Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits

Content Strategy

Table of Contents

eBook Introduction

Foreword

Preface

Who This Book Is For

What This Book Is Not

What’s in This Book

Too Busy to Read the Whole Book?

Companion Website

About the Authors

Two Authors, One-and-a-Half Perspectives

Rahel Anne Bailie

Noz Urbina

Acknowledgements

Introduction to Content Strategy

Introduction

What Do We Mean by Content?

Content Is More than Marketing Material

Your Content Defines Your Brand

Multimodal Content Strategy

The Content Strategy Imperative

Enter Content Strategy

Content Strategy and the Bottom Line

Understanding the Disconnect between Content and User Experience

Customers Want Cute and Smart

Who Wins, Who Loses?

Content Rules

Why Content Strategy and Why Now

Strategy Beyond Surface Beauty

More Than Cosmetics

Below the Surface: Untapped ROI

Case Study: Nurturing the Health of Corporate Content

The Organization

The Problem

The Challenge

The Goal

The Strategy

The Risks

The Results

Content as Part of a Complex System

What We Mean by Content

Content and Complexity

Content as an Agent in Complicated Systems

Content as an Agent in Complex Systems

Selection and Adaptation

Managing the Complexity of Content

Governance, Compliance, and Risk

Managing Content through Content Channels

Managing Risk through Content Processes

Managing Key Stakeholders through Governance

Increasing Success through Governance

Content, Complexity, and Governance

Case Study: Management as Content Roadblock

The Organization

The Problem

The Challenges

The User Interface

The Code

The Content

The Goal

The Strategy

The Risks

The Results

Realities of ROI

The Value and ROI of Content

Which Content Benefits from a Content Strategy

Estimating the Value of Content

Case Study: Making the Case for Efficiency

The Organization

The Problem

The Challenge

The Goal

The Strategy

The Requirements

The Search for Tools

The Implementation

The Results

What is Typical ROI

Managing Content Assets

Content in a Knowledge Economy

Locating the Disconnect between Content and Value

The Nuances of Content

The Pain Points of Ad-Hoc Systems

All Content is Marketing Content

Case Study: Stratifying Content Limits Potential

The Organization

The Problem

The Challenges

The Goal

The Strategy

The Results

Prioritizing Content

Content as Business Asset

Categorizing Content Assets

Recognizing the Reuse Potential of Content Assets

Content that Connects: Helping Users Find Success

Turning Content into High-Value Assets

The ROI of Content Strategy

Calculating Content ROI

Linking Poor Content to Lost Sales

Content Strategy in Business to Consumer

The Pull to Purchase

Choosing a Product: Wooed by Big Brands

Choosing a Brand

The First Disappointment: A Short Honeymoon

Post-Sale Support: Where’s the Love Now?

Promoters: You Get Back the Love You Give

The True Test of Brand Loyalty

Post-Sale Terms Need SEO, Too

Right Content, Wrong Format

The Role of Content in the Customer Experience

ROI and the Long View

Content Strategy in Business to Business

Case Study: A Start-up Treats its Content Right

The Organization and the Product

The Problem

The Goal

The Strategy

The Results

Content Under the Hood

What Exactly Is Content?

Copy and Content

Persuasive

Enabling

Turning Copy into Content

Defining Content in the Age of Technology

The Nature of Content

The Multiplicity of Content

Multiplicity in Creation

Multiplicity in Delivery

Multiplicity in Engagement

Business-Critical Content

Business-Critical Content in the Semiconductor Industry

Your Customer Doesn’t Care about Your Org Chart

Multimodal, Customer-centric Content Strategy

Consumer Products Manufacturer Gets It Wrong

The Nature of Content is Cyclical

Planning for Power Publishing

Mobile, the Game Changer

Mastering the Next New Thing is Not Enough

Designing for Any Format is a Problem

Separating Content from Deliverables

Content as a Service (CaaS), Not a Deliverable

The Risks of Binding Content to Format

Formats and Silos

Format Silos are Bad for Users

Format Silos are Bad for Organizations

Right Content, Right Context

Adaptive Content

Responsive Design

Modular, Format-free Content

Right Place, Wrong Content

Defining Module Types

Reusing Modules

Reuse Within a Deliverable

Reuse Across Similar Deliverables

Reuse for Progressive Disclosure

Reuse Across the Organization

Benefiting from Modular Reuse

Making Content User-centric Using Modular Building Blocks

Modular Content is More Adaptive

Component Content on Municipal Websites

Fragments, Smaller than Topics

Traditional Methods have Dramatic Costs

Using Structurally Consistent Content Models

Realizing the Benefits of Structured Content

Benefits to Content Teams

Benefits to Organizations

Benefits for Users

Component Content Management Systems

The Power of Semantic Content

Talking Semantics

Semantics Change the Experience of Media

Semantic Markup for Textual Data

Don’t Google XML

The Human Side of Semantic Markup

A First Real Look at Markup

XML vs. Other Markup

XML is Easier Than it Looks

Changing the Format-first Mindset

Semantic Markup in XML and HTML

Responsive Design and Reuse with Semantics

Using the Right Amount of Semantics

Why Semantics Matters

Developing a Content Strategy

Leveraging Content Strategically

Assessing Your Organizational Readiness

Thinking of Content Strategically

Is Your Content Strategy Really Strategic?

Putting the Strategy into Content Strategy

Feeding the Customer Lifecycle

Develop Your Own Customer Lifecycle

Implementing a Content Strategy

Join a User-Centered Design Process

Look for a Framework that Fits

Consider the Performance Measurements

Content in the Context of User Experience

Content Architecture and Information Architecture

The Role of Content

Audience and Task Analysis

Information Architecture

Content Design

The Technical Side of Content

The Editorial Side of Content

Centering the Strategy Around a Content Lifecycle

The Content Lifecycle

Analyze: Examining Business Drivers

Collect: Creating or Gathering Content

Manage: Improving Production Efficiency

Publish: More than Presentation

The Decision Maker and the Content Lifecycle

Laying a Sound Foundation

Content Lifecycle Myths

New Strategies, New Lifecycles

Finding the Content Strategy Skills You Need

The Content Strategist’s Role

Skills and Aptitudes for a Content Strategist

Different Skills, Different Solutions

Basic Principles Toward a Quick Start

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Copyright and Legal Notices

Content Strategy

Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits

Rahel Anne Bailie

Noz Urbina

eBook Introduction

Thank you for purchasing Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits. We hope you enjoy the book and find it useful.

You will find supplemental material, including slide sets you may freely use in your own presentations, at the book website, TheContentStrategyBook.com. You can follow the book on facebook at facebook.com/TheContentStrategyBook and follow us on twitter (@nozurbina and @rahelab).

Best Regards,

Rahel Anne Bailie

Noz Urbina

January 2013

Foreword

Jared M. Spool

Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering

For the last few years, my User Interface Engineering team has had the opportunity to study how decision makers make their decisions, up close and personal. We’ve watched as designers and managers made choices that influence the design of the websites, knowledge bases, training materials, and other things they worked on.

What became apparent almost immediately was that there are three approaches to decision making that almost everyone uses. Our research also turned up that the approach a decision maker chooses has a direct effect on the quality of the design. Choose the right approach, and you’ll end up with something awesome. Choose the wrong approach, and your design will frustrate most of your users.

The first approach we encountered was when the decision makers made choices based on what they themselves would want from the design. It’s what we call Self Design, and it asks the questions: How would I want to use this design? or What information would I want to see? The decision makers use those questions to guide every choice they make about what the design contains and how it’s presented.

Self Design works great for projects that are small and are used by people just like the decision makers. If the decision makers are using the design every day, then they’ll see the holes in the content and design and make sure those holes get repaired. However, it doesn’t work well when the design is large or is used by many different types of people.

The second approach we saw in our research was when the decisions about the design were made as an outcome of other decisions. Maybe the decision makers were making decisions about the underlying technology or the business decisions. In this approach, which we call Unintentional Design, the resulting design evolves because other things are changing.

For example, imagine an ecommerce website where a change in the process by which new product descriptions are added to the site suddenly makes it harder to shop. What used to be very detailed information about each product is now missing the information the shoppers need to be sure they are getting the right product. This wasn’t an intentional design outcome, just the result of new way the source material is compiled.

The third approach was the least common, but most effective. It’s called Research-infused Design and it happens when the decision makers explicitly focus on the experience their users will have. They don’t rely on their own needs, as in Self Design, but look directly at how people use the design and what those people need from it.

We found that the smart decision makers were the ones who took this last approach seriously. They would ensure that time and resources were available to make it happen. While it’s slower and more expensive than the other two approaches in the short term, the long-term benefit from those investments provides exactly what users need when they need it. If you’re designing something for the long term, this is best approach.

In this book, Rahel and Noz describe how to make this third approach work. Their wisdom and experience describe exactly what we saw in our research. Follow their advice and you’re off to creating great designs for your users.

Preface

If you’ve been asked to get funding for a content strategy initiative and need to build a compelling case, if you’ve been approached by your staff to implement a content strategy and want to know the business benefits, or if you’ve been asked to sponsor a content strategy project and don’t know what one is, read on.

Who This Book Is For

This book is meant for those who are being asked to do more with their content and who feel they have taken all the steps they can on their own. It’s for those who know they could do more with their content, but are struggling to figure out how to do so.

It’s for those who know intuitively that content could contribute to their business, but can’t quite make the content goals mesh with their business goals. It’s for those managers who, because of outdated publishing practices, are prevented from making the power of content work for them. It’s for those who want to save money on publication and redirect their investments to places that where they will make a difference.

This book includes case studies from our own clients and from the practices of those who generously contributed to the book. Some practitioners may read them and extrapolate how to use them to their own benefit for their clients or in their places of work. These are the people you want working on your project.

What This Book Is Not

This is not a how-to book. It’s not a user guide for practitioners who want to understand the steps of how to devise a content strategy. Those books are out there already, and more will appear over time as the profession matures. This is also not a playbook that can be used as a template. Content strategies are highly situational, and what works for one organization may not work for another.

This book is not a web content strategy book. There are plenty out there already. Although we’ll often use websites and web references as easily-understood examples, this book goes beyond the web. The web is technically not a type of content; the web is just an output channel where information gets published. And web is not a single output treatment, either. Whether you put content somewhere on the web – on a product site, online catalog, or knowledge base – in print, or into a PDF, you are publishing. And what you are really doing is publishing resources for multiple user types who have a wide range of information needs.

What’s in This Book

This book provides practical advice on how to sell, create, implement, and maintain a content strategy. Here is what you’ll learn from this book:

What content strategy is

Why you should develop a content strategy

How content strategy fits into the bigger picture

What value your organization can derive from content

How to manage the complexities of content

Ways to calculate the ROI of well-leveraged content

What you need to know about the technical side of content, and why

How to get a content strategy developed and implemented

Too Busy to Read the Whole Book?

If so, these chapters will give you a quick start:

Need an overview of content strategy and its effect on the bottom line? You’ll want to read Chapter 2, The Content Strategy Imperative.

Want the condensed version of why you should care? The concepts are in Chapter 9, Content in a Knowledge Economy.

Want to know more about the technical side of content? Read Part IV, Content Under the Hood.

Need some hard numbers to convince you? Look at the ROI the case study in Chapter 8, Which Content Benefits from a Content Strategy.

Already convinced and want to get down to implementation? Jump to Chapter 23, Implementing a Content Strategy.

Need to hire the right content strategist? Start with Chapter 25, Finding the Content Strategy Skills You Need.

Companion Website

The companion website to this book, TheContentStrategyBook.com, contains supplemental material that you are free to use in presentations or as part of a business case, as long as you preserve any attributions.

About the Authors

What happens when two kindred spirits find one another, by chance, across time zones and continents? For the two of us, it was an excited recognition of each other’s ideas, and a desire to share knowledge, not only with each other, but with others. The idea behind this book is to look at content strategy from a wider perspective than just web-delivered content. We assert that an increasing number of organizations manage content in more diverse ways than simply the web, and web delivery suffers when it is not considered together with other channels. We hope to shape theories and bring ideas to organizations struggling to manage their content.

Two Authors, One-and-a-Half Perspectives

While it might seem that co-authoring a book cuts the work in half, that’s not quite the case. We’ve collaborated and argued, encouraged each other and delayed each other, written and rewritten. We are two seasoned practitioners from, in some ways, similar, yet in other ways vastly different, professional backgrounds. Across two continents and cultures, we have come together to share our knowledge and experience. The challenges of creating a text and context that frame an issue for readers are compounded by merging two perspectives – though because some perspectives are shared, it’s more like merging one-and-a-half perspectives.

In some ways, we are book-end professionals. We may come at the same problem from opposite ends, but in the end, we embrace the same body of knowledge. Sometimes, we’ve let our individual personalities and perspectives peek through. Yet whether working with massive content sets or re-imagining content delivery models, our underlying principles are the same.

Within the content strategy community, we are the two consultants least likely to fit into neat categories. We’re not exactly web and not exactly technical and not exactly enterprise and not exactly digital, though we are a combination of all of those, and then some. Whatever label we decide to take on, we trust that you, the reader, will be the winner and will find our perspectives valuable.

Rahel Anne Bailie

Rahel Anne Bailie is a recognized thought leader and is counted among the top content strategists in the industry. With over twenty-five years of professional content experience, she combines substantial business, communication, and usability skills with a strong understanding of content and how to manage it. She is known for her work with content under the hood, particularly in connection with designing content during implementations of content management systems. Since 2002, her consultancy, Intentional Design, has been helping companies leverage their content as valuable corporate assets. She is also a co-producer with Scott Abel of the Content Strategy Workshops series.

Noz Urbina

Noz Urbina is an established content strategy thought leader, consultant, and trainer specializing in cutting edge, multi-channel, business-driven content projects. Since 2000, he has provided services to Fortune 500 organizations and small-to-medium enterprises and is a well-known workshop leader and keynote speaker at industry events. Since 2006, Noz has been Events Chair and Content Director for Congility.com and has earned a solid global reputation in the structured content community. Noz works as Senior Consultant and Content Strategy Practice Lead for Mekon Ltd.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of our friends, colleagues, and industry peers.

Jointly, we would like to acknowledge the patience and stoicism of Richard Hamilton, who watched both of us and the book go through several metamorphoses, and our advance readers, particularly Scott Abel, Laurie Best, Chris Opitz Hester, SHN, and Kevin Nichols. We’d also like to thank Richard Ingram, who contributed his graphic talents to the book, Francesco De Comite, who created the cover image, and Niamh Redmond who turned our amateur attempts at graphics into pieces befitting the book. Additionally, our thanks to CJ Walker for turning her attention to editing, Joy Tataryn for the index, and Mark Poston for his help with the website. Thanks to Jared Spool for the Foreword. A special thanks goes to everyone who contributed case studies and anecdotes.

Rahel: Many thanks to Hedy Wong, for letting me off the hook as an absentee partner, friend, and housemate for the better part of two years; Lynna Goldhar Smith for listening to me vent about how I couldn’t do this and assuring me that I could; to the rest of my family for putting up with fewer visits and less support while I locked myself in my home office to write. Thanks also go to my Jewish mother, Sharon Nelson, for her guidance and feedback. I’d also like to acknowledge Laurie Best, my Director on the City of Vancouver project, who read, gave feedback, and put up with my general distress about my writing – oh, and I borrowed one of your borrowed quotes.

Noz: Thank you first to my partner Elodie Eudier for her patience, support, understanding, strength, and level-headedness in the winding journey that is one’s first book. To my mother who motivated and supported me towards writing a book since I was in diapers – she named me with a pen name already in mind – and who taught me to take editorial feedback in stride. To my father who taught me to always keep my creativity and spirit unfettered by tradition. Thank you to my first writing teacher, Flemming Kress, and my family and friends for continuing to contact and support me despite my having nearly abandoned civilized communication and social participation. Finally, thanks to my many clients over the years who always engaged and stretched me with their various challenges.

Part I. Introduction to Content Strategy

Here, we describe the fundamental principles of content and consider ways to think about content strategy within a greater business framework. Unless you are already involved with content at a strategic level, read this section. It provides the foundation for many of the concepts introduced throughout the book.

Chapter 1. Introduction

As we publish this book, content strategy remains a moving target. Though the first book about content strategy was published a decade ago – the first edition of Ann Rockley’s seminal work, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy[Rockley, 2012] – the practice continues to develop and change as our understanding grows. This growth is not simply about new tools and technologies – like it or not, technology is a significant aspect of a content strategy – it encompasses the very nature of content.

In addition, the types of content we have to deal with have expanded. When we first learned to deal with content, instructors taught from a place of common understanding where two types of content existed: persuasive and instructional. Today, the categories have expanded to include not just persuasive and instructional, but also entertainment, social media, and user-generated content. These are not necessarily new types of content, but they are more prevalent, more important to business, and on the radar to be dealt with as part of the content landscape.

Publishing content is much more than writing copy within a communications strategy. That’s because, contrary to the days of print-only publishing, content is not part of a linear supply chain where you create, publish, and archive. Digital content is produced and managed within a content lifecycle, often one that spans multiple iterations.

Publishing that starts with an electronic source – whether the final publication is in print or online – has unique needs, and the technical and editorial demands on content have expanded exponentially.[1] Planning, creating, combining, managing, publishing, archiving, localizing, iterating – the overall process is technically challenging.

Publishing now requires a level of planning that addresses, in a holistic way, technical and business requirements along with editorial, social, and process requirements. This is called content strategy, a comprehensive process that builds a framework to create, manage, deliver, share, and archive or renew content in reliable ways. It’s a way of managing content throughout the entire lifecycle.

In other words, content strategy is to writing what house construction is to decorating. Decorating may be what denotes quality to the human eye, but it is construction quality that keeps the house standing strong. Similarly, writing (or copy) is what readers see, but it’s the construction of that copy – the content strategy – that makes it useful to your customers.

Content strategy is an emerging discipline that is already making its mark by improving return on investment and increasing internal efficiencies in the ways that organizations provide information, support transactions, and foster customer engagement.

What Do We Mean by Content?

If it sounds like we’re talking about enterprise content, we’re not. To understand the difference, a quick word is in order about what enterprise content is. Enterprise content includes all content within the entire scope of an enterprise whether that information is in the form of a paper document, an electronic file, a database print stream, or even an email message, including conversions from paper or microfilm.[2]

That definition extends to things such as wrapping email in XML for forensic e-discovery, human resources records, ERP system data, and related workaday content. Though you’d be hard-pressed to find organizations that agree on the scope of an enterprise content strategy, or two executives who agree on what enterprise content actually includes, we can agree that the generally-used term refers to content beyond what is covered in this book.

This book is about business-critical content – information that has to do with your organization’s products or services and that your organization depends on to operate. The important aspects are:

The content is central to your business. We’re talking about brand-building content: product content, marketing content, technical content, and pass-through content such as user-generated and social media content.

The content either supports purchasing decisions, pre-sales, or it supports the relationship between you and your customers, post-sales.

In either of these cases, the content we’re concerned with is, essentially, what content architect Joe Gollner calls relationship content – that is, content that serves to form persistent business relationships.

Content is a critical part of any product or service. A product or service is incomplete without useful information about those products or services. It doesn’t matter whether you’re supporting medical devices or courses for a post-secondary educational institution, travel services or government initiatives, embedding content into software or putting information into documentation and onto microchips; consumers want enough information to make informed decisions.

[1] The expansion is exponential because the