CS Forum 2011 line-up really is one to inspire.

When you learn about how traditional strategy and economics come into play, you can understand why content strategy can be challenging to sell and create and implement in organizations.

Listen now

Download the MP3, or subscribe in iTunes.

Transcript

This is episode 10 of the CS Forum podcast. I’m Randall Snare, and today I’m talking to Melissa Rach, who’s one of our invited speakers at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London.

The Forum is from the 5th to the 7th of September in central London. That’s three days of presentations, workshops, and parties. We’re featuring 39 speakers from 11 countries. Find out more at csforum.eu and register using code PODCAST10 by 29 July to save £50 off standard rates.

Randall Snare: Hi. I’m talking to Melissa Rach who is the Vice President at Brain Traffic, which is a content strategy consultancy based in Minneapolis. Thanks for talking to me Melissa.

Melissa Rach: Thanks for asking.

Randall: So, I want to start by talking about Confab, the other content strategy conference. Just because it was really great and amazing, and I went there as did lots of content strategists. So I want to hear your point of view about it as someone behind the scenes and what it was like to be around all those content strategists in your home city.

Melissa: Oh, it was fantastic. It was great fun to see all of those content lovers in one place, and to really experience the diversity of the crowd I thought was really interesting. To see sort of content strategy as a multidimensional practice with people, so many different topics of interest. And people working at so many different levels, from the real beginners to people who have so much knowledge that it was just amazing to be in the room with them. So we just had a great time just being around all of it.

I think that, as being a person from Brain Traffic and our company put the conference on, it was really fun to have it in our home town. At Traffic pretty much everybody wants to be helpful, they’re really curious, and they love content.

So, you put all those things together, wrap it up in a conference, and it was the best possible option for us to be sort of playing that host and hostess role for the conference. As a speaker it was a little bit daunting.

Randall: Yeah.

Melissa: Because you couldn’t use the, like, converting the audience to content strategy as your crutch.

You were really challenged to say something to your peers that would …

Randall: Was that your first time speaking to bona fide content strategists?

Melissa: To a whole room?

Randall: Yeah.

Melissa: Yeah, to a whole roomful like that, yeah. I speak to 10 content strategists pretty regularly in my office. But to sit there and say, here’s a room of 150 content strategists, it was pretty extraordinary. I don’t know that very many people have that opportunity. I’m looking forward to doing it again when I come to London.

Randall: And so are we. Yeah, let’s talk about your talk at Confab. I saw it, and I thought it was really, really fascinating. You explored the strategy side of content strategy and talked a lot about the history of strategy and how businesses organize themselves and operate. Can you tell me how you became interested in this and how you researched it?

Melissa: Well, I’m kind of a history geek in general. I have a degree in journalism, but I also studied archaeology and classics.

Randall: Oh.

Melissa: So I’m nerdy that way, but the reasons I think it’s really important for content strategists to know about what strategy is, I guess there’s several. First, I think if you call yourself a strategist you should really have a comprehension of what that word means to the business world at large.

Randall: Yeah.

Melissa: Where did the term come from, and what are people expecting from you when you say it? I know when I started being sort of called a strategist, I was fairly young. Here’s a 28-year-old girl in the boardroom, and I felt like I really needed to know what I was talking about to compete with the big boys. But luckily it’s super fascinating stuff to learn about.

To some extent, I think as a content strategist it’s really important to understand the strategy side. Because until very recently content work was always focused on a tactical, creating content area. There’s a real fine line in content strategy between strategy and tactics, and they’re both so important but they are different.

When you start to learn about how traditional strategy and economics come into play, you can understand why content strategy can be challenging to sell and create and implement in certain organizations.

At first you’re kind of like, oh, these organizations just don’t get it. But it’s not that they’re just dopey, they’re just not set up to accommodate content as a strategic thing.

Once you know why there is that resistance or the challenge — not always resistance. Sometimes they really know they want it. But once you know why it’s a challenge or there is resistance, you have a much better chance of overcoming it and being successful content strategists.

So that’s why I think that’s really important.

Randall: So what do you think is the most important thing for a content strategist to know about strategy? I.e., can you do your talk that you have an hour for in, like, a one minute answer?

Melissa: I think there are a couple of different things. I think that it’s really important to understand that companies, and particularly American companies — European companies don’t have quite this restraint. But American companies really are tied to fiscal quarterly results, so they want results really fast. They want absolutes measured, and with content we can’t quite do that. Content will always be measured in subjective ways at some point.

And so, that is one thing that is really important to know, so that you can help your clients understand, or the people within your organization understand, how you can measure content in a meaningful way, how you can show progress, how you can show value for that content.

The other thing to know is that content doesn’t really fit into any one silo of a traditional organizational structure. Everybody has ownership of it, and everybody really wants to be a part of it. Or, in some cases, nobody wants it.

But it doesn’t fit anywhere yet. Some organizations are starting to have a place for it, but there will always be a sort of territorial pull on content. Because everybody feels like they can do it and they have a stake in it.

So those are the two big things, I would say, that are important to understand about strategy in business. Is that you have to help align those stakeholders on those ideas, so that you can real strategic progress. Otherwise, you’ll fall back into tactics really easily.

Randall: Yeah, yeah. So how do you do it? How do you, for example, tie content to some business goals as in showing progress or measuring content?

Melissa: Well, we try to help. First of all, the first things we do are first define actually what content means, because that means something different in every organization. Oftentimes in our practice we do wind up helping them, they may come to us with, we want the content for XYZ channel, and we will back them out of it. OK, let’s talk about your business goals, and let’s put some content goals together that are actually things that content can achieve.

And so, we actually spend a lot of time in our practice backing up with the clients and saying, right, stop. Let’s look at your whole landscape. Let’s figure out what content can actually do that we can measure going forward.

So, even from the very beginning of the project we try and set up that as a goal and try and set up that environment. Then we try and break up the content, things that content is supposed to do, its function, into very small chunks that can be measured in different ways.

And we try and get people to look at not just something like search channel analytics or analytics on a website. But combine that with user research and expert opinions and things like that. So that we can really make a solid case for something that people sometimes think are subjective.

Randall: Do you find that there’s any resistance to that? Do people come to you expecting you just to create content for them? Or are they really happy to embrace this looking at content strategically?

Melissa: We’re working on our own marketing plan at Brain Traffic right now, so we’ve been looking at the different kinds of clients we have and their profiles and things like that. If you looked at maybe three or four years ago, people would come to us with, here’s the content we need to create, please create it for us. And we’d sort of have to talk them up and back into strategy.

And now I think we are, at Brain Traffic, in a really luxury position that people are coming to us and saying, look, you can content strategy. First of all, tell us sort of what that and then help us do it. We understand the concept, we want it to happen in our organization. We need it to happen.

So we are probably at a position that is not normal …

… where people give in to us and ask us for that strategic work first. But there’s still 40 percent of the clients that come to us with something specifically tactical in mind.

One thing that I think is really interesting is that as content strategy grows we’re having more clients coming to us saying, here’s the content strategy we made, can you look at it? Is it good? And if it is, then can you do some tactical things for us?

Randall: Which is pretty exciting, because they’re doing it themselves and trying to start that on their own, and some of them are really good. And in that case, yeah, sure, we’ll help you with the next level of strategic planning that goes with it.

Randall: I think that should give everyone hope.

Melissa: Yeah, it’s very cool to see.

Randall: Yeah. Was that recent, or have you been seeing that in the last year, the last two years, the last month?

Melissa: Yeah, it’s really come on strong probably since Christmas this year, so the last six months.

Randall: That’s really interesting.

Melissa: Yeah.

Randall: So how did you become the Vice President of Brain Traffic?

Melissa: There are actually two of us, Vice Presidents, at Brain Traffic. There’s me, I’m the head of the content strategy team, and then there’s Julie Vollenweider, she’s sort of head of client services and things like that. But I have been doing content work since I was at university, so I’ve been doing it for a really long time. I think probably in 2004, 2005, Kristina Halvorson and I were both independent freelancers. She might have had an employee or two at that time, I can’t remember exactly. But we were both pretty small companies here in Minneapolis. And Minneapolis has an enormous number of creative agencies.

So we were kind of the go-to girls in town for content stuff, and we were pretty friendly competitors. When she was on maternity leave, I watched over some of her clients. If I had too many clients, I’d recommend them to her, that kind of thing. So we knew each other, and we were pretty friendly about it.

And a few years later, I had a baby who was born pretty prematurely, so I took some time off. And eventually, when I came back, I decided, you know what? I’m starting my business again. Kristina’s like, “No, don’t do that. Come work here instead.” And she told me what she wanted Brain Traffic to become, and the rest is really history. So, like, three years ago, and so much for motherhood ruining careers. It actually really helped me out [laughs] .

Randall: So you’ve been there since nearly the very beginning of the company, is that right?

Melissa: It depends where you consider the beginning for Brain Traffic. Kristina had the company open, I can’t remember exactly, maybe 2000, 2001? But she really decided in the summer of 2007, I think? Yes, it must be 2007 or early 2008 she was going to really make it into a content strategy agency. She wanted to have a real, fully-functioning agency, instead of a coalition of content creators. So, I think I’m employee number six or something. Yes, there was a big hiring boom right that summer that I joined.

Randall: That’s such a lovely birth of a company story, because it involves friendship and babies.

Melissa: I know. If we could only get puppies and kittens in there, it’d be even better.

Randall: So, can you tell me about a project that you’re working on now, or that you have worked on that is particularly interesting?

Melissa: Well, I guess the best thing about being the VP is that I get to be involved in all of the projects at Brain Traffic. So it’s hard to pick just one, and all of our clients now don’t let us talk about them. But some of the things that we’re doing right now, there’s one strategist that’s working on some really extraordinary measurements for cards. I have another team working on a project focused exclusively on workflow and governance, so if the people ask, how content gets created within the organization. And that’s another trend we’re seeing a lot of, of people being a lot more interested in that workflow, and overall management of their strategies.

And we have a lot of projects based on traditional, what’s the content mix, what should be on the site, how should it be accessed? That kind of stuff. I think my favorite projects are the ones that encompass all of those things.

The last several years, we’ve worked for a really large company in Europe, actually, luckily for us, that is curating a huge reference site for doctors. And that one, they just let us go crazy and start with the strategic of content mix, curation, localization, the whole thing. And it’s just so much fun.

Randall: Cool, and you got to go to Europe.

Melissa: Yes, I got to go to Europe a lot. And I have to say that European organizations, we love our European clients, because they are a bit more amenable to content strategy, at least the fiscal aspect of it [laughs] .

Randall: Would it be fair to say that you come from a marketing background?

Melissa: I’m kind of a mix, career-wise. I was a journalist and a web person, but yes, I did spend several years at a company that did marketing and business strategy, and those years were extremely influential. So, yes, probably.

Randall: How do you see marketing fitting in with content strategy?

Melissa: The relationship between the two is really complex today. They sort of overlap. But I see a lot of people trying to force content strategy into marketing, or marketing into content strategy. And I don’t think that really works. Like I said, I think they more overlap with each other. And maybe within a specific organization, one may live inside the other, but how they work together in any particular organization depends on a lot of stuff. What does marketing mean there, or what’s the purpose of the content? Is the content a product that marketing needs to come out? Or is the content part of the promotional strategy? Is it data that lives behind the scenes? People often think of marketing and content strategy, or content in general as simply part of promotions and communications, and both of them are so much bigger than that. So it’s hard to pin it down exactly. So, kind of a non-answer, but…

Randall: But you think it helps your content strategy work, having such a knowledge of marketing.

Melissa: Yes, I think it does, actually, and business strategy almost as much. Because we need to know how content strategy plays with its nearest neighbors in the organization, and those that have marketing business strategy, and a lot of times technology, are the places that that is useful. You need to know what their goals are, and where they’re coming from.

Randall: So, here’s a broad question. What was it like working in the Internet industry in the 90s?

Melissa: It was ridiculous in so many ways, quite honestly. I’m really glad I lived through it, you know? It was just an industry of 20-year-old who we’re showered with money, and we got to do what we wanted. And we had these swank offices. At one point at one of the companies, we had a chef that made us lunch. We had constant gains. When Google came out, at the very beginning of Google your ex, where it was like, find your ex-boyfriends or girlfriends online, and you got points for it and stuff [laughs] . I think the pinnacle of ridiculousness that I can remember, probably around 1998, was flat-screen TVs — I don’t even know if that’s what they were called then — but when the big, flat, TV-like things first came out, our boss just decided to have all these salesmen come in and put all of these giant TVs around us. And we literally made these poor salesmen duel it out by watching the trailers for Star Wars Episode I, which had not come out yet. Little did we know that both Episode I and the age of Xbox were both doomed.

Randall: That’s so funny.

Melissa: For a content person it was hard, though, because we got very little respect at that time. Certainly tooth and nail to be included in the projects. I remember being told that a writer couldn’t be an information architect, because only technologists could do that. So I learned to code. I mean, that was sort of the way it was. You always had to get around it to get content involved. And I always used to sadly print out articles from Nick Osborne and Anne Rockley, and put them on my cube just to prove that I wasn’t the only one! I wasn’t the only one.

Randall: Is there anything you learned from those years that you use now on a daily basis?

Melissa: Yes, a couple things. Being able to always operate in evolution and in uncertainty. Because it’s very similar to the way it feels now in that respect for content strategy, is that so many things are happening at once, and it’s changing month-to-month about what it is that you do. And having to take that as a benefit, and take that as something that’s exciting and extraordinary, instead of being about sort of painful, I think was a good lesson to learn.

Randall: That’s great. So, my final question is a request, really, if you could give our listeners a sneak peek of what you’ll be talking about in September.

Melissa: Well, you guys have asked me to speak about methodology, which I love to talk about, but you’ve only given me 20 minutes [laughs] . I think a couple years ago, I documented the Brain Traffic methodology, and I had like 500 line items. We won’t go through that.

Randall: We could just read all those line items.

Melissa: You know, like an auctioneer, as fast as I can. No, I plan to sort of talk about the universal aspects, the basic strategic principles that anyone can use on a content strategy project to sort of develop their own methodology in the way they work. To me, the truth is, there are no real rules in content strategy. There’s no things that you must do. If there were it would stop being strategic, and stop being fun. I think if you have some basic strategic principles that you can sort of keep in your back pocket, it will help you develop the methodology that works for you.

So that’s really my goal of the things to talk about. So, how do you know when you’re in this strategy phase, and how do you know how to vet out your strategy, and how to make it so that it gets implemented in the real world. But 20 minutes will be a bit high-level.

One of the things we learned at conferences is that people really do want tangible takeaways they can use. So I hope to have some of those in there that’s something that you can write down and take home and use tomorrow.

Randall: Well, cool. I’m really looking forward to it, as I’m sure lots of people are. And thanks again, Melissa, for talking to me. It’s been really fun.

Melissa: Thank you. It was fun to talk you about this stuff.

That was episode 10 of the CS Forum podcast, featuring Melissa Rach. You can subscribe to future episodes at csforum.eu. Don’t forget to register for the conference by 29 July, using code PODCAST10 to save £50 off standard rates.

This article was originally published at gerrymcgovern.com on 16 March 2009.

The Microsoft Office Online content team has found poor quality content to be like weeds in a garden. Left unchecked it smothers the quality content.

If you work on the Web you live in a culture of content production. It’s all about the creation and publishing of content. The web team has the skills to create content, to create images, to create webpages, to create HTML, to use the content management software to publish all this stuff. The web team is a creation unit, a production unit.

Most web teams have little capacity to review and remove. They know how to put pages up but many don’t know how to remove one. In fact, some content management software packages make it extremely difficult to remove a webpage even if you want to.

To review and remove is counter-intuitive for most organizations. If you ask people to remove pages you will hear replies such as:

• “I’m sure some users will use it.”
• “Taking things away isn’t the right thing to do. We should fix them.”
• “OK, they are not useful, but surely there is no harm in just leaving it there?”

It is estimated that the Microsoft.com website has about 10 million pages and that some 3 million of them have never been visited. That means that there are almost as many webpages that nobody has ever visited as there are people in Ireland.

The Microsoft Office Online team decided to take a different approach. They began to remove clearly irrelevant pages. They removed very minor pages from the search index. They removed links for minor pages from webpages. And through all this they began to focus on the top tasks that most people were coming to the Excel website to complete.

By weeding the garden, the top task pages became easier to find. But just as importantly it became harder to find a minor task page when you were looking for a top task page. For example, by analyzing traffic patterns and customer feedback, a clear problem with the “Remove conditional formatting page” was identified. It seems that a great many people who arrived at the page wanted a general how-to for conditional formatting.

So, the team got rid of the “Remove conditional formatting” page. What was left was a page called “Format text in a variety of ways based on conditions.” This page contained comprehensive information about applying, removing, and changing conditional formatting. Customer satisfaction shot up.

The larger point here is that the team is measuring success based on the success of their customers. They are taking a ‘fact, not opinion’ approach to web management. Many of their techniques do not require big budgets or extensive technology investments. What they do require is a culture of service.

Websites fail when they focus on the content or the technology. We must instead focus relentlessly on our customers’ top tasks. We must measure success based on our customers’ ability to quickly and easily complete these top tasks.

20 countries, 5 continents

London is one of the most diverse cities in the world (we speak more than 300 languages). Unless you work for the United Nations—more on that in a second—CS Forum might be the most international conference you’ve ever attended.

You’ve heard about our 39 speakers from 11 countries, right? Well, you’ll get to meet even more people from around the world. Our registered attendees come from 20 countries, across 5 continents:

• Europe
  • Austria
  • Belgium
  • Denmark
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Iceland
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Luxembourg
  • Netherlands
  • Norway
  • Sweden
  • Switzerland
  • UK
• North America
  • USA
  • Canada
• Asia
  • India
• Africa
  • South Africa
• Oceania
  • Australia

Companies and organisations

This is a conference for people who work in-house for organisations as much as it’s for consultants and agency people. We have attendees from a diverse range of industries, from the smallest one-person shop to mega-corporations. Check out a few companies that are attending CS Forum:

• AKQA, California
• American Express, Florida
• Arup, UK
• Aviva Insurance Europe, Ireland
• City University, London
• Christie’s, New York
• Facebook, California
• Fidelity International Ltd, UK
• Government Digital Service (UK Government)
• Harvard Law School, Massachusetts
• Hewlett Packard, Netherlands
• HSBC USA, USA
• Icelandair, Iceland
• iCrossing, Brighton
• IG Group, London
• Investec, London
• Kohler Co., Wisconsin
• LBi, London
• Luxembourg Bankers’ Association, Luxembourg
• MORE TH>N (insurance), UK
• Nokia, Finland
• Paddy Power, Ireland
• PayPal, California
• Pearson Education, UK
• Profero, London
• Razorfish, New York
• Research in Motion, Canada
• Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, UK
• The Royal Society, London
• Transport Scotland (Scottish Government)
• TUI Travel, UK
• Sage, UK
• United Nations, Geneva
• University of Bath
• uSwitch, UK
• Videojug, London
• Vodafone, Netherlands
• Wellcome Trust, London
• XING, Germany

The only thing missing is…you

If you haven’t registered yet, now’s your chance. Get in while you can, because this conference is only coming to London once. It’s now or never.

Pass it on

If you’re already signed up, you still have some homework. Email, tweet, Facebook, or Google+ five people who you think should come to this conference. Yes, five. Do it for their career, for your enjoyment, for the good of the content strategy community. Web users will thank you for years to come.

This really isn’t about making an effective content strategy. We know that that can get done. The problem is once you have it, can you implement it? The challenge of implementation is a management challenge; it’s not a technical, tactical or editorial challenge.

Listen now

Download the MP3, or subscribe in iTunes.

Transcript

This is episode 9 of the CS Forum podcast. I’m Jonathan Kahn, and today I’m talking to Lisa Welchman, who’s one of our invited speakers at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London.

The Forum is from the 5th to the 7th of September in central London. That’s three days of presentations, workshops, and parties. We’re featuring 39 speakers from 11 countries, and attendees have already registered from as far away as Bangalore, Melbourne, and San Francisco. Find out more at csforum.eu and register using code PODCAST09 by the 18th of July to save £50 off standard rates.

Jonathan Kahn: Joining me today from Baltimore is Lisa Welchman. Lisa is the world’s leading thinker on web governance and strategy. Through her consultancy work, she acts as a web therapist, helping executives understand and embrace the revolutionary changes to business that the web has created. Her clients include the World Bank, Thompson Writers, Research in Motion, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Lisa is going to be joining us at the Content Strategy Forum in London to speak, so we’re very excited about that.

So Lisa, welcome and thanks so much for joining me today.

Lisa Welchman: Thanks for having me.

Jonathan: I’d like to start with your e-book, which is…. how do you pronounce it? “The Digital Deca”?

Lisa: Yes, that sounds perfect.

Jonathan: It’s an e-book, which I really would recommend. If anyone doesn’t know about Lisa, this is the first thing I think you should look at. It’s on your website and it’s this PDF beautifully designed and it’s just got these 10 key points for managers and people in corporations to kind of understand some of the issues you’re dealing with in your consultancy work. So I’ve just picked up a quote to get us started for your book, from that little book, which is this. “Most organizations address low web quality by redesigning their website or installing expensive infrastructure technology. The real reason your website keeps falling into disrepair is because your organization’s management practices don’t align with the 21st century business dynamic.”

Could you just tell us what you mean by that?

Lisa: Sure. Usually if the phone’s going to ring here, it’s one of two things. Either we try to implement some technology and we couldn’t, or we tried to do a whole scale website redesign and we couldn’t. That’s usually how people begin to understand that they have some sort of governance-related problem. So the piece about not aligning the 21st century business dynamic is, I think, that folks have underestimated from a management perspective how much digital has impacted the organization itself.

We know that people communicate differently; we know about social, we know about all of these various channels that have opened up. But I think folks really underestimate how much business change and organizational and process change needs to occur.

It’s not just a reorganizing or figuring out where the web team sits in your organization, or do we need a chief content officer, or do we need a chief web officer? It’s not really about that. It’s really about business isn’t going to be done as usual anymore and that there’s going to be a new normal. And if those are the sorts of changes that executives have to initiate and put into place, it can’t really be effectively done from out of the web team.

So that’s really what my intention is; that is, trying to give a wake-up call to executives and help them understand that they have a key role to play in getting their organizations aligned for the digital age.

Jonathan: Cool. So that kind of takes me to my question that I’ve pulled out which is “The web changed the rules not just for the way that you communicate with your customers, partners, employees or the way that you process transactions or disseminate data, but for your entire business.” That’s a quote from your book. If someone is calling you because their redesign failed, are they ready to hear that their root of their whole business has been changed?

Lisa: Well, I think the answer is no. They’re not really ready to hear that. I think more importantly, they’re probably not in a position to do much about it.

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: And so even if they are the senior-most web person in the organization, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the power or the clout to enact corporate-wide changes. Some people have thought that means “Oh. Well then we really need a chief web officer or a chief content officer so that those changes can be enacted,” but I would challenge that. I’ve worked with some clients that do need a role like that, but it’s because of a business reason. It’s not because of a deficit in the way that the company’s being managed. I think that’s one of the challenges for web folks. I also feel that most web and digital and content people aren’t really mature enough from a management perspective to get that work done at that very executive level.

It’s really one thing to know a lot about content or to know a lot about technology, and quite another thing to understand how to run an organization and the types of tradeoffs and changes and strategies that take place.

So it’s a deep and rich problem and I think we’re going to be dealing with it for the next 10, 15, 20 years as we watch businesses turn and as we watch the demographic change. When we get this kind of digital native population deeply into management roles in large organizations I think a lot of this will turn naturally. It’ll be very interesting to watch.

Jonathan: Right. So it’s a bit of a longer term change piece.

Lisa: Sure.

Jonathan: Cool. So I just want to read three more things out for people to hear from this e-book. These are just three statements that I just wondered if you could talk about. These are three of the ten. “The organization owns the web presence,” “The web is an asset,” and “Standards enable collaboration.”

Lisa: The organization owns the web presence – is my kind of smack-back response to people who say to me, “Well, who owns the web?” Communications owns it, marketing owns it, IT owns it. Who’s going to own it? The reality is – it is, and the whole point of “The Digital Deca” for me is your web presence or your digital presence is a manifestation of your organization. It’s a digital manifestation of your organization. It’s owned by the organization and certain people are fortunate enough to be able work on it. It’s not owned by communications or marketing or anyone like that.

The web is an asset is – really the idea that people really think of it as a cost center. “What is it costing me?” as opposed to realizing what an enabling force it can be and that most organizations understand that they have to have a digital presence but they’re not understanding it as something that can actually perform for the organization, unless it’s something obvious like e-commerce, but just really deeply understanding how much it can be a business asset.

And then, Standards enable collaboration – which is probably my favorite of all The Digital Deca and the one that I talk about nonstop is just a remembering for those of us who work in the web world to understand that the worldwide web itself is a standards-based platform. The fact that its standard based is what enables us to collaborate so successfully and so quickly.

When you think about how deeply and how quickly the web took hold in parts of the world that have Internet connectivity, it’s really staggering. So when people don’t want to have content standards or they don’t want to have other sorts of standards related to the web because they somehow think it’s stifling, I remind them that a standards-based framework, properly placed and implemented and enforced is really the way to get a lot of significant and deep work done.

Jonathan: One of the first resistances I get when I talk about web governance is that, some people hear web governance as being top-down, like some guy at the top giving orders and everyone has just to fulfill them; otherwise they get fired. I know that’s not what you really mean by web governance. Is that linked to the standards-enabled collaboration that if we can all agree on appropriate standards for the work we’re doing, then we’ll stop fighting and we’ll be able to actually use our skills appropriately?

Lisa: That’s exactly right. I think the fear is that if you say governance, the fear for web people is that, if you say governance that some executive who doesn’t know anything about digital is going to start making crazy rules and that you’re going to have to follow them. But I’ve never really seen that happen. Yes, I’ve seen some executives pick a bad web content management system on the golf course with a buddy who said, “We have this,” or something like that.

But the reality is, I’ve never seen it happen at all. In fact, frequently executives are waiting for the digital team to perform more maturely. It’s fascinating when they come up and say, “We want to do a standards-based framework.” They almost think, “Well, we thought this was what we had already.”

So, I think there’s a disconnection there on some real room of opportunity.

Jonathan: Yeah. I think that the other thing is; if your executives don’t, if they feel that they don’t get it, they don’t get technology or they don’t get the web or communication, they probably trust you more than you think. Whether or not they’re empowered to do what they need to do, the web people tend to have actually quite a lot of trust, because they hold the keys.

Lisa: Sure. Most executives believe that the web team is probably doing the best that they can. They’re not as engaged with the digital channels and website or whatever and a lot of folk, particularly content people and technologists, can be really cynical about this. But a CEO is not going to spend all day on your corporate website. They have people that they pay to actually make sure that functions properly. And so, I think in many instances, people don’t like it when I say this – in many instances, people who work in digital actually from a management perspective are very immature. You have a lot of individual contributors who are savvy about what they do, but not savvy about how to get stuff done in a corporate environment or in a large organization where the types of negotiations or business cases that need to be developed in order to get things to happen.

I’m hoping, in the next five years as the demographics of people who have worked on the web grows as well – a lot of people started working on the web straight out of college and have been at it for 15 years. So as those people get older and more mature and hoping that they understand that they need to augment their skills with management skills; so that they can actually start driving the business processes that they need to in order to have this work in a more mature way.

Jonathan: Yeah. I want to come back to that, but let me talk about how this relates to content strategy.

Lisa: Sure.

Jonathan: I want to take you first to talk about this title that I’ve seen you recently given yourself which is “Web Therapist.” I think this links to my question earlier on. I said, “Are people ready to hear what you have to say when they call you?” and you said, “No.” So, why do you call yourself a web therapist and what type of things do you do to help people move towards accepting their reality or whatever the first stage is?

Lisa: Well, I call myself a web therapist because some content people told me I should. [laughter]

Lisa: I said, for years that I feel like a web therapist because it’s sort of the same lamenting call that I get all the time. So, I put it up on the website because people really resonated from that, even though I thought it sounded kind of goofy. This is the reason why I think organizations need web therapy, or why I feel as if I act as a web therapist. A lot of folks are really in denial about really what it’s going to take to get this thing moving the right way.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Lisa: It’s really sad. I’ve watched organizations spend millions of dollars, turn over head count, hire people, in order to avoid the truth.

Lisa: They have to make a lot of really tough management calls or that their web presence is irreparably broken; and maybe they need to start all over again. Or that……There’s just a list of ‘or’. In some cases, if I’m talking with a digital person – whether they’re technology focused or content focused – they might be the problem. There are a lot of control freak technologists and content people.

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: Who really believe that they have the solution, that they alone have! They call me and they say – I want you to put in a governance framework that’s going to tell everybody that I’m in charge.

Jonathan: ….which links the other scary piece. Going and talking to the different departments and listening to them and all that…

Lisa: Yes. Exactly!

Jonathan: When I suggest that, people look like I’m threatening to kill them or something like that. They’re just petrified.

Lisa: Yeah. They don’t want you to talk. So, that’s the therapeutic aspect of it. Going around a kind of messed up corporate family and interviewing everybody. And then kind of teeing it up and saying – look, here’s what’s going on.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: What do you want to do about this? There’s some best practicing things that we can recommend. In some instances people may feel like…., well, that’s just the way we work and we don’t want to change. Then I help them to understand – you’re always going to get this result.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: So you might as well figure out a way to live with it. Because there’s no magic button where people are going to, all of a sudden, start to behave differently; unless you put things in place that are going to force that to happen, in most instances.

Jonathan: Isn’t there always a need to actually own some mistakes? So often I’m in a situation where someone has spent a very large amount of effort and money on a piece of technology. You can’t really keep on denying that, that was a bit of a mistake if you’re going to do a better job next time.

Lisa: Sure. Web teams aren’t 100 percent clean, and some of it’s just a maturity curve. I try to really put it in that context so that people don’t feel like I’m dumping on them. We all implemented crazy content management systems. Overly personalized portal technology where nobody’s going to fill out the form in order to get.

Jonathan: Absolutely. I call it fantasies.

Lisa: Yeah.

Jonathan: Like, let’s have a fantasy of how it could work. Most of us have spent most of our careers doing that and not really seeing that it didn’t quite deliver on our hopes.

Lisa: But more importantly I think, we’ve spent most of our careers doing that and not having to be accountable for the bad consequences.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Lisa: So, in other more mature areas of the business… If you had a consistent stream of failures or less than optimal outcomes, you might have actually lost your job. Or not been on an upward curve in terms of promotions and that sort of thing. I’m not saying that people do these things deliberately. But we’ve kind of been living in a very, it’s not a fantasy world but a charmed world, where we’ve been allowed. Because the digital channels were so immature and nobody really knew a right way to do anything, to kind of play around.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: Now we’re really getting into big dollars, and we do understand best practices. And so, now it’s at the point where we have to understand and look back and say. Now, from a maturity perspective, that was like the leading edge, bleeding edge, coming into maturity piece. And now we’re really at the point where we have to figure out, what does it mean to operate your web presence maturely? And try and work with management in order to make that happen; instead of intentionally operating things like the Wild West.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: People will criticize me for that, because they think I’m against rapid application development or R&D, and that’s not true. It’s just that everything can’t run like that. There are aspects of your digital presence that are fully operationalized and that you can kind of manage in that way. There are other aspects of it that need to be able to react more quickly. And you just need to make sure that you have a framework in place so that you can take care of all of that stuff.

Jonathan: Sure. I want to ask you specifically about your core areas of web strategy and web governance and what they actually are. Because I think most people can probably be helped by getting a bit of a handle on what you mean. I just noticed that people have been talking about web strategy for a little while. But they normally mean, what’s the reason for this specific website to exist? And I think your idea of web strategy might be a little bit broader than that. So, could you explain what it means to you?

Lisa: Sure. For our website and how we talk about our services, over the last year I’ve started to put the word ‘corporate’ in front of it. Because I think it just crystallizes a little bit.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: So, our sense of web strategy is a corporate web strategy. Why does your organization have a digital presence? What are its values and relationships to that digital presence? How are you ensuring that your organization can actually get web work done? So that’s really got nothing to do with how many sites you have. What’s your social media strategy? What’s the content strategy? When I’m talking about that, I’m looking for guiding principles, which is kind of like a mission statement for digital. Then I’m looking for this thing that we call formalization of authority.

Jonathan: Yeah. So what’s that mean?

Lisa: Formalization of authority is actually ensuring that there are three things working. One of them is that you actually have a governance framework in place. So, who makes decisions about digital? Not, what are the decisions, but who makes the decisions?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: Who makes the decisions about content? Who makes the decisions about taxonomy? About, if you’re going to buy a portal system, what technology might that be? Search, network and server infrastructure, load balancing. There’s this full range of very editorially focused to very, very technology focused decisions that need to get made. Who gets to decide those things? So, do you have a framework for that?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: And do you have appropriate policy in place and standards? For us, policy and standards are two really distinct things. And I know, on different sides of the Atlantic and within any organization, those two words can be exchanged. But when we talk about policy, I’m talking about risk mitigating, compliance focused. We don’t want to get sued. We want to operate within the bounds of the law.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: So, security, data, privacy, all of that sort of thing, as well as content focused ones. Standards are specific protocols for what your digital channels look like and sound like. Taste, content strategy components would go in there. Metadata of various architectural components that could be a rich set. So that’s the governance piece. We want to make sure that you know how all that happens.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: So that’s really, really different than saying, here’s how many times you’re going to update your content every month. So, this is making sure that the organization’s enabled to do that. The second piece of the governance formalization of authority piece for us has to do with execution. And that really has to do with understanding. Where is the web team? How do they get paid? How are they structured and what’s the dynamic of that? And, even more broadly, what’s your strategy for execution? Do you outsource development, or does it happen in house, or is it a little bit of both? Do you have an agency of record, do you not?

Do you have a central web team as a hub? And they act as consultants to everyone else and set standards and you’ve got webmasters throughout? Or are they all centrally? There’s a strategy for your organization where that works. So that’s execution.

Then the last piece of formalization of authority which is really huge is about measurement. That does really understand not just analytics and user experience, but the business measurement.

How much are you spending on digital? What’s the return on investment? It’s shocking that many organizations have no idea about how much they spend on their digital channel. It’s just appalling.

Jonathan: Someone was telling me recently that their KPIs were like bounce rates on the home page and that type of thing. Sort of, stuff you can find in the analytics package. So what do you do and where should they be, is my question.

Lisa: Well, obviously you should talk about key success factors and key performance indicators as well. I find the measurement piece of it is the last one that comes, because the rest of it’s so out of control.

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: So obviously, I call what you just described backwards analytics. I’ll go into an organization and they’ll say, this is the most important page because it gets the most hits. And you’re just kind of like… So, therefore, our organization should have the most money. Or, we should own the web. I’m not kidding. These are big, mature companies. They come at it like this.

The real litmus test for me is, can you state an objective related to a digital initiative?

What type of business change or process are you trying to drive and impact? What kind of quantitative impact, where you’re going to measure, and then implement the thing and see if you’re successful? So, those performance indicators are very unique and specific to an organization.

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: I’m sure there’s some general rules we can come up with, if we sat down and thought about it. But as a general rule, people aren’t thinking about that in a very mature way. I think that the measurement piece of it, unfortunately, is the one that comes after the governance and execution. But there’s so much noise about, where’s the web team in the organization? Where is it housed? And even more noise about who decides stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: There’s so much noise about that; that the idea of talking about measurement in a sophisticated way usually gets pushed to the wayside. And that’s too bad; because I think, particularly if people who are working in the digital arena and usually have hold of the analytics software. They could use analytics data to build a business case of why the digital team needs to be staffed differently. There are all kinds of ways that that could be used.

Jonathan: Yeah, right. But there is no other way to do it really, because otherwise you’re always going back to…

Lisa: Subjective.

Jonathan: …we need to do this right. Well, I think if there’s no business case behind it, it’s related to a real KPI to do the actual business itself. Then you just sound like people with obsessive compulsive disorder saying, it has to be done this way. We’re web geeks, and it has to be done our way.

Lisa: Or you get, depending on who’s driving, whether it’s IT folks and less and less they drive the car.

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: And more marketing-communications focused people.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: I love marketing and communications focused people. But they’re not really analytics driven, except when it relates to sales numbers. So, just this idea that it can get very subjective over in that corner, is a cultural thing. And people in marketing-communications, public affairs; they have to react to events that happen so quickly. So there’s some of that, you’ve got to fly by the seat of your pants.

Jonathan: Sure.

Lisa: When you have that dynamic kind of driving the web, the idea of measuring or having a mature sense of measurement doesn’t always rise to the top. Of course, marketing people know how to measure. It’s just, what are you measuring and why, and in particular the operational efficiencies. A marketing communication person may be focused on the external dynamic of digital, but they might completely miss the fact that you could save millions per year by creating an operational efficiency for the intranet, via the intranet internally.

Jonathan: By wasting like Gerry McGovern would say, by wasting people’s time less.

Lisa: Yes, exactly. And so, it’s very fascinating. I am a big proponent of the standalone web team because I really feel that I’m saying web and digital almost interchangeably now, but I think that that competency is not unique in that over special so give us a crown but unique in that it’s this sense of synthesis of technology and communication skills. And so, if you talk to a pure play marketing person, that doesn’t mean they know web, and if you talk to someone who knows to roll out and install search engine software, it doesn’t mean they understand search. There’s this ground in the middle where I really think there’s a role for professionalization of digital key staff, and I would really like to participate in and see a push in that area so that these teams can stand alone in all of their left and right brain grandeur.

Jonathan: I’ve got two things that I want to talk to you before we finish. One of them is, about where the content strategy can be a starter drug to some of the stuff you’re talking about, and the second one is, what the career choice is right now for web professionals. I wonder if we can try and mix that together. There’s been a lot attention about content strategy in the last couple of years. One of the reasons for that is people realize, for example, in social media it doesn’t really get you very far if you don’t have a plan for creating publishing and governing content. Where do you see the relationship between what people are calling content strategy and the corporate web strategy and governance that you’ve been talking about?

Lisa: I’ve thought about this a lot because I have been thinking about the talk for the Content Strategy Forum in September and thinking about, well, how do these two relate? Content governance, in particular, is something that’s not particularly new in that the sense of having what we’re all calling content strategy is fairly old. I think it’s great that it’s getting a lot of visibility right now, but it’s not… and this is where I get smacked on the head again, it’s not the key driver, right?

Jonathan: The driver? OK.

Lisa: So, having an effective content strategy and having an effective approach to content governance is key, but probably solving that problem isn’t… you can probably solve that problem outside of the context of fixing your corporate web governance strategy. I think you could potentially use it as sort of a poster child of how things go well if you have rules and regulations, but it’s probably not going to reach out unless you impact corporate policy or that sort of thing. That said, depending on the resources, you could escalate these concerns if you wanted to.

Jonathan: I think it’s a very clear demonstration of what’s broken.

Lisa: Yeah.

Jonathan: When we haven’t got a content strategy, that’s not because people are stupid or incompetent or any of those things. And so, why is it? It’s something you can point to and that people can really understand, I think.

Lisa: I think that’s a good way of putting it. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think that’s true. I think you could say, here is an example of an impact of not having good decision marking about content. What they might then say is then fix that.

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: It may not necessarily lead to them saying – well we have this bigger governance problem. And so, what we really need are the technologists to come out of the window, the IT side to come out and say, do you realize that we spent $18 million over the last three years on redundant technologies. Now that might get them to pay attention.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: If you could somehow quantify the money you spend with what happens from a dollar perspective or effectiveness or how it’s raising risk for the organization, which you can do. We’ve done that with clients. You use examples of redundant or contradictory content on a website and put it down in front of an executive, it horrified them. And that’s got them to go, oh, wait, we’ve got to fix this, right?

Jonathan: Which is what your eBook does as well?

Lisa: What? horrifies people? [laughs]

Jonathan: No, no. It says, the cartoon guy says, hang around. Don’t leave my website. You haven’t gone to all of my 8 content silos.

Lisa: Right.

Jonathan: You could characterize that as a content strategy problem in terms of the impact of it on, say, a customer or some business metric. The cause is unknown. If I show you a website with a content problem, you don’t know the cause until you have time with the organization, right?

Lisa: That’s right. And so, I think that’s really where the analytics come in as well and where there is power for people who work with these tools and with the content which is being able to quantify that.

Jonathan: Yes.

Lisa: And presenting that to executives… That’s going to get them to pay attention because that’s what their job is. Their job isn’t to be really specific about content and get emotional about content.

Jonathan: No.

Lisa: Their job is to protect the organization, make sure that you’re maximizing, meeting your mission, maximizing profit if you’re for profit, getting more members if you’re non-profit and more donations, and let’s stay out of the courthouse. And that’s what they’re paid so much money to do.

Jonathan: So we’ve got to speak in that language.

Lisa: That’s right.

Jonathan: This is my final work style question. How can the person who is a web professional, like a web manager or writer or something, start to address some of the issues you’ve been talking about here without becoming a management consultant, if that is possible?

Lisa: I think we just alluded to one of them. Here’s the thing. When you’re in the trenches, it’s a really different story than when you’re sitting outside like I am. I have been in the trenches. I sort of cut my teeth on Cisco.com for four years, and it made a huge difference, so I have some perspective of what it’s like to be in that. I think the thing that you have to realize is that it’s going to be very difficult to change the corporate dynamic, so kind of taking the rose colored glasses off and really understanding what’s going on in your organization, it’s clearer. The second thing that I always say to people all the time is get a sponsor.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: There’s someone in your organization who’s more senior in your organization than you who can listen to you and also start to coach you about how to interact in the organization. So, tactically content strategy, there are lots of books now written about content strategy and approaches that people can take. This really isn’t about making an effective content strategy. We know that that can get done. The problem is once you have it, can you implement it?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: And so, the challenge of implementation is a management challenge; it’s not a technical, tactical or editorial challenge. As I mentioned, I’ve seen a lot of good information architect wireframes, content strategies that can’t be implemented because of political dynamics. I would say the thing you need to do is get someone to help you understand how to do basic management things and how to negotiate internally. Make a business case and impact the organization at that level. That’s what it’s going to take. I always say in meetings, I always feel like I’m talking to a subset of people. Some people will always want to be individual contributors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can be a very strategic senior individual and contributor. You can be the best content strategist on the planet. It doesn’t mean that you can get someone to fund your project, right?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: If you’re the type of person that wants to get people to fund things, you might need to think about moving into management which means you might have to step away from your fundamental love of what you do. That’s a real career decision for people, and it’s not for everyone. So, I think really understanding where you are in that mix and who you want to be. I also say we’re always criticizing management and senior executives.

Jonathan: Yes, we are.

Lisa: Knowing so little about digital. We know so little about management.

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: And how an organization gets run and the budgeting mechanisms and all of those other things. So, get an education.

Jonathan: Yeah. Fantastic! I think that’s fantastic advice. Great! I’ve got one closing question for you which is you were featured in the New York Times, and they said you’re an entrepreneur who stays calm when traveling through meditation. Did you have any tips for people, especially if they’re traveling?

Lisa: Oh, for meditating or for staying calm?

Jonathan: I think, staying…whichever you think.

Lisa: Yeah. I have had a meditation practice for many years, and it really came about because I don’t like to fly.

Jonathan: OK.

Lisa: I’ve since changed because I fly so much. And so, I found bringing the practice into the airport sort of helped to calm me down. I think as far as folks who work in the digital arena and just talking about that kind of softer, more holistic side of myself is I feel like, and this might be kind of a little on the outside, but I feel that those of us who work in the digital arena have a huge opportunity to impact change in the world.

Jonathan: Right.

Lisa: And that we really shouldn’t underestimate the impact of the work that we do, whether or not it’s creating a great intranet that makes people’s work day easier or enables them to actually telecommute so they can be home with their family or be on airplanes less or actually solve problems, either locally or globally in your community that you weren’t able to solve otherwise. And so, one of the things that I hope, as I talk about web professionals maturing and learning more about management, is that we bring some of the hope and possibility of what this technology can bring to the world into us into the management structure as we grow as professionals. And so, that was really part of what that article was about for me was making sure that as you’re moving in your travels, making sure that you keep your value system with you and that becomes part of your work as well because the World Wide Web really was a gift to us.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: And so, I really hope we do good things with it. That’s kind of not directly about meditation but kind of where I am in that space with that.

Jonathan: Fantastic, fantastic! Well, Lisa, thank you so much for your time today.

Lisa: Thank you.

Jonathan: I really appreciate it. I think this is a really, really interesting topic, and people are going to be desperate to hear what you have to say in September, and you’ll be mobbed afterwards, I’m sure.

Lisa: Yeah, I’m desperate to see what I’m going to say, too. I’m working on a new talk, so I think it’s going to be good.

Jonathan: Thank you very much.

Lisa: Thanks.

That was episode 9 of the CS Forum podcast, featuring Lisa Welchman. You can subscribe to future episodes at csforum.eu. Don’t forget to register for the conference by the 18 July, using code PODCAST09 to save £50 off standard rates.

Elizabeth McGuane: Data, Content, and Confab

Elizabeth summarised her Confab presentation in handy 5-minute form (she’s also speaking at CS Forum):

Destry Wion: CS Forum 2011 and Beyond

Our own Destry Wion travelled all the way from Strasbourg to present for 5 minutes about the history and future of CS Forum:

Don’t forget that registration for Content Strategy Forum is still open. If you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for?

Relly Annett-Baker: Love Thy Geeks: Working in and amongst web teams

Relly summarised her Confab presentation in handy 5-minute form (she’s also speaking at CS Forum):

Charlie Peverett: Content strategy for the social web

Charlie gave us a 5-minute preview of his CS Forum presentation:

We’ll be posting the final two talks shortly, so stay tuned. And don’t forget that registration for Content Strategy Forum is still open. Have you told your friends, colleagues, and clients?

When we look beyond compliance, get testing with real users and the people who are actually going to use the website, actually are going to use the content… [accessibility] suddenly goes from just being compliance into a design goal.

Listen now

Download the MP3, or subscribe in iTunes.

Transcript

Destry Wion: Welcome again to another episode in the CS Forum 2011 podcast series. I’m Destry Wion and this is, in fact, the 8th podcast in our series.

If you’ve been listening to our series, then you know each cast offers a discount code that’s good for a limited time, and this one is no different. Register by 1 July 2011 at csforum.eu, using code—podcast08—and get £50 off the standard registration rate. If you can’t use it, make sure somebody else does before July 1st.

Today I’m talking with CS Forum 11 speaker, Richard Ingram, who is making a splash these days with his Content Strategy infographics. Richard is a co-founding brother of Ingserv, a web and accessibility agency in Hastings UK, and a co-organiser of the recently formed London Content Strategy Meetup group, along with Elizabeth McGuane and Jonathan Kahn.

He’s standing by so without further ado, let’s say hello.

Destry Wion: Richard, thank you so much for taking some time with us today.

Richard Ingram: Oh, excellent. Oh, Hello. How are you?

Destry: Yes. How’s the weather in your neck of the woods? Hastings, right?

Richard: Yeah. It’s not too bad, actually. We’ve had one of those days where it’s raining one moment and it’s sunny the next, so I’ve kind of had this Anglepoise lamp which I keep having to turn off and turn on at regular intervals today. So it’s been one of those days.

Destry: Well, we’re getting the same thing over here in France, and I think I know where it’s coming from.

Richard: Yeah.

Destry: Well, Richard, for those people who have not had the pleasure yet, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Richard: Right. Gosh.

Destry: Where do you work? What do you do? How did you fall into this thing, content strategy?

Richard: I work at IngServ, which is a very small web partnership which is made up of three brothers of which I am one. And, like you said, we’re based on the English seaside town of Hastings. Since we sort of first took ourselves seriously, which was about five years ago, we’ve worked with some fantastic clients from many different sectors, public and private. But mostly, mainly, regional development projects. And my personal background is that I actually used to be a computer games journalist.

Destry: Interesting.

Richard: I started writing and reporting for gaming websites in the late 1990s when I was about 16 or 17, which was about the same time I started building websites. And for someone of that age, getting paid to play computer games was quite something. And, for a long while, I guess I considered myself to be a web writer, part information architect. I mean, I was already performing audits, designing site maps, wire frames. But the difference being was that the content was being developed concurrently, mainly because I had a hand in writing it. I suppose, in terms of exposure to content strategy, it began with Rachel Lovinger’s “Boxes and Arrows” article, and I think a lot of people have probably said that over the years. But the main difference is that I read it for the first time I think it was about two years after she’d published it. I mean, there’s always been a tremendous amount of overlap between the project responsibilities of a content strategist and an information architect.

Destry: Absolutely, yeah.

Richard: Because, most of the time, we’re kind of working to solve similar problems, really. And, in fact, this is something that I’ve tried to get across and illustrate in a few of my diagrams. I think the first diagram I did was a collaboration with a content strategist and it was incredible the amount of nodes and arrows that were pointing to the information architect and the flow that went between the two. So, yeah, reading about this discipline called content strategy kind of allowed me to neatly fuse my roles together.

Destry: I see, yeah. Interesting.

Richard: I mean, it’s strange, but I kind of still stop short of calling myself a content strategist. Not really sure why. I suppose it’s because I’m kind of just recently acutely aware of just how long others have been doing this fantastic work for, some people since the late ’90s. And I still kind of feel I’ve got to serve my apprenticeship for a little while longer.

Destry: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

Richard: Yeah, I’m kind of hoping one day I’m going to wake up and feel comfortable with it all, really.

Destry: Right. Well, you’re creating quite a splash these days with your content strategy diagrams, and I really like how they make you think about the relationships between the different fields, like you were talking about. I can understand you’re not comfortable with that label, “content strategist,” but I relate with “information designer,” I consider myself that a little bit. And, in your situation, I really see the data visualization track of information design. Do you have… You know of Edward Tufte, I’m sure.

Richard: Sure.

Destry: Is he a little bit of an influence in your work at all?

Richard: Sure. He certainly takes his place among the people I have a tremendous amount of respect for. And there are a few others, people like Hans Rosling, whose TED talks are always great to watch. He takes something like a diagram and makes it into almost like a performance, a real event, and it’s tremendous. There’s also David McCandless, as well. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book “Information is Beautiful.”

Destry: I’ve heard of the book, yes. I have not read it.

Richard: Well, to be honest, you don’t read it, you just look at it. It’s just fantastic. He’s got a blog of the same name, as well, which is a great resource for great info-graphics.

Destry: I’ll have to check it out.

Richard: And then there’s Aaron Koblin, as well, who currently heads up Google’s Data Arts team, and he’s done some fantastic work with data before. He uses crowd-sourcing techniques to create some just wonderful moving visualizations.

Destry: Well, why the content strategy focus specifically in your work? Certainly you see an interest there, but do you have other info-graphic work that you’ve done that hasn’t gotten as much attention?

Richard: Not really. I mean, I studied design and communication at a fairly low level, and I kind of put that to bed when I went to university. But I suppose the reason why I defaulted to drawing diagrams to explain content strategy was because I was having problems myself trying to understand parts of it. Usually my diagrams are kind of born out of a desire to solve a problem I’m having, or to put things into alignment in my own head. And so I remember the first diagram I did, I wrote a ton of copy for it, and it was going to be a blog post. And then I thought, “Do you know what? I could cut all that and just draw something?” And so I just started sketching this diagram, and then suddenly I thought, “Well, that gets it across in far simpler terms than I was trying to whittle on with this long blog post.” Yeah, so that’s kind of the reason why it fell with content strategy. It really wasn’t a conscious decision to do it, it was just kind of the best way of —

Destry: It was a learning process.

Richard: It certainly was, yeah.

Destry: God, that’s fantastic.

Richard: And I’m really pleased that other people seem to have been able to use them as well to try and understand certain parts of the practice.

Destry: Well, they certainly have, and, again, they’re making quite a splash. In fact, something came by them that’s probably fairly exciting, right? Kristina Halvorson had you build a raft out of poster tubes and sail to the US for Confab? Tell us about that adventure.

Richard: Yeah. Well, it was very exciting. The idea actually came… I was having dinner with Kristina in January, and a few other content strategists who were speaking at Confab, and I realized I was the only one at the table who wasn’t actually going to Confab. And so the conversation of maybe producing some posters was raised, and I thought, “Well, I think that sounds quite exciting.” We kind of settled on the approaches to the web content strategy one. It was quite well received by the community. It kind of seemed like the natural one to choose.

Destry: Yeah, that’s a good one.

Richard: It was just very exciting watching the reactions from people when they picked it up and unfurled it, and I’ve had some really lovely emails since from people telling me exactly where they’ve hung it. They’ve explained to me the reactions from their coworkers. It has been really, really fun watching the reactions from people.

Destry: Yeah, I’ve seen some backgrounds and like Twitter avatars.

Richard: Yeah. They are particularly pleasing.

Destry: That’s really cool, that’s really cool. It’s like seeing your face on a billboard or something.

Richard: It is, yeah.

Destry: Well, you’ve also recently, a lot of people are checking this out, have put in quite a bit of time on a survey, probably the first comprehensive survey of content strategy or content strategists ever. And there’s been some interesting observations from that that I’ve noticed, like backgrounds and where they’re located. The results are online. You’ve no doubt pored over them pretty good at this point, better than most people. What sort of things have you been noticing of interest?

Richard: Well, I suppose I should just start really by directing just how much fun I had running the survey, and thanking everybody who participated. I ran it anonymously, so people who responded to it didn’t have to give their name, their age or anything like that, or a specific age or the company they were working for.

Destry: Right.

Richard: I think it’s really helped. I think that people were far more open with me and I think that they made the results… I think this really breathed life into the results. In terms of what I’ve found, it’s helped to confirm a few pre-held beliefs, really. Besides one or two who may have gone directly from education luckily to an agency that already practiced content strategy. I don’t think anyone who practiced it today could actually admit to starting their career doing it, because it wasn’t around.

Destry: Right, yeah.

Richard: When you look at the results, I think it’s just over 60 percent of respondents were aged between 30 and 45.

Destry: Right, yeah.

Richard: So the question is, where did they come from? One of the things I did was I asked the respondents what they were doing five and 10 years ago and how did this relate to what they were doing now. Yeah, actually, what’s interesting is that I’m wondering now if 10 years went back far enough. Because when you read about Razorfish in 1998 hiring content strategists, you think, wow, there were people out there who were doing it well before that, which is very, very exciting. I suppose, not surprisingly, there were quite a few people who arrived with editorial experience. But I suppose, overall, it appears to be true that content strategists require a particular background as such.

Judging from their past experience, everyone will be able to bring something different to that role. We always have people with backgrounds in stage management, radio production, teaching, editors, you name it. It’s incredible, the diversity of the backgrounds of the respondents. I’ve been just really surprised, but at the same time thinking, well, I kind of expected that.

Interviewer: Yeah, well, it’s a very interesting survey. One of the things, a couple of interesting things that rose out of that to me was the low experience that people had with accessibility and localization work.

Richard: Yes.

Destry: I mean, I was looking at the Ingserv website and noticed that you guys have an accessibility focus a little bit.

Richard: Yes.

Destry: How did you feel about that? What did you think about it? Do you think it seems normal that people are just not aware or had had much exposure to that kind of thing?

Richard: I think that the question was, which of the following areas are you competent? I think everyone has a different interpretation of what competency is. Some, for example, ticked a huge amount of the list and kind a thought, “Yeah, I could do that. I’ve done that before; I could do that.”

Destry: [laughs]

Richard: Whereas others felt, “No, I’m good at this, I’m good at that, but I’m not so good at that so I won’t tick that.”

Destry: That’s interesting how you can even pick that out and put yourself in the minds of how they were even selecting those boxes, yeah.

Richard: A few chose a few they were really good at, they specialized in that particular area. I mean, looking back, I maybe could have phrased the question better, but I wasn’t surprised by those scores for accessibility and localization. I think it just demonstrates that we do need to be having more conversations around these particular areas.

Destry: Absolutely, yeah.

Richard: I mean, the approach that we take to accessibility at Ingserv is that we look beyond just compliance, because for us, accessibility is so much more than creating something for people who are visually impaired. People tend to think of screen-reading compatibility that they’re provided with an accessible website. But they don’t think about, for example, someone with a repetitive strain injury in their hands, which limits their movement with a mouse or something like that. Someone with limited motor movement who requires something like a touch screen or a voice recognition.

Destry: Right.

Richard: We can do all the things we like to make a site compliant. We can go through the list and make sure we’ve checked all those things. And that’s absolutely fine, that is a level of accessibility. But compliance may suggest that people haven’t really thought about this. So when we look beyond compliance, get testing with real users and the people who are actually going to use the website, actually are going to use the content, actually are going to use the content on a mobile device. It suddenly goes from just being compliance into a design goal.

Destry: Right, absolutely, yeah.

Richard: We firmly believe that it really shouldn’t be a case of arriving. Accessibility shouldn’t be something that you consider after a site is already finished, or after an app is already finished and released. Again, you’re thinking, “Well, we haven’t made it accessible yet, but that’s coming soon.” I mean, we generally do not ask our clients to even ask for it, because we just build it in right from the get-go, really.

Destry: Right, exactly.

Richard: Yeah, I’m not really surprised by the low scores, because it is a tough area. It is a difficult area. It requires a lot of thought. I suppose in a way, I’m thinking, “Well, the people who responded to the survey were just being very obvious.”

Destry: Well, certainly, yeah.

Richard: Which is absolutely great. And what it does is, it just demonstrates that, yeah, we need to be thinking about these areas more.

Destry: Right, yeah. Well, comprehension of content, too, is another very important accessibility concern.

Richard: Exactly.

Destry: That is inherently tied to the content and putting content first. I would imagine things like plain language is an important consideration in that, too, and reading level and all those kinds of things. Well, very interesting. I mean, you could, in fact, be an authority speaker or something of the sorts on content strategy and accessibility. I mean, the phones will be ringing now, so prepare yourself.

Well, Richard, one last question, if you don’t mind.

Richard: Sure.

Destry: You talked about this recently in London at the London CS Unpacking Confab — or what was it exactly? Unpacking Confab…?

Richard: I think it was Wrapping Up Confab, Unpacking CS Forum.

Destry: There you go. You should know. I should know that. But especially you should know that. You’re one of the co-organizers of the new meet-up group there. Yeah, that’s exciting.

Richard: That is true, yes.

Destry: Yeah. Well, OK, spill the beans about what you’re going to do at CS Forum in September. I mean, there’s a little bit about it on the website, but share with us like you shared with us like you shared with the lucky bunch in London that night.

Richard: Well, hopefully, what I’m hoping is that it will be the combination of an interesting experiment. I’m hoping that the survey heralds just the start of the community’s participation. In a nutshell, I’ll be attempting to create a diagram, which will try and plot the different routes that we’ve taken to reach the practice of content strategy.

Destry: Yeah, exciting.

Richard: So the survey data will play a part in that, but I do want people to contact me with stories, contact me with their own particular background that they feel could help shape this particular graphic. And shed some light on how diverse skills and experience could be applied to the modern web team.

Destry: Right, OK.

Richard: What I’m really hoping is that it will reveal some of the interesting specializations that are going on under the surface. For example, I specialize in accessibility. I do think that there will be some interesting other areas that may reveal themselves. What I really hope it could possibly do is to serve as a road map for anyone wanting to get into content strategy. So they could look at a particular path that could, that suits them, and it could help them help to practice elements of it.

Destry: Get their head around it a little bit, yeah.

Richard: Either way, it will be fun.

Destry: Yeah, it sounds fantastic and it’s going to be an original info-graphic.

Richard: It certainly will, yeah.

Destry: Well, I’m excited and I know that even if people can’t make it, which would be unfortunate, they’re still going to be looking for this info-graphic. So we’ll have to make it worth their while then. [laughter]

Destry: Richard, thank you very much.

Richard: No, thank you.

Destry: It’s been a pleasure.

Richard: Yes.

Destry: I wish I had time for a few more questions, but that’s how these things go. We’ll talk to you soon and we’ll see you in September. Thank you for your time.

Richard: No, thank you. It’s been fun.

Destry: Thank you for listening to the 8th podcast in the CS Forum 2011 podcast series. Remember to use discount code—podcast08—by July 1st, and get £50 off the standard registration rate for CS Forum this September in London.

Have a great day!

Richard Ingram: The cake was no lie

Richard wrapped up Confab and gave us a glimpse of his CS Forum presentation.

Diana Railton: How content strategy supports communications strategy

Diana had to compete with automatic gunfire and grenades from a police training exercise next door (seriously!) to give us a 5-minute preview of her CS Forum presentation.

We’ll be posting the rest of the talks soon, so stay tuned. And don’t forget that registration for Content Strategy Forum is still open. Tell you friends!

Sara Wachter-Boettcher: A place at the table: taking Confab beyond content people

Sara was visiting London all the way from Arizona. Check out her 5-minute Confab wrap-up:

Cleve Gibbon: The strategist and the executioner

Cleve previewed a 5-minute version of his CS Forum talk:

We’ll be posting the other six talks soon, so don’t touch that dial.

Vapa Media, a content agency in Finland, was founded two years ago by Ida Hakola and Ilona Hiila after they had a “bouncy” discussion over lunch about how content in most Finnish company websites is boring and out of sync. Ida, formerly working in journalism and public relations, and Ilona, a communications professional and freelance journalist, decided to take action, and came upon a pleasant surprise at the same time, as Ida explains:

“We thought something should be done and so began with the preparations of starting up Vapa Media. Around the same time, Google revealed the Content Strategy movement to us, and we were thrilled to discover that other people out there felt as we did about creating content-centered strategies that would help businesses and their customers better over time.”

The state of Content Strategy in Finland is the same as it is elsewhere in Europe right now — new. Last November, Ida started the Content Strategy Finland meetup, and while the group has a few members, they’ve yet to have their first actual gathering. With CS Forum just three months away, the time might be right for them to do it.

The Vapa team know they have their work cut out for them, but are optimistic about the future. When speaking about client work, Ida says the biggest problem they initially discover with clients is a complete lack of vision in their marketing efforts.

“Companies make random attempts at marketing, but there’s rarely a strategy behind it all. We’re quite sure the next big bang in Finland will be on content. All I can say is that there’s a hell of a lot of work to do.”

Ilona points out another frustration they often see with clients; the problems that come from putting technological solutions before content:

“We’ve had several situations where the technology has been designed before the content… sometimes customers realize they have built a house that can’t hold people inside. We’ve come to realize that content professionals have a lot more to offer the industry than just catchy headers and smart copy — that’s why we’ve started a few tech projects ourselves.”

Lately, Vapa Media has been thinking about how content tools can be built to the needs of people who use them, and how content professionals can bring expertise to that process. This has inspired their workshop for CS Forum, and an interesting one it should be. The ladies recently went on a planning retreat in the middle of Turkey to brainstorm workshop activities. How’s that for getting ready?

The workshop

Just like content professionals must work more collaboratively with designers (and vice versa), so to should they be collaborating more with developers by contributing in technology conversations and lending direction to how content tools should function and be designed. This could mean creating entire content management systems, designing strategic content interactions, or augmenting technologies that already exist with innovative functions and mashups.

The Vapa workshop will explore how to create tools that improve, rather than hinder, content work. Your minds will be set to finding answers with technology to the problems we face as content strategists of all kinds. This is also a wake up call for the people who work with content; they need to take part in the design process of content-focused technological innovations.

Process

Participants will work in groups and innovate content technologies like content management systems, social media platforms, mobile applications, tablets, and so forth. Groups will then share their ideas so they can be evaluated, discussed, and tested by other groups.

Time will also be given to discuss how to bring these new ideas from the workshop into the real world. To this end, the workshop will have a special guest participant (an industry expert to be named later) who will provide feedback on the ideas brainstormed; discussing in practical terms the feasibility of bringing the ideas to market.

Participants will be invited to continue their discussions and collaboration after the workshop is over via a special online group, which Vapa Media will make known during the workshop.

What you’ll walk away with

Attendees of this workshop will learn:

1. How to innovate new content technology ideas and how to evaluate them.
2. How to bring a content technology innovation through the planning stages.
3. Small innovations can produce big results; i.e., the aim isn’t always to innovate new technologies, but to innovate platforms already existing.
4. A new way of thinking: that technology is not only a developer’s business.

Workshop participants might bring their laptops, but it’s not critical. Most important is to come with an open mind and be ready to dive-in and get hands-on.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York City, speaking with respect to content shifting, says Innovative new competitors force the old guard to change. That’s how it should be. We think this sentiment applies to content tools as well. The time has come for content professionals to claim their rightful place as important contributors in the tech scene. This workshop will help you get there.

We would like to propose that model now, and open up a bidding process for the organisation of CS Forum 2012 (and beyond).

First, let’s consider what brought us here, because the situation is rather unique, and the way forward holds nothing but opportunity for the European Content Strategy industry.

CS Forum – unlike any other conference

Since the first CS Forum in Paris, other content strategy conferences have come onto the scene, namely eBay’s Content Strategy Applied in London, and Brain Traffic’s Confab event in Minneapolis. All signs suggest that Content Strategy Applied and Confab plan to return each year. Content Strategy Applied 2012 is already online and looking for speakers. No doubt other content strategy conferences will pop up in due time. It’s all good for the field of Content Strategy.

But there’s a difference between those other content strategy events and CS Forum. Those events are owned and coordinated by the same organisers each year, respectively, and presumably in the same locations too. This isn’t the case for CS Forum. Even as STC France board leaders (organisers of the first Forum in Paris) were breathing a sigh of relief at the close of CS Forum 10, I was already having discussions with people about when and where the next Forum would take place.

A model for Content Strategy Forum over time

History since Paris speaks for itself. Together London stepped up, a small and efficient committee was put together, and CS Forum stayed alive for another year. We believe there is a lot to be gained for Content Strategy in Europe, and elsewhere, if the Forum continues to follow a city rotation model.

Here are just a few reasons why we believe such a model is a good thing:

• People and businesses in different locations in Europe get an opportunity to experience the Forum more easily. The content strategy learning and networking opportunities are brought to their home town.
• New locations and different hosts add a unique (and perhaps cultural) flair to the Forum experience.
• New organisers enjoy a considerable amount of attention from the effort, become more recognised in the content strategy industry, and add a significant event to their business portfolio.
• Speakers and international attendees get a different European travel destination.
• Students from host regions are more likely to participate, where the cost of long distance travel and lodging would otherwise prevent them from doing so.
• No one company is forever burdened with the tremendous effort that goes into planning and coordinating a major event.

Organising an annual conference in a different European country each year is not unique; the EuroIA conference, for example, has been doing it for the last seven years. The Interaction Design Association’s annual conference has also been held in different US cities each year, with 2012 being the first time it comes to Europe (Dublin). Nevertheless, one can appreciate how a city rotation model is more challenging than a single group establishing a clubhouse location and sticking with it each year.

This is where you come in!

A different city brings a different host organiser

A large part of making the city rotation model work, my fellow Europeans, lies within yourselves, as individuals or representatives of your companies. If you believe, like we do, that CS Forum provides value, and will continue to do so, then you must proactively support it—now and in the future—by attending, speaking, sponsoring, or organising.

Attending is important to show there’s enough interest in a given year to do it again. Sponsorship is always welcome (and there are still sponsor opportunities for the London event), but usually opportunities are limited. I’m happy to say there’s no shortage of speakers yet, based on the many abstracts we received during the open call, so speaking at CS Forum is definitely competitive. Alas, speakers are just part of the equation. Without organisers, there are no speakers or anyone else, and there is no CS Forum. That would be unfortunate.

So, let’s talk about you organising!

You’ve got to be a CS Forum Champion

Not anybody can be a CS Forum organiser. As much as we want to see it continue, it has to be done in the right spirit of things.

CS Forum principles

A number of core principles have developed in the first two years that we think represent the essence of CS Forum—what it is, and where we would like to see it go for the sake of the community. Future organisers should respect these principles and try to keep them in place. Nobody should want to see CS Forum slip into being a fanfare for company brands, or a platform for egos.

The first three principles came from the initial conception of CS Forum; the others from planning the 2011 event. The principles are:

1. To introduce the field of Content Strategy as a viable career direction, whether switching professions or starting new.
2. To help show content professionals of all kinds (and their employers) why Content Strategy is relevant to their careers and to their organisations’ goals.
3. To help promote existing European content strategists, as well the developing discipline in Europe, so that more opportunities take hold, whether in-house or consulting.
4. To be a networking platform that is European-wide, and internationally open, so that emerging content strategists in Europe can learn and interact with one another and move the industry forward together.
5. To be cross-disciplinary with other UX fields, which means 1) exploring how content strategists can provide more value in collaborative situations by understanding the nature of other disciplines, and 2) ensuring professionals in other disciplines understand it’s a two-way relationship—they can learn from content strategists too.
6. To be inclusive of new minds and thinking. Giving opportunities, whenever reasonable, to people (e.g., speakers) we haven’t yet heard. This assumes experience, gender, ethnicity, industry, culture, disability, and so forth.

The principles are CS Forum. If you find yourself in agreement with each one, then you are definitely a good candidate for hosting a future CS Forum event.

In case there should be any doubt, let’s consider some good and bad scenarios.

Where CS Forum should never go

Putting it simply, if you look at organising CS Forum primarily as an opportunity to make money and promote your company’s products and services, then you’re not right for organising CS Forum. You’re perfect for sponsoring and attending, and maybe speaking, but not organising.

Likewise, a given year’s “brand” should never appear to favor one area of Content Strategy over another. (We shouldn’t even have such distinctions, but that’s another story.) For example, if your background is—or company’s services are— technically oriented, don’t aim to hold a strictly technical communication event. The same goes for marketing-oriented interests, web, whatever.

The right path

CS Forum should always represent a variety of Content Strategy interests, while remaining close to the core of what Content Strategy is about. STC France should be applauded for being a representative of a technical communication society that nevertheless was able to think outside of the box to make the first CS Forum programme a veritable cornucopia of different ideas and approaches to content.

CS Forum topics, ideally speaking, should be tied to the subjects considered most relevant and/or up-and-coming to the industry in a given year, while remembering that attendees may be coming from different levels of awareness about Content Strategy.

Fundamentally, CS Forum caters to all Content Strategy interests, with a strong lean on the industry in Europe. Long live that tradition while CS Forum exists.

CS Forum’s endeavor

CS Forum was conceived, and currently coordinated, by people of different backgrounds who understand what Content Strategy (in all its nuances) has to offer; people who are passionate about weaving Content Strategy into the fabric of Europe’s developing User Experience industry.

Figure 1: Percentages of Europe-based content strategists, based on the results of Richard Ingram’s recent content strategy survey. Image taken from the infographic, Where in the world am I most likely to encounter a content strategist? by Richard Ingram, and used with his permission.

Forget the debates for the moment whether CS is UX, left is right, et cetera and so forth. If you live in Europe and work in UX, then you know there’s a ways to go yet (with varying degrees by country), even for disciplines that have been around a while longer like Information Architecture and Interaction Design. Consider this excellent case-in-point, which is an article looking at the Interaction Design culture in France it details the group’s own struggle within France’s governmental and educational frameworks. Here’s a poignant extract:

“The French digital design market is difficult to study. The main professionals operating in the industry have realized that they must in essence create their own market and continuously educate clients to try to clear up some of the semantic confusion that surrounds the profession.”

Sounds familiar, right? Imagine how difficult things must be for French content strategists. Sylvie Daumal, an information architect in Paris who doubles up on content strategy work too, talked about this last year at CS Forum 10. Yet we in France (speaking as a resident myself) do have our content strategy–minded people. More will come, and this goes for content strategy practitioners around Europe, if we do like the French interaction designers do—champion Content Strategy and show it’s value to business and clients.

Germany has its content strategy heroes too, despite Content Strategy not being recognised as an industry there yet. Or at least not one that’s openly promoted as such.

Yet there has been forward progress in Europe, as I have discussed before, and CS Forum has no doubt been a catalyst for that. Prior to CS Forum, for example, content strategists in France and Germany didn’t even know each others’ names. The Forum has facilitated that awareness—perhaps even made it possible—and supports countries in Europe to develop local meetups in between the annual events.

We, all of us who care about the advancement of Content Strategy in Europe, need to keep the dialogue and exchange going and the local content strategy communities growing. Content Strategy in Europe still needs to be pitched and proven to the digital industry, and its merits explained to customers who can surely benefit from it. Content Strategy Forum is a foundational stone on which content professionals throughout Europe can stand and be heard.

Are you ready to carry the torch?

If you’re interested in organising CS Forum 2012, becoming a hero for content strategists throughout Europe and beyond, and getting a fair amount of recognition in return, then…

download the PDF information packet!

The info pack provides additional details about organiser responsibilities, transfer of committee intelligence, and how to make your bid for being host organiser of CS Forum 2012.

We’ll accept bids up to midnight GMT+0 on the 31 July 2011, and make a decision for the 2012 host organiser and city by 15 August.

The new organiser and city location for 2012 will be announced during the closing address in London.

We’re waiting to hear from you.