Start Changing Your Organisation’s Culture Using Storytelling and Startup Techniques from Together London on Vimeo.

In this 8 minute video I explain why we need to start changing our organisations’ culture, how storytelling can help, and what we can learn from startups.

Participate in the workshop

I’m leading a full day workshop on this topic on 23 May 2013 in London. We’re offering a discounted “early bird” price until this Friday 10 May. See you there!

We’ve come a long way from the early days of the web, when “real” business people would pat us on the head and say things like, “your digital toy is nice, but my customers will never use it,” and we’d believe them. They were responsible adults with business degrees, while we were just messing around, right?

Today, anyone paying attention can see that digital transformation is disrupting almost every industry, including publishing, travel, retail, education, government, the arts, non-profits… it’s endless. Even the MBA brigade realize something’s up: I was surprised and flattered to get a call from suit-advisors Forrester recently, who interviewed me for their report called “Digital Customer Experience Governance Demystified” (they found me on google, apparently). I have no idea what that title means either, but it proves that executives realize that digital is a problem, and they’re seeking help from our community. Gulp.

We’re comfortable telling the story of why our stuff matters

Before we talk to the suits, let’s consider the story we tell ourselves. Today we’re comfortable talking about how the internet changed the stuff we care about: we might say that content is a business asset, user experience determines business outcomes, companies need to participate in social media, mobile is a revolution, etc. We’ve been telling this story, “digital disruption makes my thing more important,” for a while now, and it’s helped us pull ourselves out of the ditch of, “if you pay me, I’ll do it, even if it makes no sense.”

Take me, for example. For most of my career I told myself I was a firefighter, rushing in at the last minute to fix screwed up web projects. That story helped me avoid the scary part of my work. I chose not to ask the difficult questions, like, “why are we doing this?”, “how will we maintain this over time?”, and, “where’s the content going to come from?” Content strategy gave me a new story, and you’ve probably had similar experiences with stories about UX, technology, or design. Although these stories helped us, they’re starting to hold us back, because we’re considering our thing (content/technology/design/marketing) in isolation. When we say, “my thing is important,” other people hear, “I should be in charge and your stuff doesn’t matter.”

When we focus on our area of expertise, we miss the bigger story

In the content strategy community we say things like, “people don’t come to a website to appreciate the design, they come for the content,” to make the point that designing a web experience without considering content is crazy. While that point is valid, our design and technology colleagues may hear our statement as naïve and territorial. For example, on a banking website the user might be coming to the site to check her balance, find out exchange rates, and then transfer money to a friend. While content is an essential part of meeting her needs, so is interaction design, technology (legacy system integration behind the scenes), front-end development (she may be using a mobile device), and customer service (who does she call if it goes wrong?) She’s not only coming for content, she has a bunch of needs, and content is one part of meeting them.

We’re scared of cultural change

“What new demands has the internet put on our content?” We’re comfortable with that question, and that’s the problem: the obvious follow-up questions terrify us. Why is the business environment changing so quickly? What does that mean for our business model, our siloed organizational structure, our “waterfall” development process, the software we buy, the agencies we hire? We’re afraid to face the truth: content strategy (or UX, or technology, or design) is just one piece of the challenge of digital transformation.

As much as we like to talk about strategy, we can’t create sustainable, user-centered services without changing the culture of our organizations. We need cultural change that incorporates practices we know little about: service design, agile development, cross-functional teams, and the Lean Startup. If you’d like to talk about these challenges, learn some techniques to overcome them, and reconsider the story you tell yourself (and the suits), join me for a brand new workshop on 23 May in London, Start Changing Your Organisation’s Culture:

We want to use design, content, and technology to help our organisations create customer-centred and sustainable digital work: services as seamless as Zipcar, mobile apps as intuitive as Instagram, customer service as helpful as Zappos, and content as useful as GOV.UK. But our culture gets in the way. Our organisations operate like factories, determined to preserve hierarchy, divide responsibility into silos, and dehumanise work so it’s more “efficient”. We’ve got plenty of ideas, we work with skilled people, and our tools get better every day—but until we start changing our organisations’ culture, we won’t achieve our objectives.

Read all the details. I hope you can make it!

In Episode 11 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Daniel Eizans about context in content strategy, mental models, and structured content at Ford Motor Company. Check out Dan’s website and follow him on twitter @danieleizans.

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Jonathan Kahn: I’m speaking to Daniel Eizans. He’s joining me from Detroit today. He’s vice president, director of user experience and content strategies at Team Detroit. Dan, thanks so much for joining me today.

Daniel Eizans: Thanks so much for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure.

Jonathan: You have that very long job title. You only work on things for the Ford Motor Company. Can you tell me what does that involve?

Daniel: The very long job title is a little bit newer for me. I used to just worry about the content strategy parts of things. For Ford, content strategy really means how the content is structured and delivered to different digital experiences, the actual messaging strategy itself. How we use different types of voice and tone for different types of marketing activities, whether it’s social or whether it’s on Ford.com or whether it’s in a mobile space.

It’s also about content architecture, which is really what we’re most concerned with right now, as we’re starting to bring on board a new content management system. And really start to think about how our content is distributed across channels, not only here in North America, but globally.

The user experience part comes in because I was just given charge of our user experience architecture group, which is a group of eight individuals who are all dedicated to working on different parts of the Ford digital universe. We call it the Next Gen platform.

That’s pretty much what we work on, for the most part. We handle everything from the Ford.com website to the m.ford.com website.

I don’t have full responsibility over all of the global sites. There are many different agencies across the world that all work in partnership with Ford.

Most of my work hits the North American, but some of the content work that we do in how we produce content and how we produce assets has globalization in mind. Obviously, Ford’s a global brand. The marketing tagline for Ford right now is the first time an automaker’s used a global marketing tagline, which is the whole idea of “Go Further”.

You’ll see that no matter which country you experience Ford in. It could be in India or South Africa or here or in the UK. It’s all going to be under the promise of “Go Further”. We’re all producing assets and our vehicles are produced on a global level. It’s an exciting time for Ford.

Jonathan: That’s very interesting and I want to return to a lot of those pieces. We know each other through the content strategy community. You’re a writer. You’re a presenter in this space. What brought you to this community of content strategy? Can you explain to us how you got here and why you found this to be a place you wanted to share stuff and be part of?

Daniel: Sure. I come from the journalism side, where a lot of content strategists, I think, get their start, is on the editorial side of the journalism side. Specifically, I had a philosophy background as well. I’ve been studying a lot of things about philosophy of the mind and journalism. I fell into digital through journalism because I was one of the young people who understood digital and wanted to do more of it.

I ended up in the content strategy space through content management system implementation. There’s a CMS called SAXOTECH, which if you’re familiar with the US publishing industry, that is their CMS of choice for Gannet Newspaper Group, which is the largest newspaper group in the United States.

I was actually one of the first US people trained on the system. I brought it to a publishing group that I was working for at the time called Crain Communication. They publishing “Advertising Age” and a lot of local business community books. I brought that on board, and I got really interested in the taxonomy and the data modeling side of it.

But my passion has always been about delivering relevant content to an audience, because that’s how I was trained as a journalist was writing for an audience. The delivery of the content became much more interesting to me as I got into the CMS world, but I never wanted to abandon my editorial roots.

For me, content strategy was a great place to sit, because you think about everything from how the content’s structured to how you should write the actual messages themselves or what information that you need to put into a piece of content to make it relevant for an audience. It allowed me to play both with the research side of my head and the passionate writer side of my brain, and then get all the cool programming stuff to just deliver it in a really fun technical way.

I really practiced content strategy from all three of those spaces. And an agency like Team Detroit gave me a really good opportunity to do that.

Jonathan: Because it’s all getting so much more complex now.

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan: I think that you wrote a series of articles. I can’t remember exactly when it was…about this concept of context and context strategy, which I think it’s fair to say blew everyone’s mind. When you basically said, “We need to stop thinking of content as just marketing and just this thing that is a one time, one context piece of information,” because I think you may have used the example of your actual work, where people are considering the purchase of a vehicle. The type of content and the type of information needs that they have. It massively depends on the context they’re in, and there’s loads of different places you can be with that.

You’ve talked about context. Can you tell us why that’s important? Can you talk us through the different types of context that you’ve identified?

Daniel: Sure. I think you’re right. I started writing about context probably back in about 2010. I actually owe a lot of my foundational work that I started writing about — as far as context goes — to Andrew Hinton, who is an information architect with the Understanding Group here in the United States. He’s actually writing a book for O’Reilly Media right now called “Context Book.” I think is the tentative title. He basically started framing up these three ideas about context which I’ve definitely attached myself to. One of them is the personal situational context, which I think that’s, when you think about it in terms of selling vehicles, it makes a lot of sense, because the main reason you start to think about owning a new vehicle is because you have a situation that requires it.

It’s a major purchase for most people — the second most expensive thing maybe as opposed to buying a house. You have a reason for doing it. Either your family’s expanding. Maybe you’re becoming an empty nester or you’re a widower now, so you might not need as much vehicle or you’ll need more vehicle as you expand your family or your vehicle’s broken down and you just need something new.

The situational element…You obviously have things that you need your vehicle to do, based on your lifestyle, whether you have a lot of pets or whether you do a lot of outdoors things and you need to haul things like boats or camping gear.

The situational context becomes really important, and then you have to have content to support those different pieces of the life cycle. I can’t just tell you, “Oh, it’s got a great engine and it looks really sexy and you’re really going to enjoy being in it.” That traditional style of marketing copy doesn’t work anymore.

Jonathan: A traditional car spec says this is how big the engine is, for example, and this is how the seats are covered.

Daniel: Absolutely. We have to stop thinking about things in that sense, or the other traditional way that we do it we just come up with a great tag line that says the longest lasting, most dependable truck on the road. What does that really do for people? I don’t think that really…It might sound great in an advert, but it doesn’t really do anything for the actual user, because they’re going to look for something deeper. We’ve been doing a lot of research into things like ratings and reviews and why those things are so important for people. It’s because they can understand that once you have a great rating and review and why people use it in the shopping process so much and are starting to avoid manufacturers’ websites is because they get the story from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

Because they can filter these reviews to the point where they understand that, “Oh, this person’s just like me, they have my same situational context,” and that becomes really important.

The second key to that — all the context stuff — is the behavioral context. I think that’s something that it’s a little bit tougher to get to, but behavioral context accounts for things like cognitive factors, what’s their maximum capability to learn? That becomes really important when you’re working with non-profits or educational institutions or healthcare sites.

You have to understand what your basic patient population is like, so that you understand what their maximum capacity for reading level is, how to design and basically label your navigation moving forward becomes really important.

Then you have to worry about the emotional factors in behavioral contexts as well. What is shopping for that product do or what does looking for that insurance service do for you? Is that a stressful experience? Is it a fun experience? It might be different for different segments of people, and that’s why those personas become so important.

When you blend the personal behaviors and the personal situations together, then you have what I call situational-behavioral context that you can start to really build a contextually relevant content strategy for. It’s definitely something we’re doing with Ford.

As we have moved forward in doing research for user experience and things like that, we’re definitely looking at that blend of information so that we can start to create more relevant personas that aren’t just based on media consumption habits, because that doesn’t really tell us much.

Jonathan: The demographics.

Daniel: Yeah. The traditional way that I think a lot of agencies look at planning for the digital space and planning content is they just look at — oh, this demographic watches this kind of TV and reads these types of magazines. And then they build content based on that. But that’s not really going to be influential or even helpful, I think, for most people.

Jonathan: Because you have to actually be responding to the situation and the behavior and the emotion of this person.

Daniel: I think a lot of people might see that as being a little bit more sneaky, because you’re starting to dig into what their major motivators are. But it’s also being much more helpful in how you’re presenting information. Why should I make you hunt and peck around my advertising, if all you really want to know is will it fit two kayaks on the roof and hold X feet of stuff.

Jonathan: I was talking to Kate Kiefer from MailChimp on this podcast a few weeks ago, and she’s done this work on voice and tone, where they say, “Well, we have the same voice, but our tone changes depending upon the emotion of the person we’re dealing with.” I think that’s just a level of complexity in terms of…Organizations historically never thought about people at that level of detail. If they did, it would be a face-to-face interaction where a real human being would be reacting. Now that we have these organizations who are interacting with people directly, without any intermediaries, someone like MailChimp is then thinking much more carefully about all the different states someone is going to be in when they interact with this content, and then how do we actually adapt our tone, and in your case, our actual content, to match what their current needs are.

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. I would say that MailChimp is definitely one of the examples that we look to. Obviously, Kate’s done so much with the voice and tone document that MailChimp has put out, and that’s something we have looked to and even modeled for a lot of the communications that we’re starting to do in the social space now.

Jonathan: Fantastic. That’s super-interesting. I want to talk to you a little bit more about how this stuff is affecting your work right now. I like to talk a lot about organizational change, because I think the strategy is very, very hard to do without talking about organizational change. One of the ways into that discussion at the moment is talking about mobile and multi-platform and iPads and stuff. Can you talk to us about how that discussion is going on within your industry, and also about how the discussion around structured content is affecting your work?

Daniel: Those are all huge things for Ford moving forward. Obviously, Ford’s a very old company and does things in an old way, at times, but I think they’ve also been very progressive with at least the cross-channel approach that they’ve taken to publishing and putting content out there. They’ve been pretty forward-thinking, especially in the social space. I think a lot of our work has been emulated in a lot of ways. We’re now looking at it as, we need to be much more efficient because of all these new screens. We just can’t scale any more. The way that we’ve been doing it isn’t going to be sustainable for long, because obviously everybody’s looking at things like responsive design and starting to look at different ways that they can distribute content.

Ford’s no different, and to be perfectly frank, the North American side hasn’t even used a content management system for quite some time. We’ve been on a home-grown content delivery system that separates the presentation layer from the data model, and we’re moving in a different direction similar to what everybody’s cited as NPR’s approach, which is the “create once, publish everywhere” type of mentality.

I think that’s something that is going to be absolutely necessary for Ford moving forward, because we need to be able to scale.

Our shift in mentality, and where content strategy has been a huge help in starting to spur some organizational change, both on our agency side here at Team Detroit and for Ford itself is starting to look at the concept of distributed content models and really looking at every piece of content that we do as having the potential to sit and live on any channel. That’s pretty much starting in the social space. We definitely have our plan for that moving forward, so that we can share things on a global scale.

We are using a couple of different tools to help us with that. We use Buddy Media on the social side to help us consolidate our Facebook publishing efforts. We’re looking at setting up a distributed content model within our content management system, our planned content management system moving forward. We’re definitely looking at mobile as being the primary screen.

As we start to look at Ford as being more of a global company, that mobile screen becomes so important to us in places where we’re expanding. Emerging markets – places like Africa are definitely on our top radar for doing that type of modeling.

The way that we’ve started to look at it is, we’re working on different types of content wire framing, so that we can dissect the very different types of content we do and label them appropriately and come up with a global content model so that we can break everything up. The way that we’ve started to look at it is, everything from headlines to which images can go with which pieces of copy and how we can make those things portable and designing things and these responsive clusters and packets that are easy to distribute across borders.

Then it’s easy enough for the individual countries just to make those slight changes, localize it for their communities, and then publish.

Jonathan: That throws up a couple of interesting questions. The first one is that we’ve talked an awful lot about this COPE and NPR case study in structured content. For anyone who hasn’t heard about it, this basic idea is that they decided they needed their content, which is often centrally produced and then published across many different radio stations and websites and apps and stuff in a central repository with an API that member stations could then interface with and choose what to do with its content. It’s a fantastic case study, and at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily translate directly into non-publishing businesses, businesses who don’t necessarily have as their aim, “We need to disseminate our content to a wide network of people.” One of people’s questions is, how could a company like Ford, which isn’t really in the news business, for example, be using this same kind of concept to change how they’re working?

That’s my first question. My second question is, in this future state where you have more connected CMSs and structured content and APIs, who is actually going to be contributing to this content?

Daniel: We’re always going to have multiple agencies responsible for creating content. The thing for Ford is, lots of the other regions already have content management systems in place. The way that we’ve started to approach it is just looking at a way to get to a global governance model. What makes that idea more appropriate for Ford is because we have aligned underneath a global brand promise, so that the work is starting to at least be similar. At least in the marketing sense, all aligning up under this idea of “Go further” is quite helpful, because there’s global look and style, for instance, so all the colors are going to be pretty much the same. If we produce an asset and have a background, it’ll work no matter which country we put it in. I think that global governance works as, as long as you get the base-level asset, you’re…

I always say that governance and rules for content are not like handcuffs. I think a lot of creatives definitely see them as handcuffs. I look at them more as like rails, so that it’s easy to speed along them and make changes to be most effective for those situational and behavioral contexts that we talked about. That makes content very nimble.

Jonathan: Global governance sounds very, very complicated for your organization. It sounds really intricate and difficult.

Daniel: Yeah, and it will be. Getting even the other regions and countries to understand and adopt this model, that’s where the difficulty for our organization alike. It’s Team Detroit. North America still gets the lion share of the budget. We obviously create the most content out of all the different countries that we have. It’s what’s going to be difficult for us is getting all the agencies to come to this quarterly meeting or monthly meeting to share publishing calendars and share ideas.

Also, from the business standpoint, we’re having to get Ford to look at it in a different way as well, so that we start recognizing global priorities. The amount of data that goes into these decisions about publishing, moving forward now is huge.

That requires this massive collaboration of what’s the business goal for the month and what type of content do we need to produce to support that business goal. Then, how do we align all these different publishers, for lack of a better term, to do these things?

We’re definitely looking at a global governance council to do that. We’re hoping to solve the North America side of the fence first and then roll that out to different global properties. For the most part, everybody has this sense and has the realization now that we can’t scale anymore.

I think that realization for Ford is definitely there. That realization for all of its agencies is definitely there. Now, it’s just getting everybody to the table. I think those are conversations that are happening for us right now. I can’t really tell you that we have it — the nut cracked.

Jonathan: Right, sure.

Daniel: But I think we’re on the way.

Jonathan: Well, that’s fantastic. I love that you talk about collaboration, because I think governance can sound like “We’re going to come in with some rules and sticks and make you do things.” That never ever works. In reality, what you’re talking about is this a much more complicated collaboration between loads of different people and different perspectives and different ways of looking at the problem. That’s actually a huge amount of work to get that set up. Although, of course, the value, when that is working better, is also going to be huge.

Daniel: Yeah, and I think you get around some of the scariness when everybody starts to realize that at the end of the day, you’re supporting — at least in our sense — a business. I think that’s what we sometimes forget. We get into these microcosms where we feel like, “Oh, it’s just our little world here.” We’re just this agency that’s supporting this monster of a company. But at the end of the day, you’re all laddering up to the same goal, and that’s to sell more cars. If you can line up underneath that business objective, that’s, I think, what starts really helping drive governance in a different way, and that’s why the business needs to be a huge participant in that.

Jonathan: Yeah, and I think there’s a challenge there that historically, industrial organizations haven’t really thought about business objectives across the board like that, because their objective has been, “We need our siloed numbers to be good. We need to be really good at one thing, like marketing. And the whole business around us isn’t really our problem.” So that’s actually a change in mindset of like, “We’re in this together to solve some bigger challenge that’s across all of us.”

Daniel: At least for us, that’s what makes Team Detroit more of a unique agency. I won’t toot the agency horn too much. We were really devised to help the company in that way as being a business partner. It’s a nice shift of pace for me.

Jonathan: Fantastic. That sounds really good. I hope you’ll be sharing stuff you’re learned along that way. I think a lot of people are saying, “We need structured content. We need that kind of thing. How do we do it?” I hope you can share some of what you’ve learned as you go.

Daniel: The wire framing and stuff is something I’m in the process of writing about right now. I haven’t posted on the blog on my site in quite some time. The templates and some of the tools that we’re using now are something that I’m very excited to share and get feedback from the community on. Please look for those things.

Jonathan: Fantastic. I’ll look forward to seeing that stuff. I’m really excited that you’re going to be coming to London in a few weeks for Confab London. You’re a regular at Confab Minneapolis, so you’re helping to bring the show from Minneapolis to here.

Daniel: Yeah, I’m very excited.

Jonathan: You’re going to be talking about, for me seems to be a new talk, mental modeling for content work. Can you tell us about that talk?

Daniel: Anybody who’s a little more familiar with the UX side of the coin might even be familiar with Indi Young’s book “Mental Models.” It was done on Rosenfeld Media a couple years back. I want to say 2008 and I might be wrong.

Jonathan: It was that first book, I think, the first ever book through Rosenfeld was “Mental Models.”

Daniel: It was a good one and a foundational one for a lot of reasons. I love the book. I really do. I have a great deal and respect for Indi. I think the separation of content into this idea of content mapping is one for me that never really flew well. I always thought content needed to be a part of the actual mental models themselves. I take Indi’s foundational work of building mental models and then I add to it. I’ve added things that I like to refer to as roots and nodes and hypotheses on top of the traditional towers. I’ll discuss this at Confab and show people common examples of how to start building it.

It’s more of a call as well, for the content strategists and the UX practitioner to be working much more closely together when they go through contextual inquiry. For me, the themes that emerge from contextual inquiry should be the basis for your content plan.

It’s basically just an evolution of what the mental model I think originally began as a UX practice and really folds in content practitioners to make sure that at the very upfront you’re planning for content right away.

That starts to immediately start building content into the wire-framing process, because you’re identifying key tasks that need to be completed and key content needs that will dramatically affect the design of pages, or parts, if you’re looking at the distributed content model approach and you need to start designing things that are meant to be portable right away that are going to cross the entire situational context across devices. I think they’re going to be very helpful.

My talk’s going to focus a lot about this idea of how you evolve the traditional idea of the mental model and what types of questions you need to begin to ask in these interviews and how to start extracting content needs from these interviews as well. It starts to suppose how we start workshopping mental modeling and information design in a slightly different way to be more inclusive of content at the onset.

I think it’s an exciting talk. It’s a very fast talk, but I’ll be offering templates, both in Omnigraffle and hopefully in Visio as well if I can get my hands on a copy for anybody who wants to try it out.

It’s something that I’ve really contemplated moving into a workshop at some point as well, because I’ve had a lot of good interest, and it’s been a very successful practice for me since I started doing it last year. I talked about it a little bit at Midwest UX here in the States last year, and it’s definitely been something that we’ve started to implement here at the agency, and definitely in my personal work as well.

Jonathan: Fantastic. Well, that sounds really, really interesting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing that. Thank you. Just to finish off, we talked a little bit about community before. You’ve participated in this community. You do a lot of writing. You’ve been back and presenting. Can you just tell me about what you’ve gained from the content strategy community and how you would advise somebody who’s a newcomer to this field who would like to get better?

Daniel: Yeah. I feel like I’ve taken a lot more from the community than I’ve ever given to it. It’s such an open community. I liken it to how UX grew up as well. UX and information architecture had some splits and divisions over time. I think we’re starting to see that now. I think our practice as a whole is starting to move off into different tracks, where you’re seeing very editorial-focused content strategists, or the data librarian side. I think for me what I’ve really learned is, I’ve taken so much from people who started in structured data and communication design and have really seen the correlations between my more technical and publishing-based side of content strategy, and it’s really helped inform everything that I’ve worked on. I cite everything.

I think Cory Vilhauer has a great talk about how we’re all really just stealing each other’s ideas anyway to make our own. I’ve definitely done that throughout my career, and I like to cite plenty of times. That’s why I love to bring up Andrew [Hinton]. I love to bring up Sara [Wachter-Boettcher] and Karen McGrane, and a lot of these other folks who have been hugely influential on my career.

For me, to get started, I just started reaching out to people and saying, “Hey, what do you think of this?” Even if it’s a just a kernel of an idea, I think our community is such a friendly and open one that it makes it really easy to start to have some of those conversations or get some of those things out, or even just taking a risk and writing something, whether it’s submitting it to “A List Apart,” or starting your own blog.

Most people, I think, it’s so easy now, even if you don’t want to buy your own URL, just to start kicking something out on WordPress or submitting…there’s so many scholarly publications now for our community to submit to. All the UX publications, they now have entire sections dedicated to content strategy, whereas it took so long to get to those points.

Now, it’s so much easier to break into it. I think the big thing is, just starting to understand what you want to learn more about, and then just asking the people in that space to start getting some feedback on your ideas. I think the one thing that we need now is definitely more ideas and more of a focus around some specific things.

There are a couple of key problems that all of us as content strategists will have to worry about. We already started to discuss one a little bit today, with the proliferation of screens and technology.

It’s really high time for us to start focusing on some of these problems and creating some specific threads and some specific conversations about all of these complex problems. Mobile being one of them. Distributed content modeling being another one.

The other one that we need to start worrying about is this whole separation of content marketing versus content strategy. There’s enough of a void there between the two to start having some conversations about those things in a different mind.

Jonathan: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today, Dan. It’s been a fantastic discussion. I think people are going to get a lot of value from that. Also, really looking forward to seeing your talk in London.

Daniel: I’m so excited to be coming back. I’ll look forward to sharing a pint with you when we get there.

Jonathan: [laughs] For sure. Thanks very much, Dan.

Daniel: No, thank you.

In Episode 10 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Rob Hinchcliffe about community management, transmedia storytelling, and content strategy. Check out Rob’s website, his upcoming talk at Confab London, and follow him on twitter @hinchcliffe.

Listen to the podcast

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Jonathan Kahn: I’m talking to Rob Hinchcliffe who is a community strategist for TH_NK which is a digital agency based in London. Rob, thank you so much for talking the time to join me today.

Rob Hinchcliffe: That’s no problem. Thank you for having me.

Jonathan: First of all, can you just introduce yourself to people. You founded Londonist in 2004. You were editor at Yahoo! News UK in 2006. You actually helped bring the review sit Qype to the UK in 2007. Can you just give as an intro to that part of your life?

Rob: That part of my life, those chapters in my life. You make me sound really old now. I am a journalist by trade. I used to work in B to B publishing, pre, pre proper Internet days. While I was doing a very boring job working for B to B publishers I started a blog called “The Big Smoker.” I was looking at the sites they have in the States. Sites out of New York and Chicago and places like that which felt very vibrant and interesting to me and driven from the ground up by the people who actually live in those cities who have an interest in what was going on there. Then I would look at things like “This is London” run by the Evening Standard and cry into my lunch at my desk. Me and a friend had some web space that we wanted to do something with so we set up a little experiment.

I started this blog about London. In the first couple of months it won an award from The Guardian, which is the blog awards that they used to have. There wasn’t a lot of competition around in those days to be honest. It took off and it become Londonist. Became part of that network like Gothamist in the States.

I ended up editing that, still part-time. That let to me getting the job at Yahoo! Where I was editor of Yahoo! News. That was interesting because those were the days when you couldn’t really comment on a news story as an internet user. You couldn’t go in there and leave our own opinion, that was just unheard of. There was still a lot of old-school journalists, if you like, running Yahoo! News, and they were getting rid of that old guard and bring in annoying youngsters like me to work out how we could make it a bit more a vibrant and two-way thing.

I spent a couple of years there, and then at Yahoo!, which is very interesting. I got to work with people like Simon Wilison. Well, not work with them, but have lunch with them. Simon Willison, and Tom Coates, and people like that, and Lloyd Shepherd, who works at The Guardian Unlimited. I think it was called Guardian Unlimited.

That was really exciting for me. I spent two years there, and then went to a start-up environment, Qype. That’s how I fell into community management, is very much moving from that journalistic role to shifting people around and shifting content around, I guess. Yes, I spent three years building Qype in the UK because it was a German start-up. They wanted to launch it in the UK. It started off as a team of two and grew across Europe, so by the end of that, I was managing, I needed to manage across about seven countries across Europe when I left.

I’m now at an agency. Yes, so I work at a digital agency with the ridiculous job title of “community strategist,” which doesn’t really mean much, but we work with clients like Warner Brothers, Channel 4, the BBC, Nandos, Asos. Quite a wide variety of different clients, helping them do digital stuff. That’s been the past ten years or so, I reckon, in a nutshell.

Jonathan: Just asking you about the Qype thing, you were saying that’s when you moved from just thinking of yourself as a content person to more of a community manager.

Rob: Yeah, I mean I did a little bit of stuff at Yahoo! After we’d finished resigning the new site, I moved on to some other some products that they were launching and looking at all the strategies and community strategies. When you’ve got Flickr in your stable of products, at a company, and you’re looking at what they’re doing or what they were doing, and what they…You know around community management at that time. Then it’s quite inspiring. That was where I really wanted to go at that time. We were, and then obviously went to Qype and it was very much starting off incredibly small and very hyperlocal before that was a term, I think, in London and trying to get people involved in contributing to a site. Why would they do it? That was the big question, why would anybody come to this place and spend their time writing about a restaurant, or a bar or whatever.

Working out how that was going to happen, and how we were going to build a genuine community of people and answering that question. Which it was really interesting to me, that you know, how do you go about persuading people to do that? Incentivize people to do that, and how do you get them to make it feel like a genuine community. Which in my very sloppy definition is, they get out more than they put into it. What’s the best formula for creating that environment?

It was a nice playground. We had nothing to lose because there was nobody using it when we started in the UK. We spent two or three years trying different things and building and building and building it. Towards the end, I was managing six or seven community managers across Europe who were mainly all based in London. We had them based in an office in London. They were managing communities in places like Brazil and Poland and France, and Spain, and Germany.

It became a bit of a cookie-cutter approach. This worked for us, so you should do it here. That’s nowhere near as interesting, when you get to that stage it’s time to move on. [laughs] It’s like, “Here’ s what I did. Copy that.” You can’t experiment and evolve much anymore, so that’s when I got out. Answering that question kept me going for quite a long time, I think. Still does to a certain extent.

Jonathan: Oh I see, yeah, answering the question of, “How do we get people to…?” What was the answer to that question, “How do we get people to contribute?”

Rob: There’s no one answer. It depends on what you’re trying to build in your products, your objectives. For us, initially it was very much get people in a room together in real life and get people in a room above a pub, give them a few drinks, talk to them about what excites them. Get to know people and get them to know you. That’s the very grassroots bit of it all. We had the luxury of doing that which is fantastic. We got the time and we had the money to spend on actually getting to know our grassroots community, and there were lots of surprise and delight stuff, sending people a T-shirt or some sweets in the post out of the blue for saying thanks for your awesome review and talking to businesses, which is really interesting as well because we didn’t just talk to the people who were reviewing these places, we talked to people who owned and manned these places.

That was incredibly rewarding in terms of going out and talking to them about how they could use this stuff to make their business better and more successful, and how they could…and some of the best things we did was the events that we ran with our users and our businesses and the partnerships and the promotions that we were able to…and still to this day it boggles my mind that some people, small, medium enterprises don’t take advantage of those tools and those environments and those connections that they can make online.

Because there are a lot of businesses now doing it, especially now Twitter’s freed up over the past five, six years, their ability, people are more familiar with that tool. But I guess working on both sides of the fence, as it were, where the businesses and the users over a few years to try and get them to get to know each other and get the best out of each other was the best way of doing it.

Jonathan: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you talk about this in real life, especially in London, having these real meet-ups where you actually talk to people and let them build connections between each other and all that stuff. Because I think just think thinking of how we think of organizations today, they are petrified of that…they just would find that to be risky or too far outside their comfort zone, I would think…

Rob: Yeah, it’s weird. I’m sorry, go on.

Jonathan: Well, I’m just think if you think about what…before there was Michelin Guide or something like that, which was published thing where you had centralized publishing, where people decide…experts wrote about stuff. Then you’re saying well, what’s the modern of version of that? Now we have the web, and it’s actually this community based platform where the company’s trying to encourage a community to build around it and to contribute content. The fact that then that transition requires you to basically stop being that publisher and start being this community organizer, I just think, would scare the crap out of so many companies.

Rob: Yeah, it’s very strange. I guess I come from quite a…I’ve gotten lucky in that I’ve worked with this stuff. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it work. Trying to convince people, I guess, from a theoretical standpoint that this stuff works and is good for their business is really, really difficult unless they can see it in action. Also people tend to…I don’t want to tar all businesses and brands and organizations with the same brush, but especially people high up who’ve got their hand on the check book or whatever will always go well, can’t we just bribe them and pay them? Isn’t that easier? Because that seems the shortest distance between where they are and the objectives that they want to get to.

Jonathan: Right, because we have money. We’re a company, and we have money, so why don’t we just give some money, and then that should provide a business?

Rob: If we get them to sign a contract, they can’t say bad things because we’ve paid them. How would they? They don’t understand the value exchange and I guess the social exchange, which is way, way more valuable and goes far further. The ROI on it in those terms is far greater for a brand if they make a genuine relationship. But then that creating a genuine relationship also…when I say that to somebody in an organization, all they hear is loads and loads of hard work and time consuming, and they could go wrong, and they might…

Jonathan: Yeah, well, it’s…

Rob: When you got to a social media presentation, you always see that bit. I never do this, and it drives me mental when people do do it because it makes my job harder. You always see the social media nightmares bit of a presentation. It’s like please stop showing that stuff because it is few and far between, and can you not just show the social media that lovely unicorn dreams section, [laughs] where everything goes right for once, because that’s what brands fixate on it. It can be a bit wearing. Sorry, I interrupted you.

Jonathan: No, you’re fine, it’s good. Yeah, I mean, I just find that super interesting because you’re talking about…You said the first thing they’ll say is it’s too much work, but then you said that the second thing you said was that they don’t know if it’s going to work. I think that’s the cultural thing that interests me because we have these industrial cultures where your aim is to not be blamed for things going wrong and maybe to be…basically for your boss not to be cross for what happened. Basically if you’re working in that culture, you would never try to do social media properly because if you’re doing it properly, it could go very, very wrong.

Rob: Yes.

Jonathan: When you do that, the meet-up in London, it’s possible that nobody will come.

Rob: Yes, exactly. Life sucks sometimes, shocker. But yeah, working at Qype, we said to businesses over and over and over again, if someone leaves…The first question to any business was, “What happens if someone leaves me a bad review?” Well, A, you know about it, which before you wouldn’t do. B, you know who this person is. C, you have a way of contacting them. These are all amazing opportunities for you as a business, because you know there’s a problem, you know who’s raised it, you can get in touch with them. You can fix it.

Then that person can then can then tell you’ve fixed it to millions of people. That’s it going wrong. If that’s what happens when something goes wrong, then for a business, there are so many ways they can deal with that. When before, it would just happen, they would tell all their mates about it, they would have never known about it, and they wouldn’t have a way of putting it right or turning around and making it a positive.

That, to me, the small businesses, never mind large organizations, they don’t get that, and they’re scared of that, is the biggest failure in a lot of businesses comms strategies, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not just because I work in this area, it’s just something which…If you’re not listening, then you’re not going to be part of the conversation. If you’re not a part of the conversation, then you’re screwed. [laughs]

People are scared and I understand that. It’s just that when it’s my job and other people’s job to show them, I guess demonstrate why they shouldn’t be scared, and what going wrong really means. What’s the worst that possibly could happen? You know, Ratners, or something let’s take that and then…That was the guy who ran the company calling out his own products.

Jonathan: Oh, Ratners, yeah, the thing he said is products were crap or something like that, didn’t he?

Rob: Yeah, exactly, on a stage in front of…That was pre-Twitter. [laughs] That was pre-social media. I think his profits went up…I’m making it up, but I think his business did better after he said it than before because you know…and I think, so if having those opportunities and those tools and the infrastructure is what I talk about all the time, is if you’ve got that infrastructure in-house to deal with that stuff, then it’s never…it’s very, very rarely irreparable or damaging. But it’s getting over that initial fear is a massive hurdle for a lot of people, yeah.

Jonathan: You talking about that just made me think of…I’ve noticed, we both live in London. I’ve noticed that there are a load of new types of restaurants in London, and just immediately coming to mind is Wahaca and Byron, where I have this theory, and I have no evidence, but you may have some evidence that there’s something about social media that is allowing these really good restaurants, like Busaba as well I feel as well is in the same set, where the food is better, it’s cheap, and there’s just this expectation that it’s worth doing a proper job. In the old London, you just didn’t get that. Like five or ten years ago, I don’t think we had the same type of restaurants.

Rob: Yeah, and I think, Wahaca is one of those businesses that we did events with quite when it first launched, and I remember they approached us. They go and said can we get 30 people down here to test out our winter menu for us before we put it on. Give us feedback about it, and then you guys blog about it and write about it, and we’ll get some PR out of it. They got free PR. But they also got a free taste by all these free bloggers going down. They’re going woo-woo brilliant, because she won Master Chef quite recently. That shows great foresight by whoever made that decision to invite a bunch of people down, taste their food, review it all, and then actually make…and that’s the big thing there, properly, ahead of their time in this respect, is take notice of what those people were saying and then react to it, because that to me is, getting that…

Because there’s a lot of businesses we worked with or wanted to work with us or…who go oh, yeah, we’ll invite people own, and we’ll do this, and we’ll give them this free stuff. Then what will you do for us? You’re like, actually, it’s these people.

You’ve got to invest in this relationship with these customers just like you would if they came through the door wanting to buy something off you. Then they’ll give you something back in return. It’s not bribery. It’s not…and getting over that mindset of I have to give you something in order to…

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s transactional. That’s a transactional mindset of this is a very short term thing with no commitment and no relationship. I think that’s…

Rob: It’s what I was saying about social exchange.

Jonathan: Which is a relationship, which is open ended. I think organizations as we know them don’t do relationships. They just do transactions, and that’s why I’m saying they’re scared because they are very, very scared of the idea of an open-ended relationship that could go wrong. It exposes them.

Rob: It struck me last night, actually. I’m addicted to TV Club, which is the AV Club. The people who do part of the Onion network, the TV Club is their TV reviewing. It’s like a TV site. They review all the major TV programs that are on in the states and stuff. Their comments section is just fantastic. It’s just a really healthy, working comments section with a great discussion going on in it, which is very rare really still these days. It’s also a pleasure to read. I’m a TV nut, so I enjoy reading it.

I was reading something last night about one, and I was reading the actual review of the TV show. In the third paragraph it just said as one of you said in the comments last week, blah, blah, blah, and I just…I just had to stop for 10 minutes because you just…all right, they’re not a newspaper, but they’re a pretty big, decent online media organization, and for someone to say that in the middle of a review or TV show, “As one of you said in the comments last week,” blah, blah, blah, and then wrote a paragraph responding to that, I just thought, “You don’t see that.”

You do not see, even on a week to week column, that I read what you said, I digested it, I thought about it, and now I’m replying to it. All these other people are having to read it as if they were just sitting and watching us have a conversation. It just weirded me out because you just don’t see that. You don’t see that, “Oh, I know you’re there,” even with very quite progressive net savvy organizations like The Guardian.

You just don’t get that…you just find them complaining about the comments section, whereas the best way of fixing that is by responding to them and putting it out there and putting them front and center and having that social exchange in the daylight. I think that’s what people are A, scared of, but B, what also makes it far more…what makes it work is that if you drag stuff into the daylight and put it out in front of everybody, then everybody goes, “Oh actually, this is…we will react, and it will make it better.” It’s when you start hiding things and paying people off not to leave bad reviews or pretending they don’t exist, or…

Jonathan: It makes those comments as part of the community, part of the publication.

Rob: Yeah, and it’s a tiny, tiny little gesture. It’s not even…I don’t even this TV club article was even…I’m sure that wasn’t planned. I’m sure it’s done it before and they do it all the time, it’s just I noticed it for the first time, and I was just like ah, you do not see that enough. It’s such a…people remember that without even knowing they’re remembering it and will digest that stuff and will just note that there is some…that they might get mentioned next time or the person is reading their comments, and it just makes it such a much more valuable experience for the person who’s commenting or reading the article.

Jonathan: Yeah, fantastic. Let’s move on a little bit to what you’re doing now. You’re working at TH_NK, and I looked on…I think I might have looked on your actual home page, the company’s home page, and it says… there’s your face, and there’s a quote from…

Rob: There’s my face?

Jonathan: There’s your face twice, actually. Then you’re saying this, that you’re working with Channel Four on a drama called Utopia, and it says at the same time as the drama hits our television screens, the Utopia inquiry will hit our computer, tablet, and mobile screens, creating a digital experience that is totally in sync with the story and chilling bridge between fact and fiction.

Rob: I did not write that, I would just like to say.

Jonathan: Well, it was next to your face.

Rob: [laughs] Yeah, it was next to my face. That doesn’t mean I wrote it. Don’t believe everything that you read on the Internet, Jonathan.

Jonathan: True. Thank you for that lesson. Tell me about the project.

Rob: The project is…well, it’s Channel…part of it is true. It is Channel Four’s, which some people might have seen. It’s the fifth episode, I think, tonight. It’s a six part drama written by a guy called Dennis Kelly who wrote “Pulling” and also wrote some of “Spooks,” and he also wrote “Matilda” for the stage with Tim Minchin. He’s got quite a varied CV. He’s written this quite hard-hitting, darkly comic thriller for Channel Four, which is a brand new thing for them. They came to us about a year ago now, and we pitched for the multiplatform, transmedia, whatever you want to call, digital accompaniment to the series.

If you’ve watched the show, you’ll know that it’s got…the center of it is a comic book and a bunch of conspiracy theories. That’s not spoiling it for anybody who wants to catch up on FourOD. They didn’t want us to do the big let’s go out and big ARG approach to this, because they knew that the people who were into conspiracy theories and comic books were going to come to this program anyway.

Jonathan: Can you just define ARG for us?

Rob: Sorry, an alternate reality gaming experience. Like they do a lot of stuff for the Batman franchise dressed up as the Joker and go out and find the clues in real life. Or they did it…so there’s it’s very much like not…it didn’t need to be immersive and I’m going to say it, “nerdy.” [laughs] It needed to be mainstream and bring people who’ve been watching this program, be entertained by it, and then switch over and watch the news or whatever, or watch question time, how would they bring those people to the digital experience and get them more immersed in what we were doing? That was really appealing to me as a brief because there’s a ton of stuff in the scripts that we had at the time which was very real.

There was a lot of stuff in the scripts like the locations, the issues, the themes. There were people getting shot and comic book conspiracy theories and things like that. There’s a lot of fantastical elements, but there’s also a lot of genuinely real elements. Those appealed to us as a team about thinking about how we were going to bring this online.

What we did is we thought we would try to heighten that element of realness and because there’s a lot of stuff about surveillance and digital privacy and a lot of stuff about who controls us and who has power over us in our daily lives and what sacrifices and what exchanges are we making in our daily lives in order for our lives to be more comfortable. There’s also a giant issue which I can’t…well, I probably can talk about depending on when this podcast comes out, because the episode’s on tonight where this all gets revealed. There’s a big quite global important issue in the show as well, which gets revealed towards the end.

We weren’t going to really bring that forward, so what we’ve done is we’ve built this thing which makes…puts you…asks you a bunch of questions and asks you about your life and shows you how exposed you are in terms of your privacy and your data. Because when we went to Channel Four, and talked about 192.com and some of them just…and we told them which gigs they’d been to last week and where they lived, just enough to…and when you’ve got like media savvy people in the middle of London going, “Really, you know what my address…?”

You think wow, we could really play this up [laughs] and show people just how…some of this information’s out there, so that’s what we did, which is really interesting to me because TV and digital experiences around fiction and film and those things very much tend to focus on back-story and characters, which sounds obvious [laughs] and sounds like that’s what it should be, but it’s always seemed to me a bit of a waste. That’s what we tried to move away from a little bit.

Jonathan: That reminds me of a story somebody told about the New York Times where they created a new…they were creating a new section or it was a special or something like that, and they put a huge amount of work into creating this print publication first, and all the content decisions and the layout decisions were for this print format. Then they gave the digital team like a week or something, very short period of time, to just magically translate this into a website. It’s that idea of the main thing is the thing I’m used to and then the thing that we are made to do by outside forces, it’s just an afterthought. We just pass it to the young people who just do what they can with our real stuff.

Rob: Yes. It’s really strange because TV, I think all the industries, they’re just all…TV, movies, everyone, is realizing this now. Our industries work at very different paces. TV, I mean, I’ve never worked in a TV production company before this project, and it’s very…because we were like, one of the first meetings we had with the guys who made Utopia was, one of the questions was the look and feel of this digital thing. Can we…we’re going to design this, “Can we take our cues from your credit sequence?” and et cetera, et cetera, and they just laughed at us for about 30 seconds. We’re like, “Well, what’s so funny?” They were like, “Well, we’re probably going to do the credit sequence about two weeks before it goes on air.”

We’re like, “Oh, right, OK.” [laughs] You can’t…you have to get in sync, and a lot of these things, a lot of these multiplatform projects previously have been done very much like you’ve just described that New York Times anecdote, which is last couple of weeks, “Oh, we need something digital quick go.”

To give an example of why that doesn’t work, we…it was a Post-It note that we wanted to get into the background of one of the scenes in “Utopia,” and for us to get that Post-It note into the background of the scene and for it to work, we had to speak to A, the writer, the executive producer, the producer, the set designer, the script editor, the editor, the director, the camera man, and I’ve probably left some off.

Then you have to make sure if it does get filmed, if it does get into the shot, it is on set, it gets into the shot, someone films it, that it doesn’t get edited out, and that it’s in focus when it hits the TV screen. If it takes three months to get a Post-It note into the back of a shot, then you can’t do something worthwhile and engaging and immersive in the last couple of months of something being…you have to be brought in right at the start. I think it’s still possible to do that and not cost a huge amount of money, and be ridiculous, as long as you work cleverly…

Jonathan: It’s got to be something that the people who are in charge of the project think is part of the project, as opposed to being an add-on at the end. That’s the crucial thing, isn’t it?

Rob: Yes, exactly. We’re looking at Channel four have got a multi-platform producer in Hilary Perkins, who has done this stuff before and is very good at it, and worked with us right from the beginning to make sure we were there all the way along. At the same time, it comes back to that idea of having the infrastructure and the readiness to respond to what people want. Because the thing I railed against is probably a bit strong, but objected to in the Wired thing that I wrote for the website about ARGs and transmedia stuff, is that a lot of the times people would create these multi-platform experiences and they spent a year doing them. They’re like OK, here’s step one we want people to go on. Here’s step two we want people to go on, here’s step three. Once you get to step three, they have to find this thing, and then if they find that thing, they get to step four. If they don’t, they can’t carry on. You’re like, “Oh, God.” As a user, that’s a terrible experience. That on-rails experience is dreadful.

Jonathan: That isn’t how computer games work, is it? The computer games are all about this whole universe of discovery where there’s a thousand different…

Rob: Exactly, a sandbox. Yeah, sandbox approach, the open world approach to computer games is far more prevalent now, because people they realize, that people want to play around and will spend hours exploring. Same similarly with TV shows, you’ve got no idea what your community is going and your audience are going to respond to. If they love…in “Utopia,” the color yellow is a big motif. There’s also…it’s going to sound weird if you haven’t watched the TV runs, also chocolate raisins which feature heavily in the show. But anyway, if you look at Tumblr the day after it’s been on air, and you’ll see everyone, and on Twitter, it’s #chocolateraisins.

You’re like…if you haven’t got a setup which allows you the flexibility and the nimbleness to respond to that even though you spent X thousand pounds doing this over here, but you need to go, “Oh, actually, we’re going to need to respond to that here,” then you are doing yourself a massive disservice.

At the same time, yes, you need to be there from right at the very beginning, but you also have to build in the ability to respond to people at a moment’s notice and go OK, we’re going to ditch that. We’re going to go over here with this. You need those two things happening at the same time, because I guess there’s that surface layer of, “Oh, that’s awesome, that’s a surprise and delight. Oh, did you see that?”

There was a phone number in the third episode of “Utopia” which, if you rang it, there was a recorded message. It was just a phone number in the background for about a second. We didn’t put it on Twitter. We didn’t put it on Facebook. People just found it. We didn’t do anything with it. We just put it there to see if anybody would notice, and they did.

I think that layer of just putting stuff in there for people to respond to quickly as well as here’s six weeks of an iterative platform which responds to what’s happening in the show and asks you a bunch of questions and gives you a…I think you need to have those layers of engagement and layers of involvement with any multiplatform thing because some people are just going to come along and play and some people just want to…and other people are going to really go for it. I think I like playing those two levels off. I think that’s what’s interesting about this stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah, so it is actually…it’s actually game design in the sense that you’re…the writing isn’t just about a performance. It’s also about this interaction which is more like a game where there’s different levels of…

Rob: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t want to use the term gamification because everyone will hate me, and I will hate myself, but I guess it’s like game design where you get to design the game as you’re going along to a certain extent. You want 85 percent of the game done and in the box, and then the other 15 percent is going to make itself up as you go along. I think the making itself as you go along is the exciting bit. But it’s also the really dangerous, scary bit for certain people because they’re like, “Oh, hang on. We want to know everything that’s going to happen three months ahead of time otherwise I’m not spending any money on it. But I think the response…We were responding to people on Facebook and on Twitter and talking to them about…

They would have been tracked down because they were… we knew they were at the Eurostar terminal last Sunday because we were looking at their Foursquare accounts because it ties in with happens in the show if you’ll be tracked down using CCTV and stuff. People went ballistic for those kinds of responses. But unless you build in the ability to respond and you have to plan to be off the cuff, I guess, is what I’m saying.

Jonathan: Yeah, so you’ve got plan for flexibility and responsiveness and improvisation and uncertainty.

Rob: Yeah, and have the trust of your client for them to want you to do that, as well. That’s why Russell talks about Old Spice. That’s why everyone was talking about Oreo at the Super Bowl. They had a bunch of execs in the room. They had a bunch of creative’s in the room. They had a load of tech in the room. They had a response to the blackout during the Super Bowl on Twitter within ten minutes which got more eyeballs than the million pound, million dollar adverts that were on the tele. Because they had the trust, they had the ability to be flexible and spontaneous when they needed to be and they just got huge ROI off the back of that. We talk to Branson organizations a lot about that, about the ability to do that.

Not everything can be planned for and some of the best things…I can reel them off. You’ve got the Oreo stuff. You’ve got the raisin bread, sorry, the giraffe bread thing that Sainsbury’s did. That response, Lego are masters at this response to the kid who lost his ninja toys.

Those kinds of ability to respond to serendipitous moments which not only strengthen your brand and your engagement with your customers, but also just create awesome moments, things to riff off, that’s where brands seem to be right now and it’s really scary and really difficult for them but also quite fun.

Jonathan: We’ve been talking about taking risks with communities and letting go of control and allowing things to shift. We’ve also been talking about getting away from the thing we know and the thing we’re good at and try to figure out what are the next things we need to do. Along those lines, I want to ask you about the talk you’re going to give in just a few weeks at Confab London which is the content strategy conference. Your talk is going to be called, “Created by everyone, published everywhere. How communities can shape your content.” It’s the kind of title that would probably sound quite terrifying to someone who likes to think of themselves as someone who owns content and looks after content. Can you explain what you’re going to be talking about?

Rob: Yeah, I’ve been talking about content strategy and community strategy/management for a few years now and I’ve seen this thought evolve. Every time I come to it I have to, obviously, refresh it. [laughs] The stuff is shifting all the time. We’ve gone from the user generated content era which I guess we started off talking about at the start of this call and how that’s shaped the way organizations interact with their audiences or their customers or whatever you want to call them and the way they’ve reacted to that. How they’ve surfaced and re-purposed that relationship and that content for their own needs and to make that relationship stronger. How that social interaction then evolves and gets better and better over time, and I’ve learned a lot about that. Over the past 12-18 months I’ve really started thinking about how this content…how you react to what.

We’ve given ourselves the ability now to watch what people want on an almost real time basis and respond to that and then allow people to…and go OK, and instead of saying, “OK, people want this, let’s give them that,” it’s more, “OK, we’ve seen people want this. Now let’s give them the tools that they can make that for themselves.” Do you see what I mean?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Rob: It’s that transparency of their relationship and I guess the democratization of that relationship that has really come in, that we’re seeing loads of people starting to pick up on now, or a few people do it well. I guess I wanted to talk about that and why people shouldn’t be scared of it and how you can experiment with that a little bit and not have someone come up to your cubicle and go, what the hell are you doing talking to a person on Twitter? Now I think it’s really replacing this model of…because I’ve got a real I guess bug bear about the old social media agency model of farms of community managers basically writing Facebook posts or Twitter updates based on style sheets that was given to them by a brand manager six months ago, and that’s it. They leave because they’re bored or someone else comes in that is the voice of that brand online.

I think what brands are realizing now and organizations are realizing now is people are in charge of… creatives, and producers of content, are much more aware of what they can get out of these relationship, and I think that’s incredibly exciting. But a lot of people just get tangled up and scared in the risks and what could possibly go wrong. I think I want to talk a little bit about how people might think about approaching that and what the values of it can be, because I think that’s, like I said earlier, it’s very difficult to theoretically show someone what they can get from this because a lot of people are like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’ll have a lot of Twitter followers, and…?”

That’s a common response. I think coming back to what I said right at the start, it’s just you’ve got a…and I think the word community scares the crap out of a lot of people. [laughs] It’s like what are we going to do with this community? Who are they? Why would we want them? It’s like they’re just the people who are talking about what you do.

That’s all this. As soon as you start talking…if they come together, if they’re getting more out of it than they’re putting in, and if they are to some extent working for you in a certain way and helping to strengthen what you do, and you’ve got that…it’s a self-sustaining relationship and it starts generating its own power after a little bit.

You know when a community’s working or an online audience is working when they start generating their own stuff and you can step away almost and go OK, it’s running now. I don’t have to worry about it anymore. You get to that point and brands do get to that point then it’s a brilliant thing.

It’s worth more, worth millions and millions of pounds, but getting there is the challenge. I just want to talk about the value of it and maybe how people can start to show off your case studies a little bit and talk about why it’s a fun, interesting environment to work in and why people shouldn’t be scared of it.

Jonathan: That sounds fantastic. I’m really, really excited to hear that. The things you’ve learned in your… what I would call pioneering work, like you’ve been doing this before many other people have been doing it– are so relevant to the challenges that people face in content strategy, organizations, web communications where you are trying to control something that cannot be controlled and everyone is terrified. How do you bring people together in a way saying that we can work together, we can figure this out, we can try and learn and we can let go of control and see what happens?

Rob: When you start putting it in those terms that’s when people go, “Whoa, it sounds like anarchy,” and limit it to a sign of anarchy. I’ve seen case studies were this went horribly wrong, only because you tried to control it and put in huge amounts of barriers around it and that’s when things go wrong. If you could set an environment that isn’t as, and I’m getting to what this talk’s going to be, so I’ll shut up.

Jonathan: [laughs]

Rob: If you can set something up which is, “OK, what should we do?” That’s what brands don’t do. It’s like go out there and ask people what they’d like to see. That’s what Lego did 15 years ago and why they saved themselves from bankruptcy they’re doing such an amazing job at their stuff now. It’s because they went out and just went out there, had a beer with people, and went, “What do you think we should do?” “Oh, OK? You want to buy a $500 Death Star?” “OK, we’ll make that for you.” Just going out discovering what people want, and a lot of brands are just afraid to turn around and actually open the door and start talking to people. That’s the first step a lot of the time.

But I mean, I’ve sat in rooms with the boards of certain organizations and we’ve talked about maybe you should just invite people along to HQ to talk about this stuff, and they just go white, [laughs] so I guess stopping that reaction and explaining why this is a good thing and not a bad thing, I guess, is my mission in life at the moment. [laughs]

Jonathan: Well, that sounds great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Rob . This has been a really fantastic podcast, and I think people are going to get a lot of out it.

Rob: Thank you. I hope it has been useful, and thanks for having me. Again, it’s been fun to talk about this stuff.

In Episode 9 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Wiep Hamstra from the Netherlands about accessibility, how to structure web teams, and becoming an agent of change. Check out Wiep’s website, her upcoming talk at Confab London, and follow her on twitter @wiepstra.

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Read the transcript

Jonathan Kahn: I’m talking to Wiep Hamstra, who is a content strategist based in The Netherlands. Wiep, thanks so much for taking the time to join me.

Wiep Hamstra: Thank you.

Jonathan: What is your background? How did you get involved in content strategy?

Wiep: I studied science of communications. I worked in a variety of jobs mostly in advice, writing, and editing. One day, I discovered that there was nobody responsible for the Web. I started to work like a content strategist without knowing I was one [laughs] until I read the book of Kristina Halvorson.

Jonathan: You’ve actually a book with some other people, which is in Dutch.

Wiep: Yes.

Jonathan: Because of Google Translate, I’ve been able to look at the website and understand what it says. It’s called “The Secret of the Government Website.” Is that a good translation?

Wiep: Yes, it is.

Jonathan: Can you tell us about why you wrote that book and what it’s about?

Wiep: This book really is about how to include accessibility in Web writing. I was asked to write the book as a Web editor, because, at the time, most people thought accessibility was something for the tech people, the tech stuff about CMSs and videos. But it really is something which is in writing.

Jonathan: Yeah, in the content.

Wiep: In the content, yeah. Maybe it’s a nice story to tell about. It was in 2004. I worked in a very small municipality. One day…How do we call it…of legal, the legal department.

Jonathan: A lawyer, so a lawyer…Yeah, legal department.

Wiep: He said, “When you are making your website, you really should go to [the Dutch web accessibility guidelines] because it’s a legal part of it. I thought…

Jonathan: So like the web guidelines, or the guidelines for…

Wiep: Yes.

Jonathan: The guidelines in the Netherlands for accessibility of websites?

Wiep: Yes.

Jonathan: OK.

Wiep: At that point, I dove in and I found out it really was easy. At first, I didn’t want to find out, but later on I thought well, it’s just easy. It’s making right markup and good links and testing stuff. And so, I dove in, and I think I was the first web writer who was busy with [Dutch accessibility guidelines] at the time.

Jonathan: So you’re saying that the principles that were already in the law about how we should develop accessible websites, you actually felt that they were kind of similar to the principles of how to create good content, full stop?

Wiep: Yes.

Jonathan: And so, when you wrote the book, you’re saying this book is mainly about how to make government websites accessible?

Wiep: Yes. In fact, I wrote two books. First of all, it was about a discovery of those rules and writing them down and how to put them in a web project. And afterwards, I was asked to write a new book, and that was by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I decided well, it’s not the web project, it’s a process. I rewrote it all over and tried to include web standards and accessibility in the process of writing. Then I found out that it was not the writing, but it was the organizing stuff. And then I found out it was the organizing stuff with the right people. Then I found out it was the organizing stuff with the right people in the right places with the right words.

That’s what my book is about and how the Web professional can be the agent of change.

Jonathan: Fantastic. You’ve actually moved from starting off with how do we make the website accessible all the way to how do we organize our companies. All the way to how do we start to change those companies.

Wiep: Yes, by using the right words. It’s a great story. When I had that accessible website back in 2004, I talked about it with a person, with a city council member. I said, “Well, we’ve got a great accessible website. It’s great for the blind and the deaf people. It’s democratic and it’s just great.” Then he was silent and he just said, “But, Wiep, we don’t have any blind citizens in [this municipality].” [laughs]

Jonathan: Was that true?

Wiep: Yes, but there went the story. By focusing on blind persons and deaf persons, we say to our management, “So we have a website for a blind person.” Then they start talking about Pareto Principle. I don’t know if you got…

Jonathan: The 80/20 rule.

Wiep: Yes! They say we don’t spend 80 percent of our money to the very tiny part of a population. That is what I say, don’t mention the wheelchair. Talk about accessibility in terms of problems your management has to solve, and that’s not always the wheelchair or the blind issue. It’s really about mobile. It’s really about accessible flow. It’s really about a great experience online.

Jonathan: Yeah, because accessibility is a broader thing now than simply saying some people have very specific needs when they access content, like blind people and deaf people. The other way of looking at that problem then is that many people have, for example, their power of sight degrades over time so they become almost visually impaired over time. The idea that you need text on devices to be able to be decreased, when they can and that’s possible, is with a tablet or a computer.

That’s an accessibility requirement that doesn’t necessarily only apply to people who we officially class as being disabled, but then there are people who have difficulty with sight or difficulty with reading. It’s a much broader thing than the statistics of disabled people might tell you.

Wiep: In fact, we are all someday visually impaired, deaf, or blind, because we all use Google. Google is, of course, deaf and blind. We have there 90 percent of visitors who are deaf and blind.

Jonathan: Yeah, right. Exactly. One of the things I learned from Google Translate and is in this book is that you talk about this discussion of the type of the structure of team that you have in your organization to maintain your website. You say that this central Web team is the proven formula for content quality, so central Web teams are better in your experience. Can you explain that?

Wiep: I say a central Web team with Web specialists, these are people who are paid to do their jobs and who are very high-end professionals. They know about accessibility, about mobile, and about task-oriented writing. I found out that a decentralized Web team never works. You work with subject matter experts who are very busy with their own content. What Sara said, they write pages and documents.

Jonathan: Sara Wachter-Boettcher?

Wiep: Yes.

Jonathan: You’re making a link between…Because she’s talking about pages and documents as being a structural question of the way that we expect content to be posted, and you’re then linking that with this content to subject matter experts, I suppose, and decentralized publishing where everyone has a real job that they’re doing and that this idea of contributing content to a website is a secondary thing. [laughs] Or, it’s actually a thing that is not even in their job description and they’re going to just produce a Word file.

Wiep: In 10 years, I’ve trained so many people, subject matter experts. All my training started out with people complaining about not having time or not having…While I was paid to do a job, I could never really do at the level that was needed. One day, I decided I’m not going to train those people. Please leave them alone. [laughs] We’re not going to make accessible websites that people who don’t really care or really shouldn’t care about accessibility, because they are subject matter experts. They know about other things. Where I installed those centralized Web teams, we see that we can make accessible websites in less time, with less pages, and so much more easier.

In the Netherlands, we have a system with stars. Three star is the gold standard in accessibility. I found out that those teams, they can make the gold standard.

Jonathan: In the actual teams, you’ve been working with in The Netherlands, the ones where they have a centralized Web team with experts just tend to be able to get these better ratings for accessibility?

Wiep: Yes, so much easier. The subject matter experts, I call them…I don’t know if it’s the right word but correspondents?

Jonathan: Correspondents? Yeah. We talk about correspondents in terms of a newspaper. Is that what you mean?

Wiep: Yes, the eyes and ears of the organization.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Wiep: We don’t ask them to write. We just ask them to be eyes and ears for the organization and get in contact with the Web team.

Jonathan: Yeah, they have the expertise. The interesting thing about this is they have the expertise about how the organization works. Sometimes they’re missing the evidence about how the customers or the citizens interact with it. Maybe the Web team is somewhere between that expertise of the inside of the organization and the evidence of what’s happening outside.

Wiep: Yes. But instead of adding the knowledge about how it works on the outside to the subject matter experts, I say, “It’s OK. You don’t worry. We will take care of that.”

Jonathan: [laughs]

Wiep: And, “Just tell us what you want us to know, what’s so important, and what people have to know because it’s a legal enforcement or a problem.” We write it, or sing it, or make a video, or whatever what’s needed.

Jonathan: You decide…The professionals decide what is the best way to actually implement that.

Wiep: Yes and it’s not democratic at all. When people hire me [laughs] …We don’t have a democracy anymore.

Jonathan: I think the other thing about that is that the way people work, the old school way of working is that departments own content and own the websites and it’s their content. When you talk about a centralized Web team, you are actually switching that ownership around to saying, “Well, actually the organization is responsible for this content. No single department within actually owns it, even if they are responsible for a specific service. They might be the department for the driving licenses or whatever it is. That doesn’t mean that they should be the only people concerned with communicating how to get the driving license to a citizen, because that’s a much broader discussion and actually much more complex.

Wiep: Yes, that’s how it works.

Jonathan: You just said before, you realized that instead of just concerning ourselves with the guidelines for the content, we also need to think about the structure of our organizations, which we were talking about with the centralized versus decentralized. The next thing you said was that in order to get that, we need to become agents of change. Can you tell us about why you came to that conclusion and what you’ve learned about that in your work?

Wiep: That goes back in 2004. I found out by coincidence that it worked liked that. I had a very strong deadline. I had to produce a website in three months. It was October and it had to be launched 1 January, the next year. There were three months of writing and editing and having the content. I worked with a decentralized team of subject matter experts. They were just looking at me, “Tell me, what should we do? Where do we start? I don’t know the CMS.”

I already worked as a copywriter as an editor, so I thought, “Well, what’s the big deal?” [laughs] I start writing.” I just decided which 50 pages were the most important for the organization. I made a chart of it and I just start writing. I asked the people, “Is this OK? Is this correct? Is this what it should be about?” It was done in less than a month.

Jonathan: You actually did all the writing yourself for this piece and it was done?

Wiep: Yes! I thought it was my job. [laughs] I did it in an accessible way. I implemented all the rules. I kept on testing and writing. We had a website with perhaps 50-100 Web pages and there was no single complaint about it.

Jonathan: You’re talking about cutting down the amount of content, is that…

Wiep: Yes, because I simply didn’t have the time to write all.

Jonathan: How does that relate to this concept of becoming an agent of change?

Wiep: I saw that it was a success. I could go to the mayor and say, “Well, I did it in less than three months.” I could really demonstrate the added value of a very good Web specialist.

Jonathan: You’re saying that the type of change you’re talking about is this change from this decentralized to centralized, and you demonstrated it by accident because you had a deadline.

Wiep: Yes!

Jonathan: How have you used that learning, the thing you learned in that situation, in other places? The reason I ask is because people struggle with this concept of becoming an agent of change. Although, they can see that the way that we operate prevents us from doing what we want to do. It seems like nobody ever comes to us and says, “Can you please help me change the way my organization operates?” They come to us and say, “Please can you fix the fact that this user experience is not working or it’s losing money,” or something like that.

Wiep: When that’s the pain, I start with the pain.

Jonathan: You start with the pain.

Wiep: Start with the pain. What’s your biggest problem for government or organization that is the phone calls, the emails, or the people coming in? It’s very expensive. I always look for the core strategy of an organization. It’s very simple to find, really. You can always find promises like we want to be customer oriented or we want to have great services. I start writing down those promises. I start saying, “Well, this is what I found. Is this OK? Is it what you want?” “Yeah, that’s what we want.” I start making a strategy for implementing that on the Web.

Jonathan: You’re finding the existing almost like a brand promise of here’s what we think we did? Then you’re comparing that to what’s really happening, essentially?

Wiep: Then I start the diagnoses. I start on the website. Sometimes I have senior management in one room and I ask them, “Well, could you please put a complaint about something, what’s wrong or missing in our street?” They say, of course, “No, I have no single clue how it works on my website.” I say, “Oh, it’s not a problem. Nobody knows it, so sit down please and we try.” They just find out that it isn’t working, so that’s my business case. I’ve got the promise with their signature. We’ve got the problem, the situation. Then I start building bridges, connecting dots.

What do we have? What people? What are they doing? Oh, it’s only one person. Aha! We’ve got 10,000 pages. That’s what I’m doing in very little steps making it clear what the problem is.

Jonathan: It sounds to me like you’re not really solving the problem at the beginning. You’re going in and saying, “I need to understand what this problem is. I need to find a way to present what’s wrong in the organization.”

Wiep: Yes!

Jonathan: In language that the people who run the organization respond to and then you’re using these tricks. I think there are always tricks. We always need to use tricks to do it. The trick you just described was, find a disconnection between a stated strategy of principle and an actual piece of, in this case, citizen interaction, and show executives in a calm way. [laughs] Or make them experience for themselves what that disconnection is and then say, “Are you OK with this?”

Then they say, “Now that you put it that way, [laughs] it doesn’t seem to really fit.” Then we say, “OK, well then should we start moving in this direction?” What you’re doing is you’re linking what we would call best practice with what they would call something else, like strategy, fulfilling our promises, or whatever their aim is — customer service, whatever they think that they want to get.

It sounds like you need to do that in a different way for every organization.

Wiep: Yes. I work with a colleague. One day he was at a senior management level and he had a presentation about the new website. It was great. He just showed a PowerPoint and he said, “Well, congratulations! This is your new website.” They start applauding, but it was the old website.

Jonathan: [laughs]

Wiep: He said, “Oh.” [laughs] Just wake up please! He was just proving that they weren’t connected to the new website. That was a starting point to improve, really, the organization.

Jonathan: It’s almost like you’re a consultant coming in and figuring out what the problem is before you try and fix the actual website or content or whatever it is.

Wiep: Yes, it is. Sometimes it’s the web professional, sometimes it’s the team, sometimes it’s management, but it’s always a combination of all those things. I am in a lot of organizations where senior management don’t even know what the problem is on the web.

Jonathan: Sure. There’s a good reason for that, because when they learnt how to do their job, there was no web, there was no iPad. The way that they thought the business runs does not include these things. So these are new things, and they’re not used to learning new things. One of the things I really liked from some of your writing is you talk about — I think you said something like, “When I do this, the people in the company don’t like me.”

Wiep: No.

Jonathan: “But it’s OK.” I wanted to ask you about that, because I think that that’s one of the main reasons why we choose not to do this stuff, is we think well, I don’t want people to react badly to me, I don’t want people to criticize me, and what if they don’t like what I’m saying? So how do you overcome those thoughts in your head?

Wiep: For me, it became so much easier when I became a consultant Because as a consultant, I can say other things. Well, there is a proverb that says you’re not biting the hand of your food, you’re not going to harm the hand that’s feeding you.

Jonathan: Yeah, we say the same thing, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

Wiep: People are really afraid of that. My work, in fact, is a lot of coaching and helping people. I’m trying to help Web professionals to get the message across. It’s so much easier to have me say it, the organization. But I’m trying really hard to coach and make people confident that they can say it.

Jonathan: Yeah, fantastic.

Wiep: That’s what I do. I hope to stay invisible in the organization. [laughs] But it doesn’t always work, right?

Jonathan: You’ve actually changed your work from being the person who fixes stuff and edits stuff to someone who…You’re specifically thinking in the way you position your work, you’re trying to help these people within the organization to communicate themselves better what the problem is. I think that’s fantastic. I think you’re doing amazing work.

Wiep: Thank you.

Jonathan: Many more of us need to choose to do the same thing. I speak to so many people who work in agencies, Web design agencies, who say it’s impossible to help as a consultant, is what they say.

Wiep: Oh, it isn’t.

Jonathan: The thing is it’s impossible to do it in certain business models where we sell, we have tenders for fixed price short term projects. When you’re trying to fulfill a very short term product that someone sold in like it was basically a brochure or something, it’s very difficult at that point as a practitioner to say, “Let’s make this about organizational change.”

The challenge for people is, if you’re going to be a consultant, maybe you need to think about doing what Wiep’s doing, which is much more about, you’re really putting a lot of effort into considering how you can be helpful to the organization, which is a different way of interfacing with the organization than most of us have been doing for 15 years.

Normally, we just go in and try to solve problems, and you’re actually doing almost the opposite thing, which is to say, “Let’s actually dig up some problems. Let’s find some problems.”

Wiep: Yeah, and help you in fixing this problem. The best thing that can happen in an organization is not needing me in the organization.

Jonathan: Fantastic. That’s a nice way to think about it.

Wiep: I’m trying to feel as if I’m still there. I sometimes feel that people really feel more confident, and in fact, for me, it’s also very much about out of the comfort zone. Sometimes I fail or make mistakes, but I even tell people, “That’s OK.”

Jonathan: That’s the cultural problem we have, is that we have these cultures where if anyone tries anything and they fail, then the organization rejects them and tries to shame them, and everyone feels very, very bad about themselves if they ever do anything wrong, and that’s why no one will ever try anything new, because they know or feel like if they do, they’re going to get shot down if it fails. If we’re not ready to fail, then we’re not ever going to create anything worthwhile.

Wiep: I think that success is a result of so many failures. When I start explaining how many failures, well, that’s where very much the conversation starts.

Jonathan: The other thing I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that you’re talking about, your business is specifically about coaching. I think that, as content strategists, so much of our value or where we should be spending our effort is in activities like coaching, where you were talking about building bridges and connecting dots before. So much of the content strategist’s work is about getting people in the room and talking to them and creating a different culture, where it is OK to fail and it’s OK to talk about what is broken. We can talk about the problems and we can mentor people. Maybe it’s about bringing in new web specialists, or maybe sometimes it’s about retraining people.

That’s actually, I think, the the work of any content strategist is going to involve some of that work and it’s scary.

Wiep: Yes, it’s working with people. It’s not working behind a desk and inventing things. It’s really getting out talking to people and explaining all over. I sometimes forget that I’m highly specialized. How do you call it? I’m working this for years, so I really have to be calm and explain over and over.

Jonathan: Of course, because so many things are obvious. If you and I were looking at a Web browser, maybe we would say these things and it would be obvious what we were talking about to each other.

Wiep: Yeah. [laughs]

Jonathan: But the people in the local government have other jobs and we would know nothing about what they do. We have to then spend all this effort on being able to communicate things clearly.

Wiep: Yes and I always say, “Well, you really should explain what are you talking about,” because in the local government they are reinventing the typewriter. They’re sitting at a typewriter and watching how to improve that. But we’re not on typewriters. We’re on computers. We’re not on carriages. We’re on cars. We’re shifting things. The organizations really are in the 90s of the century for. We must help them in showing the new “paradigma?”

Jonathan: The new paradigm.

Wiep: Yes, the new paradigm.

Jonathan: Well, I know one Dutch word now.

Wiep: Yeah. [laughs]

Jonathan: Yeah, this is fantastic. Just before we finish, I want to ask you about something I’m very excited about, which is in just a few weeks’ time you’re coming here to London to present at Confab London. We’re very happy to have you presenting. You’re going to be talking about many of the things you’ve talked about today.

Wiep: Yes.

Jonathan: Your talk is called “Achieving Accessibility, 10 Things We Can Learn from Mountaineering.” I want to ask you, can you just explain to us…don’t give us all the secrets of your talk, but just tell us how achieving accessibility is like climbing a mountain.

Wiep: For me, it was like climbing a mountain because there are so many things involved you have to do when mountaineering. It’s about the simple things of how lacing a shoe or a simple skill or drill, but it’s also having a goal. The most important part is having the permit. Because there won’t be a mountain at all, if you’re not allowed to do things on accessibility, you can’t act on it. People always say, “Oh, accessible websites are great, and let’s do it!” But when you really understand what’s involved, people tend to say, “Well, no, not that thing,” and, “Well, let’s skip that and make this much more easier.” So then you really need a permit, and you have to say, “No, we go uphill, and we don’t wait here, and let’s go further.” Well, that’s a really small part.

The other side of the mountain stuff is it really starts at base camp. Accessibility is in base camp. On accessible websites, we can make great websites, work great on mobile, and with great content. So it’s really base camp stuff.

Jonathan: You’re talking about something like a mountain expedition includes an incredible amount of planning before we even leave. This is a lovely metaphor, because that is the problem of web management, that we always try to just redesign or ship something or just do something that seems to be fun or flashy or new. We allow ourselves…I think the reason that we do that is because it’s easier. It seems terrifying to actually plan on an ongoing basis how we’re going to get control of this very scary beast that keeps getting bigger and scarier. It’s just always easier for us to just try and, let’s just do one small thing and not think about the big problem.

Wiep: Of course.

Jonathan: But you’re saying that’s like me trying to climb Mount Everest without the right equipment. I’m probably going to die.

Wiep: Yes. And please start with a little small hill. I started at [a small mountain] eight years ago. It was a small hill, and nobody noticed, and I had my blisters and I fell. Nobody noticed.

Jonathan: You fell?

Wiep: Yes, of course! Some things went wrong. But that’s the only way to find out, to fail and to invent. It’s not always funny uphill.

Jonathan: It’s a hard slog.

Wiep: Yes and we’ve got all those fears of things we can encounter on the mountain. Most of the times those fears aren’t real.

Jonathan: Yes. Wow. OK. This is sounding like a really amazing metaphor for the question of accessibility and not just accessibility, the wider question of contact strategy, Web management and organizational change. I think I’m going to stop you there, so you don’t give away all the secrets of that talk. But I think it’s going to be an amazing talk and I’m really excited to have you representing the Netherlands.

Wiep: Thank you so much.

Jonathan: Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a fantastic discussion. I think people are going to find lots of things to use here. If people want to find out more about Wiep, you need to use Google Translate unless you speak Dutch. Can you just tell us your website, so people can find that and have a look?

Wiep: My website is http://www.wieperbij.nl.

Jonathan:Thank you very much for your time, Wiep. That was fantastic.

Wiep: Thank you. Bye.

In Episode 8 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Kate Kiefer Lee from MailChimp about voice and tone, writing for people’s emotions, and how to make blogging part of your job. Check out Kate’s blog at Forbes.com, the amazing Voice and Tone website, and follow her on twitter @katekiefer.

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Read the transcript

Jonathan Kahn: I’m speaking to Kate Kiefer Lee, who’s joining me from Atlanta and she’s content lead at MailChimp. Kate, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Kate Kiefer Lee: Thanks for having me.

Jonathan: You’re a content strategist, you’re a writer, you have a blog at Forbes. How did you get into this business?

Kate: I started as an editor at a magazine for several years. That eventually led me to do some marketing and copywriting projects, which led me to MailChimp, and I’ve been here at MailChimp for the past three years.

Jonathan: Fantastic. For anyone listening who doesn’t already use the service, could you tell us really quickly what MailChimp is?

Kate: MailChimp is an email newsletter company. What that means, is if a business or a person wants to send newsletters or email marketing campaigns to a mailing list, they can use MailChimp to invite people to sign up for that list, and then to design and send email campaigns to their subscribers. We have several other products like Mandrill, which is our transactional email service. We have a new app called Gather, which is like an SMS app for people who put on events.

MailChimp is at the heart of what we do even though we have a lot going on outside of it.

Jonathan: You’re content lead at MailChimp. What does that involve?

Kate: I work with the rest of our creative team to publish MailChimp’s content. That’s the short answer. I do a lot of copywriting and editing for our public site. I work with people from around the office on our blog in different types of content. I also maintain our style guide and our voice and tone standards. That means I spend a lot of time thinking about our brand’s voice and personality and the way we communicate with people.

It’s my job to make sure our content is useful and friendly and consistent. Sometimes that means copywriting all day, sometimes it means scheduling blog posts all day, and sometimes it means working with the compliance team or another team on messaging.

Jonathan: That sounds like something that’s going to go right across the things that MailChimp does. You must be working with interaction designers and developers and researchers and all these other different email experts. How do you make the content stuff fit with all those other pieces?

Kate: That’s a great question. I sit in a big room with our creative and UX teams. It’s a really collaborative environment. We all work together really well. I’m lucky to say that everyone here truly values content. At the same time, I truly value design. We can create the best content in the world, but without designers, we’re nowhere. That mutual respect is what makes my team work so well together creatively speaking.

Most conversations do start with content but I work very much alongside our designers and developers and our marketing director throughout any given project.

Jonathan: If you think about what people remember about MailChimp. Probably the biggest thing that you are known for is Freddy the mascot. He’s always saying things to you. That itself is a content piece in terms of, the things that he’s saying to you is content. I suppose it does feel that MailChimp itself is a company who’s very aware of how they’re coming across.

Kate: Yes, I hope so. Freddy has been a big part of our content from the beginning, even since before I started at MailChimp. People seem to love him. He’s not going anywhere.

Jonathan: Yeah, we have the hats here, so we’re very pleased with that. If anyone doesn’t realize that, MailChimp gives people these fantastic hats that are like a Freddy hat. Make sure you get your hands on one of those.

Kate: Yes.

Jonathan: You personally are well known for your work on voice and tone. It feels to me like it’s your specialty subject or something like that. We often talk about voice and tone like they’re a single thing – “let’s fix voice and tone for this company.” But you actually say that they’re separate and different. How are they different?

Kate: I think you’re right. People often use those words interchangeably to mean voice. Our voice, like our personality, comes through in all of our content, and it doesn’t really change much. It might adapt over time, but from day to day, our voice should pretty much stay the same. But tone of voice is more about mood and how we say what we say. It changes all the time based on the situation and based on the people at the other end of our content and our readers’ feelings. When I’m explaining it to people, I think it helps to put it in a conversational context. For example, I might use one tone of voice when I’m talking to the president, and I might use a much more casual tone when I’m talking to my husband or a child. I use maybe a really playful tone if I’m joking around with somebody or delivering good news, and a more serious and calm tone to talk to someone who is upset or angry or I’m delivering bad news. That same theory goes for our content.

Jonathan: What you’re saying is, as a human being, you have a single voice and your tone changes depending on the context, and when we do this for organizations we need to imagine that the organization is a human being.

Kate: That’s right.

Jonathan: You guys created this amazing website, voiceandtone.com, which documents your voice and tone guidelines for MailChimp for everyone at MailChimp to understand what’s going on – but you also chose to actually share that with anyone in the world who wants to learn about how you do this stuff. Could you explain how that came about?

Kate: Sure. It all started with our style guide. I was working on our traditional style guide, and I had written the section on MailChimp’s voice. I thought it was great, and I talked about our personality, and I was feeling pretty good about it. Then I got to the next section, which was basically a list of our content types and an explanation of each content type and what it does and what purpose it serves. At that point I realized we have this huge range in content types, from really playful content, like little jokes from our mascot, Freddy, when someone logs into our app, to really serious stuff like compliance alerts, which are messages that say, “We had to shut down or suspend your account.” Something like that could ruin someone’s day. Worst case scenario, it could cost someone their job.

So at that point, I realized we have this huge range in content types. Which means our users and our readers are experiencing a huge range of emotions when they’re interacting with our content. So suddenly one voice fits all didn’t seem to make sense. That’s when I realized tone of voice is part of the picture. I started talking to our UX lead, Aaron Walter about it.

We started putting together this guide. I’m not sure when it became a public thing, what made us decide to do that. I think it’s because I felt like it was something that more companies needed to do. It was such a good exercise for us. We wanted to share it, so that other people could learn from it.

Jonathan: Yeah. What’s amazing about this website is that you go through these different scenarios when we should be using a different tone. For each of them, like the one you just mentioned, with the compliance thing, you identify the user’s emotional state first. You say, “Here’s what the customer is thinking to start with.” Then, what are their feelings? After we’ve thought about that, what’s the tone we use? Can you talk us through that?

Kate: Sure. When I was putting together this guide, the voice and tone guide, I started with a list of content types and was and listing emotional states that I associated with those content types. I think it’s an exercise in empathy. It’s something that we do naturally, in human conversation. But we don’t so much do that when we’re writing copy. So I started listing those emotions and asking myself questions like, “How does the reader feel, right now, going into this content? How is this content going to make her feel? How can I make her happy or keep her happy?” That just sent me down this road. From there, I noticed, I’d naturally adjust my tone, based on those emotional states.

And I tried to just define the way that I adjust my tone, and learn more about how we can do that on a larger scale.

Jonathan: Yeah. If you think about a conversation between a user and this website, it’s like a semi-human situation. Where there’s one person who’s a living, breathing human. And the other person isn’t really a person. We’ve programmed a computer to react in a certain way. What you’re saying, what I’m hearing is that we have to, when we design these… When we write the error message, or whatever it is, we have to put ourselves in the position of this future interaction that’s going to happen between the human being and the company. And then decide how we should react.

Kate: Exactly.

Jonathan: I think the thing that sticks about voiceandtone.com to me is that it’s such a practical way of helping everyone in the company to do it. Because they can say, “I know I need to do this type of content now. I know I need to do this type of screen. And what is it that we’re supposed to say to be MailChimpy?” Then they look in there and they say, “Oh yeah.” It reminds them to think about the emotional state of the person that they’re dealing with.

Kate: That’s right. And I definitely didn’t create it to be a guide that people should use as a reference. It’s something that I want people to poke around and get a feel for that. So exactly like you said. Once you spend enough time on it, you get a good feel for how we talk to people and how we adapt our tone, based on users’ feelings.

Jonathan: And I think this whole discussion about style guides and governance and being in charge of content and owning content and stuff. It’s so easy to try and write a document which has these rigid rules everyone must follow. Otherwise, the people in charge of the website won’t let you put the content up there. They don’t really work very well. Because people feel like you’re telling them what to do. Whereas, if you provide a tool like this, where you’re saying, “This is a way to make what you do more effective.” So the user of the style guide wants to be more effective in communicating, or whatever it is. You’re saying, “This is a practical tool to make you better at doing communication.”

So I would have thought that people used this a lot in MailChimp. As opposed to one of those old school voice guides which no one ever looks at.

Kate: Absolutely. And I think it’s also really helpful, when you’re working with people who are creating content, but they aren’t necessarily writers. So a big traditional style guide with lots of rules and regulations isn’t going to be as useful as an explanation of voice and tone and how that works. It’s basic human things that someone can understand. Even if that person doesn’t consider themselves a writer.

Jonathan: Yeah, perfect. So, how should a company’s culture influence its voice and tone?

Kate: That’s a great question, and it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, because that’s very much true at MailChimp. I think that the best brand voices are true reflections of people behind the company.

Jonathan: OK.

Kate: MailChimp’s voice is…it’s a reflection of the culture here. It’s a reflection of our CEO, Ben, and his personality and sense of humor. It’s a casual place here. We have a whole lot of fun that comes through in our content, but we also work really hard and we like to get things done, and I hope that that comes through in our content too. So, I think that honesty is the key there,…

Jonathan: OK.

Kate: …to have a voice that’s as honest as possible, and as true to the company’s culture as possible, and then these things sort of fall into place. It comes a lot more naturally that way.

Jonathan: Yeah. That just makes you think about… I often come across people who work for some established companies who have set this idea of what their tone and what their voice is, a long time ago, a long way before the Web happened, and they have these branding agency type documents that they’re supposed to use, which have these kind of difficult to interpret statements about how we’re supposed to sound.

So, I think that there’s something in what you’re saying there, that they’re not honest, in the sense that they’re not really reflecting what is this big telecommunications company actually like…

Kate: Right.

Jonathan: …versus how would they like their adverts to look.

Kate: Yeah.

Jonathan: That’s not very practical for Web content people. So, do you have any tips for people in that situation, whether they feel like they’ve been given branding guidelines that aren’t really appropriate for the Web?

Kate: I would say that voice and tone guidelines should be fluid. They should be living things. Even if it’s written in a post-digital context, it’s still something that should change all the time and be updated all the time, based on the environment, based on people, based on new content types, based on feedback. I think that it might make sense to go through the content and find places where the existing branding guidelines maybe don’t apply, and it doesn’t work, and then from there figuring out, “What’s the solution? How do we adapt our tone in this case?”

And then, that helps you make a case for why the whole thing needs to be changed, why a company needs voice and tone guides that are updated, well maintained and really useful in whatever context you need them for.

Jonathan: I was just thinking about that. The other part of this, in terms of getting this cultural change in the organization, like more appropriate style guides and stuff, is usability testing. I think you’re well known for doing usability testing on your interfaces. Do you ever do that with content?

Kate: Yes and no. we’ve definitely started including, you know, “How does that make you feel?” type questions in our testing, and I think that user interviews are really useful for that.

Jonathan: OK.

Kate: I’m at the beginning of that, but I absolutely pay attention to all different types of feedback, even maybe Twitter and Facebook feedback, and emails from customers, and then feedback we might get in usability testing or customer interviews, or just in natural conversations that happen when you’re interacting with customers. So, all of that absolutely comes into play and helps me to tweak our voice and tone.

Jonathan: Fantastic. You spoke at Confab last year, and also at CS Forum last year, about your work on voice and tone. At Confab you gave a fantastic talk, and you gave us some examples of when…actual experiences you’ve had where a light-hearted tone backfired. So, can you tell us about when that happens, and what companies can do about it?

Kate: Yes. I think that a lot of companies think that if they have a fun or playful voice, then they have to be fun and playful all the time.

Jonathan: Sure.

Kate: That’s not true. It can be a huge mistake, because certain situations just don’t call for humor. So, I think that where it can get companies into trouble is if someone is maybe troubleshooting, or reading a failure message, or reading some kind of bad news.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Kate: They don’t want to hear your jokes, and they don’t want a playful tone. They want you to calmly and quickly explain to them what is going on, and how they can solve this problem that they have. I find this stuff so interesting that I’ve just started on some research about touchy subjects, and creating friendly content in such sensitive situations.

It’s exciting for me, because there’s a whole lot to learn, and we all have a long way to go. I’m still learning how to talk to people who are receiving really bad news from MailChimp, and tweaking that and getting to the right place with it.

Jonathan: What kind of research are you doing into that stuff?

Kate: Well, I’m starting by looking at different industries that are maybe sensitive industries by nature.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Kate: So, something like health care, maybe banking, and companies that are dealing with foreclosure, legal and privacy stuff, and thinking about how they can have a friendly human voice. But they have to walk this line that the rest of us don’t necessarily have to pay as much attention to, because if someone is looking at a hospital or a hospice web site, they’re likely to be feeling vulnerable or scared, and you don’t want to be too casual and you also don’t want to be too formal because that can ruffle people’s feathers too.

So, I’m looking at industries, and I’m also looking at content types within the rest of our industries, so, things like failure messages and help content, contact pages and frequently asked questions, or places that people might go when they have a problem. And then I’m also looking at legal and privacy content, and how to handle crises.

Jonathan: Yeah. I mean, if I think back to…you were saying, like financial content. The way I think of financial content is normally unclear, formal language, indirect language, which is the last thing you want when you’re dealing with something that’s gone wrong, or something that might cost you a lot of money or something like that.

Kate: Exactly, and a lot of times those places where it’s the last thing you want are the most common places to find that sort of formality. We’ve got to figure out how to fix that.

Jonathan: Yeah, and I remember when I had this friendly debate with some colleagues, a year ago or something, about the idea of – this is related, I promise you – social media and insurance. They’d done some work for an insurance company who had decided that there was no way an insurance company could do social media, because everyone on Twitter was just saying how much they hated the insurance companies.

Kate: [laughs] Right.

Jonathan: So, their initial conclusion was, “It can’t be done. Everyone hates insurance,” and I said, “Well, surely there are some good things in insurance, or else nobody would buy it.” What you’ve actually got there is that there is some communication breakdown between what value the people are getting from insurance, and how they’re communicating online or whatever it is.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. It can be an opportunity. We just have to figure out how to deal with these sorts of situations, and how to deal with customers who are dealing with insurance.

Jonathan: Yeah, and you’ve also often got a situation where, in the past, there was some human being in between the company and the customer. For example, if you went to a broker for your insurance, and they would talk you through everything, or a travel agent or whatever it is, financial advisor. When that goes away and it’s just you and the company, and the company still uses this formal way of communicating, then that’s when you hit problems.

Kate: Yeah, it can really make people feel isolated and nobody cares about them.

Jonathan: Will you be sharing some of this research when you’ve gotten further with it?

Kate: Yes, absolutely. I’m getting all my thoughts together and I’m excited to write a little bit about it and see where it takes me.

Jonathan: We’ll all be following that. That sounds fantastic. We talked about voice and tone a lot, but I know you do lots of other things over there at MailChimp, so can you tell us about some of the other cool stuff you’re involved with in MailChimp?

Kate: A lot of my job is the website itself and our basic day-to-day content. I do a lot of copywriting. I do a lot of editing. I still love that part of my job. We have fun projects, like the annual report that we worked on, was this super fun project for the creative team to work together on. I have the writing that I do and the research that I do. There’s a lot going on. I have a lot of balls up in the air, but the voice and ton stuff is still exciting for me every day. I still learn more about it every day and it changes all the time.

Jonathan: Thinking about the content that comes into my mind, when I think of MailChimp, you do these stories where you talk to the people who use it. The ones I’ve seen have a video, but they talk about what their businesses is and they happen to be people who use MailChimp to get that message out. You don’t really talk about how they use MailChimp, you talk about what they do. I remember there was a bee keeper, I can’t remember what else… That’s fantastic because it’s really really interesting to see the stories of people.

It’s not really about the fact that they’re also a user of MailChimp. For me, it’s more like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting story.” As we go on, anything you can share about those types of strategies you’re using, which are not how most people think of say marketing.

Kate: It’s very important to me that we all remember that MailChimp itself isn’t changing anyone’s lives. We are not the most important product in our customers’ lives. It’s easy to get carried away, telling our own story, and talking about MailChimp and selling MailChimp. I try to take a step back as often as I can and realize our users have their own stories. We are helping them live out those stories.

We’re helping them communicate for their businesses, but they are not sitting around all day thinking about MailChimp and how great we are. It’s not going to get us anywhere to expect them to understand everything from our context and our perspective.

That’s another way that I like to put our customers first and focus on their stories and focus on what it is that they do and how we can help empower them and help them do what they do.

Jonathan: The interesting thing about that is, you do it so well as a company that it probably is important for people, their choice to use MailChimp versus another email service. Probably the things like that that you’re describing about this community that you support and the way that you support events and whatever else, is probably a more important thing to those people who are choosing whether to use you or not, than your exact feature for HTML something, something in the actual product.

Kate: Well, thank you. I hope that, that’s true. We have an amazing product, and really great features, and that makes it a heck of a lot easier for me to do my job. I hope that helps us to have more real relationships with our customers, and more loyal customers.

Jonathan: Fantastic. Just to finish off. I also noticed that you write a blog for Forbes.com, about web writing. I really enjoy it because you really hear all these juicy topics, and you manage to write three paragraphs about it, and it’s really useful. I could mention, I would try to write 17…

Kate: [laughs] I like to write short. That for sure.

Jonathan: Well, you do it incredibly well. It’s easy to write short, and say nothing. You don’t do that, you write short, and say something. I want to ask you about that, and I also want to ask you if you have any tips to share with people, about how to put time aside, in their existing life, and job to do something like writing a column?

Kate: Sure. Well, to be totally honest I’m sitting on a couple of articles right now that I probably need to finish. [laughs] [Jonathon laughs]

Kate: In general it helps me to consider that sort of writing. Just another part of my work. Writing about content means research, it means talking to people about content, and seeing it from different perspectives. I work in-house at a certain size company, and I see content a certain way, and it helps me get outside of that. That writing process makes me smarter, and it stretches me. I think it absolutely enriches my work at MailChimp. If I look at that kind of writing as another aspect of my job instead of just a separate freelance thing, it helps me to get it all done.

Jonathan: Cool. Do you have any tips about your style? You were just saying, you like to write short. Tell me about that?

Kate: Honestly, that’s something that I’ve always preferred, short over long. If you tell me I have to meet a certain word count, sometimes that’s really hard for me, but I can always cut. That’s the editor in me. I love cutting things down, I love starting as short as I can, and then trying to make sure that every word means something, every sentence means something, and eliminating the fluff.

That’s a lot of my day to day work in general when I’m editing content for our website. Copywriters are used to having to write short, so it comes naturally for me.

Jonathan: That’s fantastic. It’s really fantastic blogging. It’s so nice to sit there and read it. Because I know that it’s not going to take me that long. I know it’s going to have some actual point to it. It’s fantastic.

Kate: Thanks.

Jonathan: Thank you so much, Kate, for your time today. It’s been fantastic to hear about your work at MailChimp. I think it’s going to be really practical for people to apply to their own work. Especially because you’re sharing it all on voiceandtone.com. I’m also really excited that you’re going to be joining us in March, here in London, for Confab London, to share some of this stuff.

Kate: Yes, I can’t wait.

Jonathan: Thank you so much for your time today.

Kate: Thanks a lot, Jonathan.

Most conference talks make the audience feel bad about themselves, because the presenter talks about their achievements instead of how the audience can become more awesome (or how they can “kick ass”, as Kathy Sierra puts it.) This isn’t deliberate, and it’s straightforward to change, as long as the presenter is willing to take a risk by making themselves vulnerable.

Imagine you’ve been asked to present about something you’ve learned, or a project you’ve completed. You have something valuable to share, which means you took risks to get there—learning something is always uncomfortable. But when you start writing your presentation, a voice in your head tells you that people don’t want to hear about your struggles—instead they want to be “inspired” by your success. And so your failure story about learning transforms into a success story about “good practice” and “return on investment” and the way things should be done. You miss out the hard part of your project: the failures, the self doubt, the fear of criticism, the shame. You edit history to fit the form of almost every talk you’ve seen, until you come up with what you think we want to hear.

As the audience, part of us does want to hear your success story: the voice of shame, the lizard brain, the resistance. The lizard brain is trying to protect us from vulnerability by repeating the story that we learned as children: I’m not good enough. That’s exactly what your talk is communicating to us. You edited out the hard part and you’re telling the story of your project as if you found it easy, as if you’re a super-person, as if you’ve never faced shame in your life. We translate your story into a story about ourselves: “I could never do that, I don’t have a super-power.”

We might tell you that we feel “inspired” and that your case study will help convince our boss to give us permission to do our work. But we’ll walk out of the presentation feeling bad about ourselves, affirming that we’ll never amount to anything—that we could never be like you.

There’s another part of us that wants something different from you, though: we want you to be vulnerable. To risk our rejection and criticism and to share your struggles. To model the type of behavior that we need to practice in order to do our true work: doing things that scare us because we might fail. If you’ve ever seen a talk like this, you’ll remember it: you probably described it as honest or brave. This type of talk makes us feel challenged, scared, and hopefully brave. We realize that you, the person on stage, are just like us—you struggle, you feel shame, you fail. You’ve shot down our excuses (“I’m not a super-person”) and you’ve told us that we’re capable of great work. We’ve learned that it’s OK to be uncomfortable, that other people believe in us, and that we have to take risks in order to do our work.

Back to your conference talk. You can choose to be honest about the hard part of your work, and focus on making your audience awesome instead of telling a fictional super-me story. Here’s the catch: it will scare the hell out of you. The couple of times I’ve tried it, it’s made me shake with fear, as if my body is trying to shut me down. But if you manage to feel the fear and do it anyway, it will change you—because you’ll help people to fight their own demons, to make themselves vulnerable, to do work that matters.

If you like sound of this, check out two conferences I’m organizing this year: Confab London (with Brain Traffic) and the Dare Conference.

As people who work in technology, content, and the web, we’re at the forefront of cultural change. And we need to take responsibility for the way we run our communities, both online and face-to-face. Let’s talk about some of our problems.

The academy is dead, long live self-development

The old educational model of god-like experts pouring knowledge directly into the brains of students doesn’t work any more. In the era of connection, you’re responsible for your own development, whether that’s writing a blog post or attending a conference. A community event will only help you if it challenges you, because learning is uncomfortable—and you need to make yourself vulnerable in order to learn. You’ll only be willing to do that in a safe space. Here’s the problem: we’ve failed to create a safe space for so many people.

We have an inclusion problem

We’ve seen some constructive discussion in the tech industry recently (1, 2, 3, 4) about inclusion in events, mostly directed at conference organizers—for example, making it clear that it’s not acceptable to have all-white-male lineups at conferences. I think this is fantastic—we organizers need to raise our game by learning what the community needs and redesigning our events to match, for example by running open calls for talks. We need to make inclusion an explicit goal of our events, and we need to work on making conferences, meetups, workplaces, etc., a safe space for everyone. Which means setting standards, expectations, and boundaries about acceptable behavior. And modeling inclusion and respect on stage—which is why inclusive speaker lineups are so important. But before you let yourself off the hook, this isn’t just a problem for organizers. We’re all community organizers now. This is your problem too.

Harassment is widespread in our community

I didn’t understand harassment until it happened right in front of me. Recently I was at a web conference with a female friend and colleague, and one of the organizers behaved in a sexist, insulting, and aggressive way towards her, on more than one occasion, right in front of me.

Initially I was shocked, because I’ve never had that kind of behavior directed at me, so I naïvely assumed that nobody else experienced it either. (Attention white men: people behave differently towards us.) Was this an isolated event? No, I learned, technology conferences (and much of the business world) are rife with sexist behavior, which is one reason why so few women choose to stay in the field—a problem for all of us.

But hang on, my shock is irrelevant—I was a bystander, not a victim. What happened next? This incident happened at an official conference event, in front of several male attendees (including me). It felt like everyone knew the organizer was behaving inappropriately, but we had no idea how to object, so we stayed silent and left my friend to fight him off alone. (I attempted to intervene but got stuck on the idea that I shouldn’t speak “for” my friend, as if that would imply that she couldn’t speak for herself.) The “topic” of the aggressive behavior—the thing he was shouting about—was ostensibly a web industry issue, and I guess the others told themselves this was an “argument” about web stuff, which they felt uncomfortable about interrupting. I learned that we live in a sexist culture, to the extent that when three men witnessed something we knew was wrong, we didn’t have the language nor the courage to intervene.

We need to set boundaries about acceptable behavior

I realized that this guy must behave like this all the time, and the people around him choose not to call him out on it. (Since then I’ve confirmed that he has a history of aggressive behavior.) Our instinct might be to retaliate by publicly shaming him—but that’s the easy way out, and it won’t work. People are abusive and aggressive when they have shame issues (eg low self esteem)—that doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it shows that trying to tell the world that he’s a bad person won’t stop him behaving like that. He’s not a bad person, he chose to behave in an unacceptable way. If we tell him what’s wrong with his behavior, and explain that we won’t engage with him unless that changes, he might make a different choice tomorrow. Instead of labeling people as good our bad, we have to set boundaries with them, and that makes us uncomfortable. We have to say, “this community doesn’t allow that type of behavior”, and we have to mean it.

You’re responsible for the culture you’re part of

What does this have to do with you? Whether you’ve experienced this kind of behavior or not, you’re part of this community, and you need to be part of the solution. If you agree that a more inclusive culture would help the industry, our careers, and our work, then reconsider the choices you make. You choose which conferences to spend your money on—do they challenge you by taking you outside your comfort zone? You can give organizers feedback about their speaker choices and harassment policies. You can pitch talks to events, or encourage people you know from under-represented groups to do the same. You can start your own meetup or conference.

You can be alert to harassment in the workplace, at events, online—and when you see it, you can try to uphold the community’s values by calling out inappropriate behavior. Something like, “the way you’re behaving is inappropriate.” Difficult to say, and yet essential if we’re going to redesign our culture around respect, empathy, and collaboration.

Let’s get uncomfortable and remake our culture

I’m trying to make cultural change part of my work. Here’s what I’ve achieved so far:

• I’ve co-organized open calls for speakers for two conferences about content strategy, both of which resulted in a diverse range of backgrounds, genders, and countries. (Far from perfect, of course—there’s always more work to do.)
• Together with Richard Ingram I’ve organized 11 (and counting) London Content Strategy Meetup events, all of which featured female speakers.
• I’m trying to set boundaries at the events I organize, based on the values of respect and inclusion. I’m working on harassment policies for my events.

What are you doing to change our culture?

Photo by Rhiannan Walton

For much of my career I told myself I was a firefighter, fixing problems that nobody else could. I would get contract gigs as a developer, and web agencies would hire me to fix a content management system or finish a messy project.

For example, in 2007 I spent 6 months working on a demo website that was supposed to showcase the “future of corporate reporting” for the digital arm of a print-focused design agency. They’d promised the CEO that the demo would be ready by now—complete with a man “walking” across the website explaining its features (I wish I was joking)—but they kept getting stuck. It was urgent, so they found me and I spent a ridiculous amount of time managing the project, writing code, and wrangling stakeholders. Eventually we launched the site at a fancy event: I’d put out the fire, even if it took 5 times longer than planned.

Of course, the demo didn’t revolutionize corporate reporting—the agency’s real aim was to bluff their way out of a business model problem. They were trying to use flashiness to convince corporations to pay more for online annual reports, because the switch to digital was killing their lucrative print commissions. I’d led them on, and taken their money too.

I only realized recently why I was telling myself the story that I was a firefighter: I was avoiding the difficult part of my work, the part that scared me most. For this job, and all the others too, I chose not to ask, “why?”

I’d lecture clients about user experience, but in reality I was there to fix a short term problem. Firefighters make themselves vulnerable to help others—they’re brave, and they often risk injury or death. They don’t like fires: they do everything they can to prevent them from happening. What I was doing wasn’t brave at all. I was addicted to fires—they were my specialty. Clients never asked me how to stop the fire next time (that is, stop screwing up their web projects). I realize now that I was comfortable with that, even though it made me miserable.

I remember when I first heard about content strategy. I was working at an agency, and I’d often complain that their processes weren’t user centered, that they didn’t “get” the web. When I talked to clients, I’d downplay the importance of my work, saying things like, “I’m just a web developer, I don’t know anything about your actual business”. I realize now that I was avoiding difficult conversations—how much time were they willing to commit to maintaining their website, and how would they change working practices? (Answer: they wouldn’t.) Then I read “The Discipline of Content Strategy” by Kristina Halvorson in A List Apart magazine:

…who among us is asking the scary, important questions about content, such as “What’s the point?” or “Who cares?”

At the time I remember saying, out loud, “me! I’m asking those questions!”

I was fooling myself. I’d never asked those questions—or at least, not with enough persistence to be helpful. They were too scary: I couldn’t handle the vulnerability, so I avoided the hard part of my work.

And that’s our challenge, as a community. How do we break out of our cover stories, our excuses, our distractions from the real work? How can we admit that doing our real work is hard, that we’re scared to fail, that we often take the easy route and feel bad about it?

I’ve stopped telling myself I’m a firefighter. Instead, I’m trying to do what scares me, to feel the fear and do it anyway. Here’s something I’m working on: “The Dare Conference. Let’s be brave together.”

You’re a troublemaker. You can’t ignore the clash between today’s soulless production-line culture and the digital revolution, which values connection and openness. Our outdated organisations need your help more than ever—and yet, you can’t change the world on your own. Join us! Together we’ll dare to take risks, be vulnerable, and do work that matters.

Will you join me?

Photo by the US Army.

In Episode 7 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Angela Colter about testing content, considering users with low literacy skills, and continuous improvement. Check out Angela’s blog and publications and follow her on twitter @angelacolter.

Listen to the podcast

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Read the transcript

Jonathan Kahn: I’m talking to Angela Colter, who’s joining me from Philadelphia today. She’s a user researcher and usability consultant, and she’s been designing information for people, both online and in print, since 1997. Angela’s Principal of Design Research at Electronic Ink in Philadelphia, and she’s presented worldwide at conferences like UPA, Confab, STC, IA Summit, and the Plain Language Association. So, Angela, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today.

Angela Colter: My pleasure.

Jonathan: According to your website, you’ve been working in information design since ’97, originally as a print designer. So what I want to know is, how did you end up in the usability field, and how did that lead you to content?

Angela: So I started working as a graphic designer after I finished my master’s degree at a college outside of Baltimore, Maryland. And what I found was that, while I was doing print design work, I found that, in many cases, I felt like the clients, the internal folks at the college that I was doing work for, were very interested in getting their message out. So, “This is the message that we want to get to our students, prospective students, and so forth.” But I found it a little frustrating that the conversation was all about the information that the department wanted to communicate out, but there was very little acknowledgement of what kind of information their audience was looking for or needed from them.

So, it was a frustration that grew over the course of my career, until I sort of stumbled onto the field of, initially, information architecture. So, this idea of cataloging information, of organizing it in such a way that made it easy for people to find. So I thought, “Ah, that’s pretty interesting. I’ll go back and take a course on information architecture.” But it just so happened that the course was only offered once a year, and it wasn’t offered [laughs] the semester that I had intended to take it. And instead, there was available a research-methods class, where you learned the basics of usability testing and user research.

So I had intended to do one thing, after becoming sort of disillusioned with the career that I had chosen, and by accident, I suppose, hit on this other sort of career interest. That was about 10 years ago, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

Jonathan: OK. I think you’re best known as a usability person. So how did that lead you to presenting and writing and talking so much about content?

Angela: Yeah, so that’s a very interesting question. I suppose that, with doing usability testing, mostly for websites, early in my career, I worked on a project with my graduate adviser on creating guidelines–print guidelines, in this case–for people with low literacy skills. And that project sort of expanded into, “Well, now that we’ve got these guidelines established for how to communicate health-care information to people who don’t read easily, how would you translate that to a website?” So if you’ve got print guidelines, what are the corresponding web guidelines? It was just very early in my experience with usability that I was exposed to this idea of different audiences that had different needs from content and how do you satisfy those needs. I don’t know. It just sort of happened that way, that content came, and how we communicate with our audiences just sort of happened, I suppose, organically, as part of the beginnings of doing this type of work.

Jonathan: OK. And so, I think I first came across your work when you wrote an article for “A List Apart Magazine” in December 2010, which was called “Testing Content.” And I thought this was a big eye-opener for me, at least, because you called out a common usability practice, which is testing whether users can find content rather than whether they actually understand it. When I saw that, I thought, “Wow, that is one of the problems with usability testing as a practice.” So why does this happen?

Angela: I think it happens from the client’s point of view, and really, I think, in the usability field, we tend to be somewhat complicit in this, is because that’s what we’re comfortable with. It’s a very on-off sort of switch: “Are you able to find it, or are you not able to find it?” That’s a very binary sort of issue. And I think that, naturally, we’re sort of drawn to answering the more simple questions. And the issue of “Can you find it or can you not find it?” that’s a very simple question that can be answered, and so you tend to gravitate towards the things that are maybe a little more simple to answer.

The question of whether somebody understands what it is that you’ve set out for them, that’s a much more complex issue. And it gets into not only what you have control over, which is what you’ve written, but it also involves things that you really have no control over, which is the domain knowledge of your audience, the reading skills of your audience and so forth.

I mean, that’s the excuse that I will use for myself. [laughs] When I’ve gravitated towards “Can you find it or not?” it’s because that’s an easier question to answer.

Jonathan: Yeah. So it’s like a quick win that we could fix. The other part of that is you can fix it more easily, so maybe you should label it more clearly.

Angela: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jonathan: There’s a great reality check in that piece, I think. When you say that if you ask the user, “Do you like this information? Do you understand this information?” that isn’t really the useful question to ask. Why is that the case?

Angela: If you’ve ever observed a usability test, at the end of a usability test, you’ve maybe spent half an hour or an hour or longer with a person, and you’ve asked them to complete a bunch of different tasks, and maybe they’ve struggled with some of those tasks, and maybe, in some cases, they even failed to complete them. In my entire career, every single time I ask somebody at the end of the test, “So, how did that site work for you?” I never get any answer other than, “It was great! Thumbs-up! It was really easy!” And I’ve never understood why somebody would tell me, “Oh, yeah, that was easy,” when, “Oh, that’s funny, because you actually failed every single task that I gave you.” And I think there’s something similar going on when you ask somebody, “Did you understand that?” And I think part of it is, with a usability test, you’re already setting up this artificial environment where, despite the fact that you want to make it very clear that you’re not testing the person, you’re testing the interface or the content or whatever it is that you’re looking at, the person who’s participating, there’s no way they’re not going to feel like you’re testing them. And I think people, they don’t want to be perceived as dumb or “You didn’t succeed. You failed at doing this.”

So I think that folks who maybe did have a hard time with some tasks in a usability test are going to say, “Yeah, it was great. It was easy,” because they either don’t want to admit otherwise and admit that they had a difficult time, or I think what’s also likely going on is, “Well, it wasn’t easy, but it’s no more difficult than any other thing that I’ve ever used on the web.”

Jonathan: Right, right, right. Usability itself is this very relative term. If you can complete the task, you may regard that as usable. [laughs]

Angela: Yeah, yeah. If you call, for example, you’re on the line with customer service for some company, and you’re on the phone for five minutes, and you didn’t really get the answer that you wanted from the first person that you talked to and you got shuttled around, but eventually you got the answer that you came for, but it took 45 minutes, well, how did that go? And it’s like, “Well, about as well as I expected.” Because, if your experience with something is always bad, then the fact that it’s bad when you test it, it’s like, “Well, it’s no worse than I’ve ever encountered before.” If something matches up with a person’s expectations, they’re going to say, “Yeah, I guess it was fine.” I think that’s, going back to your original question, why asking people, “How did this content work for you?” you’ll often not get a very accurate answer. “Well, it worked well enough,” or “I had to read it two or three times, but I finally made sense of it.” I think the expectation is well, that’s usually what I have to do so that’s not outside of the realm of people’s experience.

Jonathan: So you actually… in this article you go through three practical ways that people can start testing their content right now which are moderated usability tests like you were describing, although you haven’t yet told us how to do it, an unmoderated test, or something called a cloze test. So can you talk me through those techniques?

Angela: Yes, so real quickly, a moderated usability test is where you have a moderator who’s actually talking to the participant of the test. So the moderator is asking the participant to complete…if you’re usability testing a website, for example, you usually will have a list of tasks that you want the participant to attempt. And then you watch them as they attempt those tasks, and you might ask them to think aloud, kind of give you the running commentary of what’s going on in their head while they’re trying to complete that task.

And what that does is that allows you see what they are actually doing. The running commentary also gives you some insight into what they’re thinking while they’re trying to complete the tasks. But what’s also very interesting is that what people…how people describe what they’re doing and then what they’re actually doing do not necessarily overlap 100 percent.

So in other words an example might be, “Oh, yeah, I thought that task was pretty easy,” when, in fact, the participant may not realize that they actually failed to do what you asked them to do. So you can’t 100 percent rely on what people are…how people are describing what they’re doing. You always have to sort of match that up with, well, what did they actually do and pay attention to kind of both of those things.

So that’s a moderated usability test. That can happen either with the participant in the same room with the moderator, or it can happen remotely where you’re talking with somebody perhaps over Skype. You’re doing screen sharing so that you’re seeing with testing a website what they’re clicking on, where they’re going, and so forth. So just because it’s moderated doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re in the same room with the participant.

Jonathan: Specifically when you said testing content in this way, how are you determining whether they’ve understood the content in this test?

Angela: So one good way of doing that is to ask somebody to paraphrase what they’ve read. So if you give somebody a piece of content, maybe an article about how to address a particular healthcare situation, and you ask them to read it and then ask them to paraphrase what they read, you can look at did they get the gist of what the article was saying or did they completely miss the main point of what you ask them to read? So paraphrasing is one thing you can do. Another thing that you can do is to ask them questions about what they just read. Ideally you would ask them questions where they really wouldn’t know the answer unless they read what you just gave them.

That can be difficult, because people are also bringing domain knowledge to bear so getting a sense of what people already know prior to asking them to read a piece of content is always useful, but then asking them questions to see if they were able to pick out that information in the content is another way that you would do that.

And then you mentioned the cloze test, which I mentioned in the article. That’s another really interesting technique that you can use, which is kind of a funny little thing. It looks like, if you know what a Mad Lib is, it kind of looks like a Mad Lib, where you’ve got a piece of text, and you remove every five words or so, and you give that piece of text with every fifth word removed and blank put in its place, and you ask them to fill in the word, the original word, that they think that the author would have used.

And what that does is it kind of it uses the idea of closure from your gestalt theory, the idea of closure that the brain is going to fill in the blanks of incomplete information. So the brain will do the same thing with words where you take a look at the rest of the words that are present, and are you able to, from the context of the remaining words, sort of intuit what’s missing there?

Jonathan: It’s one of those things where until you actually do it yourself, it doesn’t seem to make any sense, because I remember you actually have…you must have a sample of it in this article, and then you gave a talk at Confab in Minneapolis where you actually got us all to do this test as I remember. And people around the room were just like, “Wow.” I’d never seen this before, and everyone around the room is just like, “This is so useful. How does it work?” And it does work so I think you gave us one that we could do, and then you gave us one that was financial which we just could nowhere near do.

Angela: [laughs]

Jonathan: And we were all just going, “But we’re all supposed to be clever people, and we can’t do this. What’s going on?” And I think you explained afterwards.

Angela: Yeah, so what’s really interesting is, I know that when I first encountered this concept of the cloze test, which is something…I mean it’s been in use for, I don’t know, the past 70 years or so. It’s often used in classrooms, particularly for folks that are teaching English as a second language. So this is an established method that’s used mainly in education up to this point, but it’s a technique that’s commonly used in areas outside of usability and content website and that sort of thing. But when I first encountered it, I remember thinking, “This is complete voodoo. There’s no way that this actually makes any sense. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

But then I worked on a project where the client said, “We want you to use a cloze test,” and they explained what it was and how to use it to test – in this case they were asking us to test two different types of articles.

It was for a government agency. The agency was trying to come up with a readability formula that could be applied to healthcare information, specifically, and so they were kind of…this was a method of testing whether the tool that they had come up with was actually working.

They gave us a series of articles. Half of them their experts had judged to be easy and the other half the experts had judged to be difficult. We were to take these, turn them into a cloze test, and then give them to participants.

Sure enough, based on the method that you use to score the cloze test, which is you figure out the percentage of fill in the blank answers that got correct. The benchmark that you use is if they were able to guess 60 percent of the words or more then your article is appropriate for that audience. If you are between 40 and 60 percent, it might be a little difficult for this particular audience, but if you’ve got supplementary materials you might be OK.

If they got 40 percent or below, you really need to rewrite it. It’s not appropriate for the audience that you’re presenting this to. I think at Confab when I had you guys do the exercise I had an easy article and a difficult article and, sure enough, that was borne out by the folks doing each one of the cloze tests. The folks that had the “easy article” had an easy time filling the information and they got above 60 percent, if memory serves.

The poor folks that got the more difficult article, I could even see it in your faces. People were struggling to come up with what could possibly go in this blank. It really was a struggle.

Jonathan: It was a real document. It was some kind of financial, legal terms and conditions that you found. That’s why it was so powerful, I think.

Angela: Yeah. I think I pulled it from a credit card disclosure document or something like that so it was an actual thing, it was actual content that exists out there in the world. A room full of highly educated, very smart people had trouble with it.

Jonathan: I think that’s why this is so interesting on a number of levels because that actual content was, in theory, supposed to be informing a party to a contract about their side of a contract who, by this evidence, highly educated writers, first language English, could not understand what that meant. Before we move on to the next thing, I want to say the great thing about all these things you talked about so far is these are things that we can all use to start testing our content now and, maybe more importantly, to actually demonstrate to people who should care more about this in our organizations that this is a problem we should care about.

I can imagine you could sit down with some blocker in your organization about content quality and get them to do the cloze test on their own content and say look at this, this is what this means. You’ve just got this very practical way of getting on with it and saying these are techniques you can use now.

If anyone’s listening who would like to create an agenda for better quality content in their organizations, I think Angela’s work is fantastic for just getting into that stuff.

The other thing that that threw out for me, in terms of the terms and conditions for the person that’s supposed to be on one side of a contract, is that the other assumption we tend to ignore is we assume that everyone’s like us and has the same educational background as us and the same language skills as us. The other article that you wrote that blew everyone’s mind was for a Contents Magazine and it was called “The Audience You Didn’t Know You Had,” which is about low literacy users.

You also gave a fantastic talk just a few months ago in Cape Town, Content Strategy Forum in Cape Town, about this same topic. Why is this an important topic for you?

Angela: I think it’s an important topic for me because low literacy affects an astounding number of people, not just in the US but really in so many different countries. It’s such a universal issue and I think that it’s one that people just aren’t really aware of. I’ll throw some statistics at it. Something like 46 percent of the population in the United States, the adult population in the United States, has low literacy skills. I guess it’s commonly defined as reading at or below an eighth grade level. The folks that actually do the national adult literacy survey in the US would resist the eighth grade level or below label. Other places that I’ve read make that connection and I think that’s an easy thing for at least my brain to grab onto so I tend to use that even though the folks that author the survey would resist that definition.

Nearly half of the population has low literacy skills and about a quarter of the population, 21 to 23 percent, something like that, have very low literacy skills, often defined as fifth grade or below. That is not an insignificant number of people. I think that’s one of the reasons why I have an interest in low literacy is because if that’s the number of folks that we’re talking about in many countries, we’ve got to be conscious of that when we are building sites for a general audience, when we’re writing content for a general audience, because that general audience is going to include people who are going to have difficulty reading, understanding, and acting on that content.

Jonathan: What are the behaviors that you’ve observed among people with low literacy? What type of techniques do you recommend to try to make stuff useful and usable and effective for this audience?

Angela: Things that you tend to notice with people with low literacy skills is, for one, nobody will ever admit to having difficulty reading. That’s just very rare. It makes recruiting for a usability test very difficult because you can’t just ask somebody do you have difficulty reading or what grade level do you read at because nobody’s going to know the answer to that. It makes that difficult. In addition, even if somebody does know that they have difficulty reading they will likely not acknowledge that to people. I think in the contents article I’ve got one citation that says a significant percentage of folks who have difficulty reading have never told their spouse. This is not something that people are necessarily even talking to their own family about.

You will see folks who don’t acknowledge the fact that they have difficulty reading. In fact, referring back to the national adult literacy survey, folks who do have difficulty reading, when you ask them how are your reading skills they’re going to answer 90 percent of the time, “My reading skills are good,” or, “They’re very good.”

Whether they simply don’t have an accurate perception of how their reading skills are or that’s just their normal I don’t know. I can’t really speak to that. They may not even be aware of the fact that they have difficulty reading. Some of the other behaviors that you’ll see, particularly with usability testing, really in testing content as well, is the tendency to satisfice.

What that means is that’s a made-up word. It’s a combination of satisfy and suffice. What that means is folks with low literacy skills will often stop searching when they find the first plausible answer to their question. They’re looking for a piece of information and they see something that’s plausible, not necessarily the best answer or even the right answer, but something that’s plausible, they’ll stop looking. You will see that satisficing behavior with folks with low literacy skills.

What that means is when we’re designing information you need to be very conscious of what you’re communicating to folks. You need to be aware that if you’re not really clear about what you’re saying somebody may take incomplete information from what you’ve written if you’re not nice and clear. Or if you throw a bunch of extraneous information into what you’re trying to communicate, somebody may pick out the wrong thing and stop there instead of pushing a little more to get the best answer or even the right answer.

Jonathan: Any other things you can share about what we should be bearing in mind when we try to make our stuff accessible to people with low literacy?

Angela: One other thing I would point out is literacy isn’t just about word recognition. A lot of times when I talk about low literacy I’ve gotten some push-back from people saying I don’t understand this people reading at a fifth grade level or an eighth grade level. My eighth grader can read just fine. They’re really thinking more about those word recognition skills. Literacy actually has to do with a lot more than just word recognition. It’s also understanding the structure of sentences. It’s understanding how one sentence relates to another. It also gets into issues of being able to find a piece of content within a paragraph. It’s being able to identify when you need to do calculations, when you need to do math to figure something out and actually doing that math.

Literacy is a whole host of things. It’s not just word recognition, although word recognition is certainly a very important component to that. It really has to do more with once you’ve recognized all these words in a sentence are you able to make sense of the sentence? Are you able to make sense of the paragraph that you just read? That’s also something to keep in mind. It’s not just about word recognition.

Jonathan: When I’m listening to you talking about this stuff it’s really making me think about some of the social changes we’re seeing as a result of the web. For example, there’s this whole new expectation on governments that they should be communicating information to their citizens online in a clear way. There are a number of different ways where we can get this, but one of those things is there are certain types of situations which you can imagine people, in the past, having an intermediary working with them to, for example, decide what their rights are.

So, for example, you might go to what we have here, the Citizen’s Advice Bureau where they’ll actually give you free legal advice about your rights and perhaps if you have low literacy that may have been one your main things you would do in the past.

If you’re now making that same decision without the help of a professional using a government website which uses formal and legal…Archaic type legal language, you’re much more likely to actually misunderstand what it is that the website’s telling you.

Angela: Right.

Jonathan: And so, it’s that whole kind of…We talk about accessibility and inclusion a lot. I think it’s very easy to just throw that into, “Oh, yeah. I need to make sure that these websites work in screen readers for people who can’t see the screen.” Actually, that is one aspect of accessibility. That technical aspect of does it get to the device that the person uses is necessary but it’s not sufficient if we’re not thinking about, is the language we’re using appropriate for our stated aim, which is to — for example, everyone is supposed to be equal when it comes to the law, but they’re obviously not going to be on equal standing if they can’t understand the law because of the way it’s written.

Angela: Right. I think a big part of that is when you realize that information, legal information, terms and conditions for a product or a website. Even the folks who are writing it will tell you that the audience for this really are the lawyers. The lawyers and maybe the judges and the actual people, the customers or consumers of a particular product, you guys are just an afterthought. What we’re really doing here is writing it in such a way that lawyers can understand and make sense of it. I think that it’s really important to make sure that when you’re writing something you’re honest with yourself about who the audience for this actually is. Is it the lawyers who are going to hash out something later if something goes wrong with the product that you’ve purchased or what have you? Or if you are arrested and you’re asked to sign something are you able to understand it?

The lawyer can fend for themselves, but who is the primary audience for this information? I think that in many cases we just sort of gloss over the fact that actual human beings that don’t have a law degree are using this and really should be the primary audience for this information. But in many cases, with legal language in particular, that’s not the case. It’s really written for the lawyers.

Jonathan: When I was watching your talk in Cape Town about this topic, it just came across to me that what you were really saying, what I was hearing at least, is that so often we design stuff under this delusion of who our audience is which is like me and you, people in our studio, people like us. Actually, that’s so rarely the case. As we go out there and use this evidence based approach of saying I’m actually going to find people who actually fit in this group and see whether they’re actually using this stuff in the way that I intended to. I see a connection between that audience delusion and content strategy. I think so much of our digital products and services are delusional in that same way in that we throw all this stuff out there, we leave it to rot, we don’t really maintain it, we don’t really look at it anymore, and we just pretend that it’s working and hope it’ll go away. We don’t really find out whether it’s effective for our customers or our businesses or if it’s sustainable.

My question is how do you see your work in this area, or just in general, relating to content strategy?

Angela: I think there’s a very close relationship with that. Really, in my practice I see it almost on a daily basis. It can’t just be here is what I am putting out into the world, now it’s out there, my work is done. We really do have to be conscious of here was my intent with what I’ve created, what I’ve written, what have you, but I think there really needs to be a reality check of here was my intent, now how does that actually manifest itself? How are people using this? How are people acting on this information? Now that I’m sensitive to this, I see it all the time. Here was my intention. Now does that match up with what I intended to happen for the people who are meeting or using or otherwise consuming this content, what’s that output? Is it having the intended effect? If not, then I’ve got more work to do.

Jonathan: It never really stops. I think that’s part of what I’m trying to get at here. This is an ongoing commitment to something.

Angela: It is. It really is. It is an iterative process. Even once you’ve launched something and you’ve tested it and things are going well, does the user landscape change? Do people’s domain knowledge change over time? Do their needs change over time? That’s something that I think is worth attending to once you’ve launched it. “Oh, we’ve tested it. Yeah, things are going pretty well.” But how about when your users have changed from novice users…How are they interacting with the site the first time that they encounter it to, well, now they’re customers and they’re using your product or your site on a daily basis. How have their needs changed and are you still meeting those needs?

Jonathan: What we actually need to do is to work stuff like usability into our processes and keep iterating on what we’re designing and what we’re publishing and actually continuously measuring how well we’re actually doing.

Angela: I do believe that.

Jonathan: Angela, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a fantastic podcast and super interesting stuff. I think people are going to have lots to practically use out of this. Thank you so much.

Angela: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.