Content Strategy, Like Lightning...

Simon Land – Magus (sponsor)

They want to help us manage the quality of content. Over half of websites have four plus errors per page. State of the art CMOS? You can’t lock everything down. The Magus approach is to patrol your live content separately from the CMS, check it against agreed standards, and flag problems. You can drill down to countries, or site sections. Creates dashboards to show web editors what needs doing…

Francois Jordaan

Is content strategy doomed from the start? Lots of lessons from failure that make him depressed. Clear trends about what a good projects needs. Bolt-ons to sites, editors wrestling with CMSes, none of the original people involved… these are warning signs. Companies aren’t used to thinking like publishers, so once the experts leave having set the strategy, the content suffers. Most companies aren’t ready to be publishers for the web yet. Changing them is very hard. Easiest to make the content the clients problem. Taking responsibility as an agency is often asking for trouble. Basic organisation, human, political problems – these are usually the ones you have the least remit to solve.

Joanna Pieters

Talked about her Benefits Checker approach to looking for fraudulent content in your strategy – stuff that doesn’t serve the content goals. Use when you’ve got your personas, your cone sorted. You start with a persona. Patrick is into a photographer. He’s a camera geek, looking for info on cameras. He needs to end up saying “I know the camera to but, I know the difference between these models.” a

Also emotive stuff: “I’m excited by the photos I’ll take”. Four functional, four emotive statements – and then, as a team, assess each section of content against those statements:

• 1-2 ticks when reviewing – fraudulent content. It needs to go.
• 3-6 – Rehab. Needs guidance and work.
• 7 – 8 – Champion content. Make sure it’s important enough and flagged up well.

Johnny Rose

Enterprise content management used to be Fuddy Duddy. But now people are talking about “experiences”. What is content experience? Interactivity, apparently. That’s very content centric, and we’re interested in people. Idio does content marketing. We’re trying to move people closer to a purchasing decisions. We as humans at producing tonnes and tonnes of data. Is there enough content? Should you curate or aggregate? If you apply semantic analyses to your data streams, you start to understand your people. Content strategy should be data driven.

Michael Alves

Never be content with your content. Information and entertainment – you can’t bore people into buying your product. And you need to give people ways to find the content. You need to find ways to use the content… How are you going to deliver the content? A website? A mobile experience? Social media?

You need a structure. You need to create the content to fill the holes. And you need to review it. And then you need to get a strategy to get it approved. and then your publish it. But your also need to archive it, because you don’t know when you’ll need to reuse it. Always make your information interesting.

Peter Springett

10 questions and answers:

1. Welcome to the new austerity? Smaller budgets, great pressure to perform.
2. How have we performed up until now? Before: IA, design
3. So who are our role models today? CEOs, COOs. They know conten is king.
4. Meaning what, exactly? Value, efficiency, ROI.
5. OK, having got this far, how do you make value? Make it repeatable, reusable.
6. Sure, but what about content? Be smart – do more with less
7. Fine, but how do I come up with original content? Capture and store source materials. Get 10 uses from i.
8. How else can I multiply value? Seek out the in-house talent
9. How do I tell this story to the business? Evidence (metrics) is everything.
10. What next? Be creative, be smart, be valuable.

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• Struck by content strategy lightning talks – SmyWord
• Content strategy lightning talks night – currybetdonet