TNT11: Content Strategy: The Key to Effective Web Content

Rick Allen:  I'm very excited to be here and talk about content strategy and why it's so important for all of us in higher education.  The hash tags, obviously #HEweb10 #TNT11 #contentisdynamite and #contentstrategy.

So quick direction, I'm Rick.  I work at Babson College as the manager of web content for the Graduate School of Business.  I was hired earlier this year to implement a lot of things I'm going to be talking about today.  I'm also a consultant at ePublish Media.  I focus on content strategy, user experience design and online communications.

And also, I'm the founder of Content Strategy New England which is a community of web content professionals in the Boston area that focus on bringing clear communication to online user experiences through the evolving discipline of content strategy.  We host a lot of events, speakers, including Kristina Halvorson who came a few months ago, who literally wrote the book on content strategy for the web.  So you could tell I have a mild interest in this topic.

First a favor, I'd really love questions.  I may have to delay some until the end to make sure I get everything in but if you have questions, please raise your hand and if I can, I'll try and get them in.  Can you raise your hand, Tim?  Also, Tim here has volunteered to be my back channel buddy so if anyone has any questions on there, he can help facilitate that, too.

Okay, so what are we going to talk about?  We're going to talk about why quality web content is so important to higher education, elements that comprise a content strategy, and how to maintain quality content.  So piece of cake, right?  Let's get started.

Why quality web content is so important.  So why am I talking and focusing on content?  Why are we having this discussion?  Why am I having to ask the question or suggest that content may not be high quality?  Well, I'm a publisher just like you, surprise.  Actually, I don’t think a lot of you are surprised.  I'm sure that everyone here would recognize that content is a critical element of your website, but I'm sure you can also appreciate that you have a hard time keeping up quality content, creating it, sustaining it but it's important to put yourself in this publishing mindset.

Kristina Halvorson says the moment you launch a website and email campaign, a mobile application or content of any kind, you're a publisher.  She says, shouldn't you start acting like one?  And the answer is yes because content is why people visit our website, period.  They don’t come for the design.  They don’t come for the user experience.  They come for the content.

View yourself more like a publisher delivering valuable editorial products then as a marketer selling products and services.  This is coming from Joe Pulizzi.  He's kind of the content marketing evangelist.  He has a book called Get Content, Get Customers.

So again, why is content neglected?  Not just in higher education but elsewhere too.  We all use the web, you know?  So if you work on the web as we all do, you should be able to appreciate the challenges, the answers to this question, right?  Content is massive.  It's seemingly uncontrollable.  It's daunting we have content thousands of pages, tens of thousands on our public websites but pages are the beginning because content is video, content is images, content is Twitter feeds, content is Facebook comments, podcasts.  It goes on and on.

Content is political.  This is the one that usually gets me frustrated, but I think we can all appreciate that it's really hard to manage web content stakeholder expectations; all these competing priorities and different goals for web content in your website, admissions, academics, student life, career development, alumni.  So how do we shift the focus from individual stakeholder requirements to your college website goals?

And content is time-consuming.  With limited resources, no one can do it all, especially when their responsibility is just tacked on to the end of a job description and that's a good scenario.  More commonly, it's categorized under that five-percent duties as assigned.  So no more excuses.  No more excuses because these challenges are real but they're not new challenges.  These challenges have existed for a long time, so we need to take responsibility for selling them.

So typically in a project, people are all about creating content and even understanding it used to be good, useful but they don’t plan for them, prepare for it, and then once it's up, how do you govern it?  What plan do they have in place for maintaining that quality content?

And then a modifier that I add to this definition is effective content because useful and usable describes the "what" and effective describes the "why," the result.  As our peer, Georgy Cohen recently said, effective is a two-way street so quality content or effective content meets college objectives and users' goals.  It's not just doing the work for us; it's doing the work for them.  It's a two-way street.  It's a win-win for everybody.

So quality content is important because only quality content can attract users, inform users, engages users, and retains users.  I mean these things don’t just happen by chance very often, but can you imagine compromising or risking any of these goals?  And most of us do everyday.  So got content strategy, well, let's take a look.

So in higher ed, we share a lot of the common challenges that I was talking about.  We also suffer from many of the ineffective solutions.  So here's kind of my top list of warning signs that your website may not have a content strategy.

Welcome and overview pages are often unnecessary and contain redundant or trivial content.  If a page doesn't provide unique content or offer value to the user, it's likely irrelevant.  A website doesn't require a welcome letter any more than a print publication does, and if your website is usable, it doesn't require an overview.

Facts pages, FAQs, this is one I think a lot of people like to share, groping about, but FAQs rarely actually contain frequently asked questions.  They contain the questions that we want them to ask or rather the questions that we want answered.  Again, they're used to compensate for ineffective content elsewhere on your site.  They're kind of making up for those gaps and ineffective content elsewhere.  Quality content answers FAQs.

Now, I'm making some generalizations here because these are things that can be done well.  In fact, taking a step back, one example for a welcome letter or a welcome page perhaps like from the dean of a school or something, I mean, that could be used effectively to provide some insight to the leadership of an organization, but rarely is it used for that.  It's usually just kind of rehashing maybe your mission statement or kind of other keywords that are used elsewhere on your site.

PDFs, so I majored in electronic publishing so I value, I appreciate PDFs but they are poor substitutes for webpages.  And higher ed is littered with them, and the reason is because they're so easy.  I mean you just have a Word document and you save as PDF.  The problem of course is that it sidesteps the whole editorial process and you compromise quality.  So whatever standards you have for your website are lost, but there are appropriate uses for PDFs; perhaps a long student guide or some forms that need to be printed out.

And related links, typically to contain orphan pages or irrelevant content, and I find that they're often used to make up for poor navigation.  So, oh, my god, we have this new page but it's not part of the navigation.  How do we get them over there?  So we add related links.

Points of distinction pages, these are really, really important pages and people have really high expectations from them.  They actually expect to see points of distinction on your points of distinction page.  And when they see things like dedicated students and stellar faculty, integrated curriculum, these are not distinguishing factors.  These are the norm.  These are common.

So this summer, a number of us in higher ed discovered that we were all in the middle of a CMS migration and just like everyone is always in the middle of a redesign, many of us are also in the middle of a CMS migration.  So we created a hash tag, CMS migration 2010, and we started talking about the process as we went through it, and it turned into a form of group therapy but here are some good goals from that list from Tim here.  The web is not a filing cabinet.  Don’t keep outdated pages up for the sake of remembering what you did in 2008.

There's one from J.B. Ross.  I feel like I'm on an archeological dig.  I just found a site for a 2002 conference that was cancelled for lack of participation.

Another one from Tim.  Oh no, I just came across a page called mission summary which has over 23,000 words.

Audience:  That was awful, it was awful.  I kind of want to lose it but something I really wanted to

Rick Allen:  So it's really easy to get discouraged.  We can all I think relate to these things, but there is hope.  And amidst all of these tweets going on, there's another one.  Content strategy equals happiness, I knew it.  Thank you, Sherry, for this tweet.

So let's make content work.  Content strategy answers critical questions needed to plan, create and maintain effective web content on your site.  Some of these questions are deceptively simple and others are clearly difficult.  So how do we decide what to communicate?  How do we decide what content to create and update?  How do we prioritize content requirements?  How do we determine our users' needs?  How do we align analytics, usability, SEO, SEM with content creation?

How do we maintain voice, tone and branding with content across multiple channels because we're talking about content strategy, we're not talking about just your website?  We're talking about all your web properties.  We're talking about your Facebook page and your Twitter page, all your other social channels.  We're talking about email too.

So let's talk about then the elements that comprise a content strategy, so how we can make all this work.  So you can break down the process a number of different ways but these are the stages that help me to kind of compartmentalize the process.  Message architecture, content audit, content analysis, and then planning and implementation.

So message architecture defines what you want to say and how you want to say it.  Message architecture prioritizes your college's key messaging across your website, relating low-level concepts with your business priorities.  In Georgy Cohen's session on Monday, yesterday, someone was asking the question, well, we're creating content all over campus, different groups are doing this, so how do we maintain a consistent brand message or voice and tone across the college?  How are we all supporting the brand?  Without a message architecture or some sort of guidance for that, you can't effectively do that.  So this is kind of a road map for that.

Message architecture ensures a clear brand message and ensures a consistent message.  It identifies what your organization wants to convey and how it wants to be perceived.  It ensures clear, concise descriptions of organization concepts.  Are people talking about your mission statement or your key values in a consistent way that people understand or are people being confused about what they're seeing?  It aligns messaging across all your communication channels and determines if content is appropriate for your users.

So why are we talking about messaging before we even get to content audit?  Because in content audit, that's where you're collecting everything that you have and that's kind of the first step for a project.  Well, as Margot Bloomstein says, how can you measure if content is appropriate if you don’t have a metric against which to measure it?  So message architecture can be really helpful in informing the content audit and content analysis phase.  So when we get into content audit here, it'll help us to make better decisions.

Content audit consists of a couple of different components.  One of course is the content inventory.  This is just a pure inventory of your website, all the pages that exist, all the content that exists.  A quantitative audit, this consists of the facts about your website, so it's considering how it's organized, who creates it, what format it's in.  And then a qualitative audit, so this is where that message architecture really comes in handy because now you can start making some initial judgments about whether content is useful, relevant, appropriate.  Is it outdated?  So without the guidance of a message architecture, you can't make those decisions at this point.  That's important.

Content analysis defines quality content and problems that need to be solved; such things as, what is the purpose of each piece of content?  Everybody should be able to answer that question.  Does content meet our business objectives and users' needs, the effective two-way street?  How do we want our users to respond to our content?  What content do users need but not know to look for?  I'm also a very big fan of analytics, kind of an evangelist for that as well.  But this is something that's not easy to answer with quantitative analysis.  So how do you determine what people might need or may need that they don’t know upfront?

So understanding if content is any good, it helps to look at content analysis heuristics.  So we're not talking about fixing grammatical errors and typos and stuff like that.  We're looking at questions like: is content useful and relevant?  Is it clear and accurate?  Looking at influence and engagement, completeness, voice and style, usability and findability.

So you can't see the little credit here I have for the source for that, but I'm going to include a lot of links and resources at the end so you can have all this.  The source blog post for this is really excellent and breaks down for each one of these categories details, questions you can be asking and evaluating the content.  The author of that blog post is Colleen Jones here, content strategist in Atlanta.  She says the analysis is not just about the deliverable but about the insights you gain and what you decide to do about them.

And then the final element here is planning and implementation.  Now we can establish a content strategy by developing an achievable, actionable plan to make content work in your organization.  So when people are reading content strategy or hearing about it, it seems very overwhelming.  There's a lot going on; audits, analyses.  It's time-consuming, definitely, not doubt.  But the strategy part of content strategy is making it work for your organization, so there isn’t like a toolkit that you can just take and bring to your school.  The strategy is the planning and coming up with something that will be manageable within the organization because the available resources from college to college are completely different. So it's achieved by running specific relevant answers to questions about content, goals, tactics and requirements.

So here are some things you can expect from a content strategy.  This is short list, not really, but it's relatively short.  Roles and responsibilities, workflow, an editorial calendar, messaging and style guides, information architecture, linking strategy, SEO and meta data strategy, page level content structure.  Also, I'm going to stop real quick.  In order to condense this talk, I had to move some of the examples I have but I actually do have a number of really good examples in higher ed for a lot of these things, like style guides and page-level content structure templates and stuff like that.  So I'm going to include that in the blog post, and I'm happy to answer those questions after I talk.

Content formats, content channels, maintenance requirements, so we're talking about all of these things.  This is what we're looking at.  It looks a little hectic.  Content workflow is not a three-step process or four steps as my little kind of element suggests.  There's a lot going on.  This diagram, although crazy, I think illustrates the point well that it is a process and it's very detailed.  There are a lot of things to consider.

So how do we keep this thing going?  Governance, that's one of those keywords that I wanted to highlight in the definition of content strategy.  We need to govern content.  Governing content, this is not a process, this is a mindset.  I'm going to break it down to manage publishing process, measuring content efficacy and evaluating goals and objectives.

The publishing process, I don’t think a lot of people think about it like this but this is referred to as a content ecosystem.  I think it's a great concept, so having a holistic view of content at your school on your website.  So where does content originate?  Who creates it?  Who handles it?  How is it managed?

As Colleen Jones again here says, the content, the ecosystem often reveals the underlying principle of the content problem.  So if you don’t have an understanding of your content ecosystem or content life cycle, you can't make any evaluation what's working or not.

So having this map up is actually really helpful.  This is a very simple version of a content life cycle, broken down a little bit more than my elements of content strategy, but kind of just illustrates the point that it's a process, it's a cycle.  It's not a project.  Content strategy is not a project, so the launch of the site is the beginning; it's not the end.

How to measure content efficacy?  So this is where we kind of repeat the process a bit that we talked about earlier.  A qualitative analysis, we'll be asking questions such as: is content redundant, outdated, trivial?  Does it rot?  Is content still usable, useful, relevant, appropriate?  And then you have of course other elements of a qualitative analysis; usability testing.  I think we're all sold on that now after today.  User feedback, too, surveys.

And quantitative analysis, we come back to this again, asking questions: are the links still functional?  Is content still findable?  Are we reaching our audience?  Is our content accessible?  Are users taking the actions we want?

And then evaluating goals and objectives.  So how do we know if our strategy is accessible?  The strategy that we set in place at the launch of your redesign is not going to be as useful or successful a year from then or even six months.  The strategy itself has to be reevaluated.  Asking questions: have the website objectives changed?  Have our users' needs changed?  Have our resources changed?  Is our strategy still effective?  Is it still working?

So I have a few words of wisdom.  This is a work in progress.  Audit, analyze, strategize, repeat.  It is very much a process, and plan, not a project.  Getting into this mindset in my experience has been the biggest hurdle.  And very often, the problem with dealing with consultants or people coming in and helping with the content strategy, speaking as a consultant myself, the problem with us that when you come in and help with the content strategy, you put this plan in place and then we leave and then the staff there that are actually having to maintain the site post-launch are not either educated or prepared to sustain that plan.  So it's really important that kind of strategy is set to work in your organization people are educated on this process.

Get buy-in through education and shame.  The more that you educate people on this process and the need, the more they're going to understand the value.  A couple more of my tips kind of say how we could do that.  Shame helps a lot, too.  A meeting I had in the last couple of years, I was asked to talk about analytics and I was in a roomful of marketing directors and I was bringing analytics on the table because I was recognizing a lack of process and there was not effective system for prioritizing web projects or determining what content to create and update.  So I put it on the table and I asked them how they decide what content to create and update.  How do they prioritize web projects?  And I got a lot of blank stares because they knew the answer wasn't very good.  Eventually, after a few minutes of silence, someone stood up and said, well, the squeaky wheel, when someone complains then we update content.

Start small and aim big.  So this is not something you can just take and just implement easily or institution, but creating little victories and measuring the success of those victories allows you to make the case for it.  So also, going back to the shame approach, comparing yourself to other schools that are doing good work that have effective welcome pages or FAQ pages.

This is probably the biggest challenge, I think, for implementing content strategy in higher ed.  Content strategy requires regulation, and you need the support from the top-down.  It requires empowerment and accountability.  Someone needs to own that for governing content for your school.  Without that, it will ultimately fall apart, but show the numbers, demonstrate ROI.  Being able to measure the results and effectiveness of content in your strategy is really important.

Okay, questions?  Let's have them.

Audience:  What about starting? What is the first thing of having no semblance of strategy.  I know that it needs it but I'm one of the...

Rick Allen:  You're the web department.

Audience:  I am the web department, and we're doing CMS, MB design and...  I want to, but what is the first thing that I can do?

Rick Allen:  Sorry.  What is the very first thing that you can do at your institution to get started with content strategy?  I think definitely getting people that are involved in content process involved, educated, and talking to them about the challenges that exist.  So those people that relate to content.  We're not just talking about web writers here.  We're talking about everyone is involved in this process; designers, developers of course.  So they all have a hand and they all touch content during the process, and talking to them about the challenges.

I think a lot of the challenges are uncovered during a content audit.  You understand the scope of the project of your content needs.  It's possible you're going to be surprised that you might not have to replace or update 90 percent of the content in your site.  But having that kind of on the table and looking at that, that really helps.

I think everyone also goes into these projects with a basic understanding of what the institutional problems are, and then looking at the process kind of strategy and identifying those areas that might be most effective and kind of addressing those right from the beginning.  I mean, if you are just going in as a consultant, the elements that I was talking about, that's the process you'd want to go in, but you may want to approach it from a different angle.  You could start with analysis.

Audience:  When you started working on this, what we did... I'm not into this as a... that we begin with both.  So we work on the content on those... information is current, updated and make sure they're finding information they want.  So is that allowed?

Rick Allen:  Oh, absolutely, that's very good.  I don't know if everyone heard that.  One approach was to look at the top landing pages on your site and look at solving the problems of the content there.  I think that's a good suggestion, but I don’t think it's as black and white as that.  I mean you have to think about how they're getting there.  Is that the first page or the landing page?  Is that a destination page after getting through a couple of others on your site?  Is that the content that's most important to the college because you have to balance that, too, right?

I mean it's possible you have a blog post on your site that just have some really awesome keywords that are driving tons of traffic to your site, but that's not going to help you necessarily get more prospective students on your admission site.  So yes, but that is really good to be looking at.

First two questions, get a book.  I might have a third book for a third question so that is an incentive.  Yes?

Audience:  [35:23 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  Asking people what the purpose.  Sorry, repeat the question?  How do we talk to administrators at your college about welcome pages, mission statements, about repeating content or setting up pages that are irrelevant or not useful or redundant?

I would say that asking them the question, what is the purpose of this webpage?  If the purpose of this webpage is to distinguish yourself and you're repeating things that everyone else is saying, then that's not meeting that goal, right?  Look at the key phrases that are being used on your mission statement on your welcome page and try Googling them and see how many other colleges come up.  Do a search for integrated curriculum.  Do a search for dedicated students.  You're going to see a million hits.  Innovation, absolutely.

Audience:  [36:43 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  Right.  We all know these phrases very well.  Yes?

Audience:  [36:50 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  I'm sorry, say that again.

Audience:  [36:57 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  Right, right.  So why go to Babson College?  I think that's very much

Audience:  It's sort of the same.

Rick Allen:  It is very much the same thing.  Well, that page is typically used as a point of distinction page which is what I was talking about earlier.  And most college websites do not do an adequate job of distinguishing themselves on those pages.  Anyone else?  Yes?

Audience:  [37:32 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  It's not a quick answer.  Analytic strategy is another thing that I'm very interested in and I talk a lot about.  I have a post in my website which talks about this.  I recently wrote a guest post on .eduguru which talks about analytic strategy.  It's critical that you can actually show the results.  I mean content strategy has gotten a lot of hype over the last year.  Now it's a buzzword and people are already making fun of it for that, but I think the next step is that people are going to have to do a better job of showing the value of content strategy and how it actually increases enrolment and all the key really business factors that you have.  Yes?

Audience:  [38:40 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  Yes, definitely.  I mean analytic is key to answering that question.  Anything else?  Yes?

Audience:  [39:13 Unintelligible]

Rick Allen:  Someone needs to own it.  Someone needs to govern the product.  Someone needs to be the content strategist.  So even if you can't hire a content strategist and someone needs to own that responsibility.  Someone needs to be looking at content at your institution holistically and looking at all the different ways that it comes together and has to be evaluating that and making changes.  It's not something that you can put on auto pilot.

Anything else?  Any other questions?  Okay, thank you very much.  I'm sorry.  All the sources for a lot of the stuff that I was talking about as well as a number of other resources that I want to highlight I'm going to have on my blog on my website in the next day or two.  So check it out.