Tuesday, June 28, 2011

The Value of Content, Part 2: Nobody’s Perfect


The Value of Content, Part 2: Nobody’s Perfect

by Melissa Rach on June 23rd, 2011
Once upon a time, I wrote a blog called The Value of Content, Part 1: Adam Smith Never Expected This. It was about how traditional economics make it difficult to assign value to content. In that blog, I promised to write a sequel about measuring content “in a few weeks.” That was (blush) 94 weeks ago. (I’d like to say I was abducted by aliens or something, but in reality, I was on a bunch of exciting content strategy projects. Way cooler than aliens, right?)
Since “Part 1” was published, content strategy has gained a lot of ground in the business world. However, justifying budgets and resources for content projects is still a major challenge. So, here, at long last, are seven tips to help you measure content effectively.
 
Get it? Measurement!
(photo by HeyThereSpaceman. cc licensed)

Disclosure: There’s no silver bullet

I wish I could give you a simple, foolproof way to make all your content measurement dreams come true. Unfortunately, there’s no magic app or secret mathematical equation that does all the work. Sure, there are tools that streamline the measurement process, but no matter how many fancy widgets you buy, measuring content value will still take a significant amount of time and attention.

1. Don’t worry about exact numbers

Before we talk about how to measure content, let’s talk about measurement itself. Most people think of measurement as a practice of absolutes (I am exactly 5 feet 9 inches tall, my dog weighs exactly 98 pounds, etc.). With this mindset, things that can’t be measured exactly can’t be measured at all.
This perception is reinforced in the business world. As I explained in my previous blog, our economic system was created when most products were tangible things, such as shoes or chairs. Calculating the manufacturing costs, units sold, and price for these products is relatively easy. The CFO sticks all the data in a fancy Excel spreadsheet and poof: the company’s year-end profit from shoes is exactly $4,829,006.56. (I’m oversimplifying it, but you get the gist.)
However, when somebody tries to measure something intangible—like the value of content—it’s impossible to come up with an exact number. So, people assume content is immeasurable.
Luckily, most scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians say exact measurement is a myth. To them, the goal of measurement is to reduce uncertainty. Get this: it’s impossible to eliminate uncertainty all together—all measurement is based on assumptions. That means, when measuring content value, you don’t have to come up with precise numbers. You just need to provide enough information that your stakeholders feel comfortable making a decision. Think estimates, not exacts. Now, doesn’t that seem easier?

2. Start by defining what you’re measuring

Ok, so how do you reduce uncertainty? The first thing you need to do is decide what you’re measuring. It might sound simple, but it’s actually one of the trickiest parts of the process. The key is to get as specific as possible, because the more specific you get, the more uncertainty you’ll be able to eliminate.
Start by answering the following questions:
  • How are you defining “content”? Many people forget to answer this critical question. I have my own ideas about what content is, but your definition will depend on your situation. You may need to break “content” down into smaller distinct categories. For example, if you define content as “text,” you may need to define several types of text (marketing vs. help text, intro paragraphs vs. sidebars, etc.). List each component or distinct type of content individually—they may need to be measured differently.
  • What does the content help the user do? In other words, what is the function of the content? Most project teams identify high-level user tasks, but they don’t go deep enough. You need to get into the dirty details. For each piece of content, list as many functions as you can and rank them in order of importance. The more explicit the function, the better. For example, instead of saying the “content on our furniture store website facilitates the buying process,” you might say content on a product detail page needs to:
    • Accurately describe the furniture
    • Justify the cost of the furniture
    • Provide clear details about furniture customization options
    • Guide the user through the purchase process
  • What are the desired characteristics of the content? In addition to function, most organizations want content to have certain traits. For example, they may want it to be professional (no spelling errors) or “on brand.” Again, the more information you can gather about these characteristics, the more easily you will be able to measure them.

3. Assign values to your functions and characteristics

This step really pushes content people out of their comfort zone, because it involves math. And assumptions. I promise it’s not as hard as you think.
For each of the functions and characteristics you identified, assign a value based on data or educated assumptions. (You can use monetary amounts, percentages, or arbitrary point systems. Just as long as you use numbers.) Document all of the data and assumptions you use, so you can show them to your stakeholders later, if necessary.
Using our furniture website example from above, assigning values can go something like this:
  • The average chair costs $500
  • Analytics show that 50 people start the process of purchasing a chair online every day, but only 10 finish the process
  • User research shows that the instructions on the purchase pages are very confusing
  • We assume 5-10 people leave the purchasing process because of something unrelated to the site, and 5-10 leave the process when they see the shipping costs
  • We assume the remaining 20-30 people would complete the purchasing process if the instructions were more helpful
  • Therefore, the value of the instructional content is likely around $300,000-450,000 per month ($500 x 20-30 people x 30 days)
  • The cost of fixing the content is approximately $25,000
(In this case, we can prove with a large amount of certainty that the price of the project is worth doing!)
A lot of work? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
In some cases, documenting only your most important functions and characteristics is necessary to help your stakeholders make decisions with certainty. In other cases, you’ll have to do the whole enchilada. (Hint: Tons of data/assumptions can get confusing, so on big projects you may want to create a content scorecard or matrix. You could even put it in Excel—just like the CFO. See how official you’re getting?)

4. The more ways you measure, the more certainty you get

At Brain Traffic, when we ask a new web client how they measure content effectiveness, they often give us a Google analytics login and a smile. Analytics are great. But, no single measurement method captures the complete picture of content.
Try to use a variety of measurement methods, instead of relying on favorite or easy method. When you use two or more methods, you'll get more well-rounded results. Some common methods include:
  • Analytics: use technology tools to collect data
  • User research: ask the users directly what they want or observe their behavior
  • External expert review: ask content experts or industry peers to review/rate content
  • Internal expert review: get insights from knowledgeable people inside your organization, such as sales people or customer service reps
  • Competitive comparison: measure direct competitors and your content on the same factors and compare
The more ways and more often you measure, the more certainty you get. But, you likely won’t be able to use all of these methods—just choose the ones that are most applicable to your organization.

5. Establish a baseline

Taking a baseline measurement is simple: before you make any changes, make sure you measure your existing content using the same metrics you’ll use on the new stuff. It can be painful to get feedback on content you already know is crappy, but the baseline will help you measure the impact of your future content work. And if all goes well, you’ll have handy, glowing before-and-after stats to pass around at your company’s next board meeting.

6. Measure regularly

Once your new content is live, set a regular schedule to measure the content using the established metrics. This will help you see how content performs over time as business and user needs change. In addition, it helps you understand how content activities change due to events like holidays or product launches.

7. Be realistic about measurement budgets

It’s important to plan a budget for your measurement initiative. Although measurement isn’t always expensive, it does take time, resources, and money. Scale your efforts to the size of the content project. If the whole content project is going to cost $50,000, you can look at basic analytics and do some informal user testing with your friends. But, if your company is looking to invest several million dollars in a content venture, $50,000 on measurement is money well spent.

Phew, I had a lot to say

Well, there you have it. Two years of pent-up measurement info in one ginormous blog. Although this is probably too much information for a blog, it’s just the tip of the iceberg in the content measurement conversation. In fact, it’s a tiny ice cube.
Measuring content value is important to content strategists, but it’s not just a content strategy issue. It’s one of the most important business discussions of the information age. There’s still lots to learn, let us know what you think.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Smart + Steady Wins the Content Race for AutoTrader.com

Smart + Steady Wins the Content Race for AutoTrader.com
June 21, 2011
New to creating your own content? Watch and learn from this clever case study.

Thinking Outside of the Bento Box to Improve Content Design


Thinking Outside of the Bento Box to Improve Content Design

Bento boxes satisfy the obsessive-compulsive disorder-side of my personality, organizing those fishy morsels of sushi goodness into visually beautiful patterns of color and flavor.
The bento box is a great visual metaphor for the role of information design in content marketing. Information design is the art of presenting content on the page (or screen) in a way that makes it easier for your reader to understand and remember your message. Just like the bento box, a well-organized article or report should include highly visual modular elements that separate sections of your work and embellish key points.
The lesson hit home for me personally when Chief Content Officer (CCO) magazine launched in January. A few bloggers pointed out (thank you) that our articles were too long and linear. Readers wanted to be entertained both in word as well as story format.  The CCO team gathered  and gave me marching orders:
  • Take each feature article and break it into pieces
  • Add sidebars and pull-quotes
  • Add skimming elements
  • Make it more visual and less daunting to read.
Some people refer to this strategy as creating modular content. (‘Modular’ makes me think of boxy-modern, orange furniture. I would rather visualize pieces of sushi snuggled together.) In CCOmagazine next month, we are adopting the bento box model of content marketing. Rather than having one 1,200-word feature article, we are running articles half as long, supplemented with short-form sidebars and callouts.

Why is modular content so important?

We are an impatient bunch
Particularly in the context of business content, we are reckless skimmers, racing through web pages and PDFs to find useful nuggets of information.
Content marketers are often writers by profession, and so we are understandably focused on delivering smartly-written, high-value content, forgetting to consider visual presentation. Visual tools like section headers, callouts, sidebars and infographics help your impatient readers decide whether they want to read more and help them arrive at the sections they are most interested in browsing.
Some of us remember information visually rather than in wordThat’s why infographics play such a crucial role in relaying complex information. I consider McKinseyto be an infographic powerhouse. Other companies manage to create infographics that are more beautiful or intellectually challenging, but the designers at McKinsey are experts in simple, educational graphics.
Sidebars add depth without weighting down the main article
Perhaps you have a case study or an expert interview you would like to include, but you worry that your article is already too long. Sidebars allow you to add depth and nuance while keeping your main article tight and focused.

Make it Modular

Here’s a quick information design checklist to walk through during your next content marketing assignment (sidebar, baby!):
  • Consider a quick-hitting summary presented up front that allows readers to decide whether they should read on (could be included as a secondary title, a short executive summary, or a sidebar). PricewaterhouseCooper’s 10 Minutes series does this well.
  • Make it modular with sidebars. Are there sections of your article that could stand alone as a sidebar? Sidebars shorten your main article, pull out key information visually and allow you to expand on more complex ideas.
  • Use section titles that allow your readers to skip sections or locate key sections and use callouts to highlight key concepts or quotes.
  • Use bold print (judiciously) to highlight key phrases or sentences. This is a tactic CMI uses in its daily blog.
  • If your article contains complex information (could be quantitative, a multi-step process, a series of decisions, a cost-benefit analysis) consider an infographic to simplify the information.
  • If your article is educational in nature, consider a half-page self-assessment that allows readers to test their knowledge or test their company’s level of sophistication on that topic. This is a great reinforcement tool.
  • Make it easy to share with a checklist or synopsis. Pull it all together with a beautiful pdf checklist (don’t forget to brand it).  See Ahava Leibtag’s content checklist as a great model.
Our July issue of CCO magazine will truly be the first issue that embraces this new modular? mantra. Also, keep a lookout for our new columnist, Bob Johnson from IDG Connect, who will be writing about dynamic design and content optimization for CCO magazine.

In case you're wondering where you fit in the web design world...


Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2010

For the fourth year in a row, A List Apart and you have teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going?
Once again, we present our findings on the web, with XHTML table data converted to charts care of CSS, Jason Santa Maria, and Eric Meyer. Others who worked on these findings include editor Krista Stevens and publisher Jeffrey Zeldman.
Analyses contained in this report should be considered primarily descriptive; no attempt was made to assess causality among survey variables. In plain English, be careful not to extrapolate the observations that follow into predictive or causal relationships.


http://aneventapart.com/alasurvey2010/

Friday, June 17, 2011

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention


If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention

by Rahel Bailie

My new-ish contract (I’ve been there a couple of months) involves an organization that is ramping up with user experience and content strategy with a serious learning curve. To the credit of the project Director, she is absorbing and integrating the principles and best practices at an intense rate. The title of this post comes from her observations, and she admits that she now finds herself looking at the world through a completely different lens as the UX Manager and I expose her to new principles and ideas. Today’s discussion involved signage in the rapid transit system. It’s a classic intersection of user experience and content strategy, and here’s how it plays out.
Vancouver has a shiny new Canada Lin—a subway train—that runs from the Airport to downtown Vancouver. It’s wonderful. As I live out near the airport, I often take it to work, and it shaves a lot of time off my commute. It’s clean and comfortable, and runs every few minutes. However, there are inherent problems with wayfinding; some of them are usability problems, others are content problems. They are not separable, and work together to create either a good experience or a frustrating one.
Inside the airport, the signage says “Canada Line”. As I walk through the airport, I sometimes wonder how these people around me, many of whom have little or no English, find the transit system. Canada Line could mean “information about Canada by telephone” or some sort of train line. But where does it indicate what the Canada Line actually is: a subway train to Vancouver and to the whole regional transit system?
From inside the train, each transit station looks identical, and station signage is sparse. At rush hour, it’s next to impossible to see station signs through the crowds of people on the platform. Riders must learn to look for the signs insidethe train that identify the current stop. It takes a while to realize this, and to counter-intuitive look within the train to learn where you are.
The signage on the platforms tells you which trains are coming. A recording announces that the next train on the “outbound platform is for YVR.” The platforms are not labelled, and in underground stations with several twists and turns down the stairs, who really knows which direction is inbound or outbound? Going north, there is one terminal called Waterfront (in other words, downtown). Going south, there are two possible terminals: YVR (the airport code for Vancouver, though the airport is actually in the suburb of Richmond) or Brighouse (also in Richmond). Going north is no problem. You get on the next train. Going south, you need to choose your train if you are going as far as Richmond. The helpful signage displays an electronic schedule such as:
YVR – Airport – 4 minutes
Richmond-Brighouse -  8 minutes
Richmond-Brighouse – 12 minutes
(This setup could be problematic; some riders see past the first line as its size and boldness are subconsciously interpreted as a title, and they automatically skip to the second line to look for “real information”. But that’s a whole other story, and we wonder whether TransLink did any testing of that.)
However, you are more likely to see a series of messages that say something like:
  • If you drop something on the tracks, don’t retrieve it yourself. See an attendant.
  • Only one bicycle per bicycle area on the train at a time.
  • GO CANUCKS GO
The schedule comes around eventually, but your train may have entered and left the station by then.
If you have gotten onto the wrong train, figuring out how to double back and get onto the right train is problematic because of the mapping system inside the train (if you can find one). I know – been there, done that, cursed the entire time.
These may seem like small items, but they’re the crazy-making stuff that ruins your experience. It’s the stuff that makes people post about “the sign says this but what you really need to do is …” and “it’s cute but not too bright…” or “be careful, because if you miss your connecting stop, it takes you an extra 15 minutes to turn yourself around, and believe me, it will happen.”
It doesn’t take much to fix these problems, but it means that someone needs to walk through with a “user experience eye” and make sure that the experience works for all the audiences. For example, the content on the signs could shorten the duration of secondary messages and spend more time on the schedule and train destination. And it means training staff (including whoever is in charge of the electronic platform signage) to follow the guidelines that make the difference between a good user experience and a frustrating one.
Many thanks to Jerome Ryckborst, the UX Manager who collaborated with me on this post, and my project Director, who was the inspiration for this post. Pay attention. Be outraged.

Online Endeavors Need a Spare Tire


Online Endeavors Need a Spare Tire

by Clinton Forry on June 16th, 2011

You need a spare tire in your content strategy. Otherwise, you’ll end up stranded with a blowout on the information superhighway.

Be Prepared

The Boy Scout motto is a simple two words: Be Prepared. (I am an Eagle Scout, you know.) I think of that motto often, in both personal and professional settings.
We’ve all encountered unexpected situations and issues of one sort or another while working with online projects. The anxiety level is usually in direct proportion to the lack of preparedness.
  • Online content emergency + no plan = TIME TO FREAK OUT
  • Online content emergency + content strategy = cool as the other side of the pillow
Preparedness is not always black and white. It’s more of a spectrum, really.
For example, I saw the cutest car in the parking lot the other day—a Fiat 500. I went right to my desk to look for more info on their website. While clicking through the options, I discovered an odd one: A SPARE TIRE.

Spare tire as an option
A spare tire. As an option. Really? (Click to inflate)
Some car companies now include a “tire repair kit” instead of a spare tire. It’ll fix some minor problems like a slow leak or a nail puncture. No biggie.
But, if you hit a big pothole and completely destroy your tire, you’ll be left stranded. This happened to me earlier this year. No repair kit would have helped the shredded remnants of my tire. To be fully prepared, I needed a spare.

Issues Known or Unknown

In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the following quote. It remains relevant, yet somewhat garbled, today:
[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
Believe it or not, spare tires and unknown unknowns can have an impact on what you do online.

Online Content with a Slow Leak

The known/unknown quote serves as a reminder to account for the most likely and obvious things that might affect an online endeavor in some way. Take these flat-tire scenarios, for example:
  • Staff changes disrupt content workflows
  • A CMS update breaks your current site
  • Third-party content provider folds
These things can and should be anticipated. They are “known,” as Rumsfeld would say. Contingency plans to deal with them can be crafted and shelved until needed. It’s all in a day’s work for a sustainable content strategy.

Online Content-Shredding Blowout

But what about those pesky “unknown unknowns” that Rumsfeld talked about?
Plan as we may, there is always something that comes along to break even the most carefully assembled contingency plan. Often, the unknown unknowns are major and abrupt. For example, some tire-blowout-level  scenarios:
  • New laws or regulations change your content ecosystem
  • Upper management changes the overall business objectives
  • Competitor innovation changes the market landscape
  • Technological innovation changes the industry
What can we do? Develop a fast and flexible approach that allows content teams to address those unknown unknowns as they come up. This is not meant to be an explicit plan. Instead, it should be a modifiable process that is informed by the foundation work that goes into every solid content strategy.

Using Your Spare Tire

When the unknown unknowns make themselves, um, known, established roles and responsibilities become even more important. Some things to consider when establishing your “unknown unknowns” approach:
  • Include the proper staff and stakeholders. Not every person needs to be at the table for each discussion, but the right ones should be.
  • Keep an eye on sustainability. Changes must be realistic, and within the true scope and capability of those involved (as with any content project).
  • Set everything in alignment with your core strategy and business goals. Any one of the tire-blowout-level scenarios can lead endeavors off course.
Take the time to put together plans for issues and situations that might threaten your online endeavors. Then, create a process that will allow you (and your team) to address any other situations that come up.
Before long, issues will be resolved and you’ll have your tires on the road again.