From the MIMA.org blog

EVENT RECAP – COPYWRITING IN A NEW MEDIA AND MARKETING ERA

Advertising and marketing professionals have all long known that great brands – and great campaigns – are primarily built on great ideas. And that developing and communicating great ideas depends on great copywriting. Just ask any copy writer.

Seriously though. The classics are memorable, in part, because they so clearly provoke strong emotional connections with the intended audience for the message.

Indeed. Traditionally its the copy writer’s ideas and words that tell us what we can expect. Consider: “Mm, Mm good.” Or they remind us about what we aspire to be. Such as: “Breakfast of champions.” Or they promise something new that will change our lives for the better. Who can forget: “Think small.” Just for context, in case these little gems are not part of your personal experience, they are examples are slogans from 60s-era campaigns for Campbell’s Soup, Wheaties and Volkswagen, respectively. Anyway. The list goes on and on. As you might have noticed, the media landscape has evolved and grown over the last decade (or two) to include new communication channels that offer more and more and more ways to get the word out about the product or service you want to promote.

At the same time, you may also have noticed that these new channels, while opening new opportunities to marketers, are also changing the way people respond to marketing messages and relate to brands. Essentially, new technologies like social media, mobile internet, radio frequency identification, geo-location and other “Dick Tracy-like” capabilities are rapidly reshaping the way consumers behave. The upshot of all this? The role of the writer, ever essential to the creative process and the creative product, is changing. Evolving. Growing. Even maturing?

Teressa Iezzi, editor of Advertising Age’s Creativity magazine wants to help us understand where our industry is headed – and how copy writers will continue to help drive results as the paradigm shifts force marketers to update the way they do their jobs. This must be a subject on the minds of many creative and marketing leaders these days. Because more than 200 MIMA members and guests, convened for the February monthly presentation to listen to ideas from her recently published book, The Idea Writer: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Era. (Kudos to the programming committee for bringing her in to speak with us. And a sincere thank you to Teresa for traveling here to share her experience and insights with us.)

The good news is: while technology innovations are driving the changes in how marketers and consumers interact, the fundamentals of human nature remain the same. So while copy writers may have an expanded set of tools to use to communicate ideas, their primary duty – to help create relationships with consumers is pretty much unchanged.

Basically, copy writers simply have more competencies they need to develop. Just like copy writers in the 90s had to learn to expand their range from ideating and writing print ads, direct mail, sales collateral, outdoor and broadcast to also include websites, banner ads and e-mails, copy writers today must continue to expand their repertoire to include social media, “apps” and more. Because developing effective ideas, depends on understanding the underlying technologies.

So the craft of copywriting is not dying. It is simply changing. From being mastery of writing to including mastery of conversation.  And being conversant with technology. Our industry will always need idea people. Word people. People who can take complex ideas and boil them down into something easy-to-read and easy-to-understand. (Like helping people quickly get the gist of an hour-long presentation that touches on a lot of great ideas.)

If you can do that, you’re golden. Writers who can engage readers will always be in demand. There will always be a need for Mm, Mm good ideas and writing.

Download the podcast (available soon, please check the Resources section next time you visit this website) and listen to the complete conversation for a number of practical insights. And be sure to leave your comments here, to share the key take aways you think are important.

Creating Great Content: 7 Steps to Keep Your Team on Track

By AHAVA LEIBTAG | Published: FEBRUARY 21, 2011

So much has been written about content creation, and it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities. However, have you ever noticed that everyone is gung-ho when the project starts, but things fall apart months later? Do you find yourself asking the following questions:

• Why is there always a content bottleneck, either in creation or in editing?
• Why do the developers always seem to need to know so much more than the writer hands off to them?
• Why do executives look at the work of many months and many people and say, “Nah, this isn’t really what we had in mind”?
• Why does content creation seem to be such a beast?

Are we all on the same page?

There are a lot of reasons why content projects fizzle. Part of why content creation is so difficult is because everyone on the team has different goals. There may be confusion about what users really need or want. Some may not think the content is important and instead want to focus on a redesign or a new, cool application. And, even if content is given a priority, some may think it is easy to create (not writers, of course).

It also comes down to poor planning and general timeline ignorance:  “Oh, you need that today?”

As an example, let’s consider a legal company that outsources the content of its total compensation packages to an HR company. These packages are typically distributed to employees every July, and they include information on their salary and other benefits, such as healthcare and retirement. Let’s analyze how a project like this could be planned from the beginning so none of the above problems occur.

Practical solutions for the content conundrum

Satisfying both the client (legal company) and their employees is the key here, and that requires careful planning to create content that will appeal to each audience.  Here’s one way to do it, but you can certainly adapt it to your team.

Set the goals of the project

From the beginning, everyone on the team needs to define and set the goals of the project. Leading this effort should be the content creators (either the HR company, or the company they’ve outsourced to create the content).

Do you want to simply hand these content packages to the employees or create a relationship with employees to help them realize they are working at a company with great benefits? Do you need to transition them from printed benefits to online benefit statements? Answering these questions fully will help avoid the typical snafus experienced later.

Talk to the client about content types

The types of content you need will depend on the goals above.  Is print the best format for all employee benefits, or is it better to house the longer content online and produce a printed piece that invites employees to learn more online?

Research the users

Define the user(s) carefully so you know what types of content will appeal to them while also satisfying the overall goals of the project. To avoid making assumptions, conduct focus groups, usability testing and user research. It doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming.  Consider asking a random sample of 15-20 users to get an overall sense. You could also conduct a company-wide online survey.

Document the content development plan

Include things such as timelines and outlines so everyone on the team can weigh in—both the content producers and the client.  Make sure someone on an executive level signs off on it. Consider it a roadmap.

Develop the content in stages

Ask the stakeholders to weigh in at the draft format, halfway point and final product.

Test your content

See how users respond to your content.  It’s very rare that the first draft is the best draft. You can develop great content by rewriting and revising it until you create the best message possible that meets everyone’s goals.

Evaluate your process

Learning to run great content creation projects requires assessing what worked and what did not in any project. Train your team to do a regular review of content creation projects to improve managing them in the future.

How do you plan for content projects?  And, what has your experience taught you about managing expectations from the client side effectively?

You might like:

• How to Get the Best Content From Subject Matter Experts
• How to Build Personas to Bring Your Targets (Back) to Life
• Why Traditional Content Audits Aren’t Enough
• 5 Steps to Creating an Effective Content Mix

Intelligent Content 2011--workshops

Intelligent Content Conference: Workshops

Rachel Lovinger   February 17, 2011

The Breakdown: Yesterday, February 16, 2011, before the Intelligent Content Conference officially began, there was a day of Pre-Conference Workshops. Here’s a summary of what I heard.

Ann Rockley, Intelligent Content Eye-Opener: Content Strategy

In the first workshop, organizer and conference founder Ann Rockley answered the question “What is Intelligent Content?” In brief, it is content that is:

• Structurally Rich
• Semantically Categorized
• Easily Discoverable
• Efficiently Reusable
• Dynamically Reconfigurable

Now, for anyone who still thinks this is a conference that’s just about the technical side of content, I would like to point out that the subtitle of this opening workshop was “Content Strategy.” And indeed the rest of the talk was about exactly the kind of practices we content strategists often do – gathering business requirements, auditing and analyzing content, defining the structure of content, identifying a reuse strategy, and creating a taxonomy.

I’m excited about potential crossover between the “technical communications” community and the “content strategy” community. There’s a lot that both can learn from each other.

Joe Gollner, Implementing Intelligent Content Solutions

Next up, co-organizer Joe Gollner provided his take on how to make these strategies into realities. In this talk he got down to brass tacks a bit more, but framed the discussion in language and concepts that would be accessible to business owners, as well as content professionals and technologists. He talked about balancing business considerations, opening communication channels, assembling the implementation team, managing risks, addressing legacy content, processes and controls, and battling entropy and “barnaclization” (which is a great way of describing scope creep).

Gollner described “Intelligent Content” as requiring a balance between knowledge, technology and business. I have long held the same belief (if by “knowledge” you mean messaging, communication, or editorial goals). But, based on my many years working in the User Experience group at Razorfish, I would also include user needs in that mix.

Gollner had several practical suggestions on how to get to implementation, several of which are described in this post he wrote last year called Seven Steps to Intelligent Content. The rest of his tips would be hard for me to cover without just recreating his entire deck here, so let’s hope he posts it online at some point.

David Clemons, Please, Turn Your Mobile Device On!

In the afternoon there were three very interesting sounding workshops taking place at once: one on developing a corporate social strategy, one on developing a mobile workforce, and one on the ROI of DITA.

I decided to go to the mobile workshop led by David Clemons. If you followed the#icc11 Twitter stream during this part of the day, it might have seemed like the social workshop was the only one going on (but, then, it makes sense that the social-oriented people would tweet a lot, right?). Trust me, though, there was a lot going on in the mobile workshop as well.

Clemons discussed the need to publish content to a wide variety of mobile platforms, and some of the considerations for doing so. Then he demonstrated one of the tools offered by his company, Push Mobile Media. It’s a tool called LearnCastwhich allows people to create and publish cross-platform mobile courseware pretty easily. We got into small groups and each group created mobile courseware and then tested it out on our various mobile devices. It was great, after a day of listening, to do some hands-on work with content.

The pre-conference workshops were a great intro for the conference. Come back tomorrow for a wrap-up of Day 1, and in the meantime you can follow #icc11 on Twitter for live coverage (starting up again at 8:15am PT on Thursday, Feb 17).

Intelligent Content 2011

ICC Day 2: What We Heard

Rachel Lovinger   February 19, 2011

The second full day of the Intelligent Content Conference was also filled with interesting talks and demonstrations. Patterns started to emerge around the topics that are important today. In this post, I’ll sum up some of the trends that I saw across the three day event.

Single-source publishing

There’s a growing need to create content once and publish it in a number of different formats, configurations, and platforms. Authoring standards such as DITA are designed to add structure to the elements of content (in DITA’s case, technical documentation) so that they can be segmented and reconfigured and still retain their context in the overall body of content.

The tools that support this kind of publishing include component content management systems – which have been around for a while – and some newer tools that are designed to produce multi-platform content for specific purposes. Several of the conference sponsors are companies that make component content management systems: SDL, Author-it, and Vasont. In the realm of more targeted authoring tools, I had the chance to play around with a platform called LearnCast. It’s designed to allow people to create educational content – including video, audio, and interactive elements – that’s compatible with any mobile platform.

Content will be everywhere

Several of the speakers observed that content is breaking out of its containers (an opinion shared by us here at Scatter/Gather). And of course, people increasingly want to access digital content on their mobile devices: phones, tablets, netbooks, etc. Single-source publishing tools are going to be indispensible in making that possible for organizations with limited resources, but there are also decisions that need to be made.

To really streamline content production, organizations should separate the content from platform-specific layout or functionality. But this could mean missing out on some of the desired features of apps. As a result there’s a growing tension between the benefits of creating device-specific apps and the benefits of creating digital content in platform agnostic standards, such as EPUB. As the platform wars heat up, do you sacrifice features? Or reach? Or will we develop ways to get the best of both worlds?

Enhanced publishing

Let’s hope we develop ways to get the best of both worlds, because paging through a PDF on a tablet is not going to cut it for most people. They want interactivity, social integration, collaboration, and links to other sources of information. They want a good experience.  Eric Freese (Aptara) gave an overview of some of the enhanced eBook capabilities of the EPUB 3 specification, the first public draft of which was just recently released for review. Unfortunately, many features that are currently available, even in version 2, aren’t supported by the eReaders on most tablets.

Content needs context in order to be intelligent

Without context, content is just information. It may or may not be useful in a given situation. With context, you can deliver content that’s actually relevant. This means being aware of your users’ needs, which could be broad or very state-specific. Derek Olson (Foraker Labs) gave an inspiring demonstration of thebreastcancer.org iPhone app and discussed the kinds of research and design decisions that went into creating an app that delivers highly targeted content to an audience with very specific medical and emotional needs.

Context also means being location aware, especially in the case of mobile content delivery. Localized content applications can be powerfully engaging when done right. This was the topic of a lively presentation and discussion led by Mark Fidelman (Mindtouch). The discussion was focused less on the capabilities and more on the privacy implications of providing a lot of personal information to corporations in exchange for discounts and rewards. People have different comfort levels, but many people in the room (including Mark), felt that we’re already giving away a lot of personal information all the time, we might as well be compensated for it in some way.

I was also pleased to hear several speakers discuss the need to tag content with meaningful metadata in order to make the most of all this contextual awareness. Rich, semantic taxonomies, properly structured and applied to the content, help make sure that information gets served up when and where it’s most useful.

End-to-end content strategy

Though a number of useful tools were demonstrated at the conference, it’s important to keep in mind that buying a tool doesn’t, in itself, solve all of an organization’s content problems. I like the way Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, expressed it during the wrap-up: “Vendors talk about ‘end-to-end solutions’ but they don’t seem to understand what ‘end’ means.” Generally, they define the “end” as the point when their product is no longer involved in the process.

In fact, several speakers had presented their view of the content lifecycle. Rahel Bailie, for example, identified a four stage process: analyze, collect, manage, publish, and then back to analyze again. Other speakers proposed models with three stages, or even six. But however many stages each person envisioned, they all agreed that it’s a cyclical process. And while certain tools may help with one or more stages in the cycle, no tool covers all of them. For example, a content management system isn’t going to help determine user needs or business priorities. There are tools that can provide data that will support those activities, but they still require human insight and a solid approach to developing a strategy.

In other words, use tools for things that tools are good at, and let people do what people do best. And involve your audience when you can, as well as your employees. Content creation is happening at such a massive scale now, any successful effort will probably require some combination of editorial effort, automation, and user/social contributions.

Next: What’s next?

At the end of the conference, the organizers, Ann Rockley, Joe Gollner, and Scott Abel, led a discussion with all the conference participants on what we had seen and what’s next. In my final post on ICC11, I’ll talk about some of those upcoming trends. Look for it after the weekend.

Se also:

• Intelligent Content Conference: Workshops
• ICC Day 1: An Appeal for Content Agnosticism