Content Strategy for Mobile and Content Everywhere: Book Reviews

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Are you ready for multi-channel publishing?

Mobile content strategy is a topic you just can’t get way from—not if you’re a content strategist, content marketer or any other type of content professional.

Really, mobile content strategy is a misnomer. Instead, we need to be thinking content first, as both Karen McGrane and Sara Wachter-Boettcher argue in their books, Content Strategy for Mobile and Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content.

Both books are immediate content strategy classics, and therefore required reading for anyone who practices anything having to do with content. Yes, that means even you, information architects. 

However, the books approach their topics in quite a different manner, using dissimilar organizational structures with different central theses.  Sara’s book is the more technical of the two: she goes into great lengths to clarify content modeling, structuring content, markup and transporting content.

Karen’s text covers more of the why:

·       We need structured content

·       Content management systems are such a hot mess

·       Authors, developers and designers need to think about creating adaptive content to create better mobile user experiences

Both authors clearly agree that we must think about content for repurpose and reuse, rather than locking content down to the page format. This is the famous “divorcing content from display” argument so many of us content professionals have heard about in the past three years. The goal is to make your content adaptive, so it can flex and shift—no matter the device, template or context.

In other words, we need to think about hardcoding our content’s end behavior while we are creating it.  That way it is already programmed to display the way we need it to on varied devices and within different templates when it shows up on our end users’ screens.

Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane

Content Strategy for Mobile

In Content Strategy for Mobile, Karen argues that many of our problems with multi-channel publishing stem from thinking about how we publish print. She also argues, quite brilliantly, that we need to move away from thinking about mobile, because device isn’t really the issue:

“The boundaries between ‘desktop tasks’ and ‘mobile tasks’ are fluid, driven as much by the device’s convenience as they are by the ease of the task. Have you ever tried to quickly look up a bit of information from your tablet, simply because you’re too lazy to walk over to your computer? Have you ever noticed that the device you choose for a given activity does not necessarily imply your context for use?” (pg. 18)

Karen also spends a lot of time explaining forking (ha ha, we’re professionals, get it together), which is when you create multiple versions of your website—say one for a traditional desktop experience, and one for mobile. The problem with this is that every time you have to update the content on the mothership (the traditional website), you then have to remember to do it on the mobile site as well.  Not efficient—as Karen points out—it doubles the workload, and I would argue, the nausea.

Karen is also a real proponent of changing content authoring within a CMS. “Content creators need to break free of imagining a single context where their content is going to “live” and instead plan for content reuse.” (pg 54) Later, she says, “By decoupling content authoring from content display, we make multi-channel publishing possible.” (pg. 78)

Imagine not knowing how what you’ve written is going to look like when it publishes on your audience’s devices? We need to envision and create that future if we’re going to manage all our content and publish it to different display formats. To do that, we need effective coding and authoring tools, and that’s where Sara’s book dovetails so nicely with Karen’s.

Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content

Content Everywhere

Sara also makes a brilliant case for why we need to construct content in such a way as that it is able to freely move about the web.  The organization of her book and the excellent case studies she intersperses throughout the text really gelled all of her arguments and ideas together for me.

Sara reviews the chunks and blobs problem: if content is placed into the CMS as a big blob, it will render on different devices and within different templates as a big ‘ole wall of text, with no distinctions to the different attributes of the content—for example, the author’s name, title, related comment and so on. 

However, if it is chunked within the CMS, and given a defined role, it is structured content. Structured content is divorced from display, giving it the behavioral instructions it needs to show up on your audience’s multiple devices properly. (It’s weird that we’re so happy about divorce, no? I guess it was a long time coming.)

Sara also does an excellent job of explaining content modeling, content APIs, making content more findable, reusable content and personalized content. She also talks about content shifting, which I call content saving. Basically it’s the idea that people may not want to read your content right at the moment they encounter it on your website, so they’ll save it for later—in Pocket, Evernote or on the Reading List in their mobile browser. This is what I like to call a DVR for content. Just as DVRs changed content consumption for broadcast, apps like Pocket are changing online content consumption.

In the same way that DVRs let you speed through commercials, apps like Pocket and Evernote strip out the annoying ads and right hand modules and deliver just the text and pictures associated with a particular article. But if your content isn’t structured and encoded for this to happen, your audience won’t be able to save it and read it later. They suffer. And so will you, because they won’t engage with your content.

Great Content is Central to the Audience Experience

Sara also covers voice and tone, however briefly, and talks about improving the reading experience. And, she summarizes how creating great content is still central to the audience experience, “This is the real crux of creating content that will endure, serving your organization and users into the future: it must shift and reshape to fit varied devices, contexts, and sites, while also retaining its essence—the substance that defines it and make it what it is. Getting closer to content and understanding how its elements lend it meaning and give it purpose...it is the only way to keep content from losing its power as its context shifts.” (pg. 209)

Meaning, no matter where your audience is when they consume your content—on a street corner, in bed, at an airport—and no matter how they consume it—on their laptop, tablet or smartphone—there are critical things we must do for our content so it can live anywhere online and resonate with your target audiences.

The most amazing thing to me about both these books was how much I enjoyed reading them. It was like spending time with two great minds; listening to both of these authors talk about content got me excited about content strategy all over again. I highly recommend each text—and may I recommend the product below to go along with the books?

A pen made for nerds.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on either book and where you think the future of multi-channel publishing is headed.

Posted by Ahava Leibtag at 9:20 AM