HOW TO SPARK AND SCALE ENTERPRISE CONTENT STRATEGY

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Colleen Jones Talks with Content Visionaries at Dell

POSTED BY
COLLEEN JONES

JUL 17 2013

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Smart companies recognize the importance of smart content.

Diane Bunton, Marketing Director for Global Online Content Operations at Dell Inc., explains

“Dell has a practical, no-nonsense approach to helping customers do more. We want our content to be relevant for the decisions our customers are making.”

But how do you ensure a strategic approach for each and every piece of content across your entire organization, especially if it’s large? In other words, how do you make enterprise content strategy work? It’s a question facing enterprises across industries and around the world.

At the Fortune 50 technology leader Dell, the company’s portfolio of end-to-end  solutions demands compelling content for products, services and markets worldwide—from marketing all the way through technical support. Getting all of that content right is a massive, complex challenge.

So Dell’s leadership tackled the question head on. Their answer? Build a content strategy that scales.

Let’s take a closer look at the content challenges Dell faces and how content visionaries such as Diane are overcoming them by forging a united vision for content strategy and enabling global teams to implement that vision.

THE CHALLENGES THAT SPARKED A CONTENT STRATEGY SOLUTION

Because it covers an extensive range of products, services and markets, content creation at Dell involves hundreds of employees and takes place all over the world, from the company’s Round Rock, Texas, headquarters to the UK, Japan and beyond.

Until recently, operations had been segmented around business units, with content following as an extension of that segmentation. As is often the case in large enterprises, content at Dell was being produced in decentralized silos that didn’t always coordinate. What makes Dell different from many large companies? Thought leaders realized there had to be a better approach—and that approach involved content strategy.

Brennan Dell, the company’s Director of Marketing Education, explains that he and others came together and discussed a different philosophy…

“Let’s rein this back in, and not only decrease the number of people with the ability to create content, but sync up our approach and get more consistent about our strategy for content creation and maintenance.”

Of course, taking a content-first approach means more people have to collaborate across different teams. Aaron Burgess, Dell’s Senior Manager for Content Strategy, explains

“If we are building an interface that is just one company collecting content from all these different silos into one presentation layer, then holy cow, we need a plan for how we work together.”

Dell started to do things differently on key projects—with much success. One big win was the content strategy to support the launch of Dell’s 12th Generation PowerEdge Servers. The right promotional content in campaigns, through social media, and on the Dell.com home page drove people to in-depth content about the new PowerEdge launch on Dell.com.

This sample flow shows how Dell strategically planned the PowerEdge content that customers needed. Dell sought to repeat successes like this by scaling content strategy.

Why did this success happen? Because of content strategy. Instead of operating in silos, teams collaborated and coordinated with one another from start to finish.

“We realized this is the way we should be doing it in the future,” Brennan notes.

That realization raised a new question and a challenge: How do you scale a strategic approach for each and every content project or effort at a global enterprise? With so many people involved in the planning, creating, and building / publishing phases of content, the challenge is not small. That’s where my team and I collaborated with Aaron, Brennan, and Diane.

Let’s take a closer look at the approach and insights from our recent collaboration with Dell that might help your organization adopt content strategy.

TRAINING AND TOOLS: SECRETS TO SCALING CONTENT STRATEGY

After talking with stakeholders from several different Dell content teams, we realized that scaling content strategy would take alignment around two things:

• A core vision for content strategy.
• A practical framework and supporting tools for implementing content strategy.

As Diane notes

“We have multiple marketing organizations—search, video, product, and more—but we need our customers to have a similar experience, no matter where content is coming from. We wanted to get all of our content teams aligned on the basic goals.”

So, together, that’s what we did. The key? A two-part system of training and tools.

1. In-Person and Remote Training

We developed an in-person and remote training course for Dell’s headquarters and key global markets. The goals included articulating the value of content strategy, offering a unique vision for it at Dell, and empowering people to apply it. Brennan confirms,

“It was a good level-set across Dell’s online division on the importance of content strategy, why we need to have a content strategy brief, and what goes into creating a good content environment and user experience.”

A few elements of the training made it work well: relevance, credibility, and case studies.

Relevance

At Dell, “content” often translates to “marketing,” so the training focused on content strategy from the perspective of marketers. As Aaron notes,

“The course was was speaking their [marketers'] language right from the start.”

Credibility

I personally led each session with a wide variety of professionals across different teams at Dell. Not only did I enjoy the insightful questions and diverse perspectives, but my background enhanced the training’s credibility. Diane points out,

“People appreciated meeting the author of Clout, a thought leader in the field.”

Professionals from different teams and with different perspectives at Dell came together for training in content strategy.

Case Studies

Sometimes, the best way to learn something is by example. Diane explains,

“It was really helpful to see the case studies within technology and also in different industries.”

But, the training would not be complete without the right tools.

2. Practical Tools

We provided several tools to empower Dell employees to do more with their content. “These were great supplements to the delivered training,” Brennan notes.

The Content Strategy Brief (sample shown) helps everyone involved in content ask the right planning questions.

• The Content Strategy Quick Guide
  A concise recap of the training’s main takeaways that content planners, creators, and managers can refer to frequently.
• Content Strategy Brief Template
  A custom template that promotes planning and communication before, during, and after content is created and launched.
• Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content
  My book, with even more tools, resources, and case studies.

So, what were the results?

THE RESULTS

The training and tools have fanned the spark of content strategy at Dell into more of a flame. Aaron notes

“The biggest success so far has been changing the conversation and getting people speaking with a similar vocabulary about content at Dell.”

The content strategy brief brings that conversation to life in actionable ways. Diane elaborates,

“I’m seeing people ask more questions like the ones in the Content Strategy Brief and do more planning at the front end of a content project.”

Dell has also set up a repository for the training resources and tools, which Burgess says has been active with people accessing and downloading them. He notes,

“Each of these things is a little seed that’s being planted, and I’m confident that we’ll see more good results as more people adopt and evangelize the lessons from the training.”

TAKEAWAYS FOR YOUR ENTERPRISE

If your organization suffers from silos or faces other scaling challenges like those at Dell, then you can learn from the technology giant’s example.

• Reach out across teams and silos.
• Talk through a more strategic approach to content.
• Get a big content “win” to spark interest and support.
• Scale the content strategy with relevant training and practical tools.

Change at this scale takes time, but it will happen. And, the results will be well worth the wait.

7 Actions that Earn User Trust

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Ilana Westerman

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Control of personal information in the digital space, and particularly on mobile devices, presents a uniquedesign challenge.

Most people aren’t aware that their personal data is being collected and shared. Many don’t take the time to validate their expectations and most never read privacy policies.

People become aware of these issues only when something happens that doesn’t meet their expectations, like seeing their friend’s picture in a Facebook ad or banner ads that match a recent purchase. And when people do become aware and their expectations are violated, trust in the brand is eroded.

People want transparency and control, but they want it on their terms. They don’t want to have their activities interrupted, but they do want to set controls on what is being collected and how it is used.

The Goal

The goal of the Digital Trust Initiative is to create awareness of privacy issues while not getting in the way of the experience. This is an even bigger challenge for mobile interactions due to small screen real estate and the need for consistency across apps and sites. However, it is not insurmountable. By leveraging visceral design constructs such as sound and vibration, we can create new experiences surrounding personal data collection that are transparent and provide control.

The 6 Design Principles

In our previous article, “Control and Transparency,” we outlined our approach to establishing user needs: conducting foundational research into the context of use. Through in-depth interviews, including asking participants to demonstrate how they use their mobile devices to access content, we gained a clear view of their experiences. Analyzing that data, we derived six design principles to guide the design process:

1. Context: What are users’ mental models, beliefs, expectations, and task flows around maintaining their personal information?
2. Motivation: What do users care about? What triggers their actions to adjust privacy settings?
3. Awareness and attention: Do users know that a privacy status indicator exists? Once they realize that it’s there, do they pay attention to it when they are using their device?
4. Discoverability: If users look for a privacy status indicator, can they find it? How visible does it have to be? Can it be something other than visual?
5. Comprehension and retention: Do users understand and remember how to interact with or adjust settings via the privacy status indicator? Can they repeat processes?
6. Usability: Can users interact with the status indicator? Is there a box that they can check for easy control?

From these six design principles, we dug deeper, arriving at a growing list of actions or best practices that DTI design must take into account. In this article, we will take a look at the first seven actions that we’ve solidified.

An Initial Set of Actions

These actions are essentially the barriers that must be overcome in order to earn users’ trust in the digital domain:

1. Timing: Tell me when I should care. Don't interrupt me, and don't force me to pay attention to something I’m not interested in at the moment. Ask for data when it is needed, at the moment when it makes sense intuitively and contextually.

• Bad timing is asking or requiring the user to agree to terms when they are just trying to evaluate an app for the first time.
• Good timing is requesting the user’s location in the process of placing an order; such an “in the moment” request seems perfectly natural, because users know the information is necessary to complete the transaction.

2. Organization: Why is the same action available in several places? Dispersed controls can be hard to find, and duplicative or similar-sounding controls are confusing. Provide access to all controls in one place, so that users can link them together easily. Simplify or consolidate similar controls to avoid user confusion.

• Similar-sounding choices, such as “account settings” and “privacy settings,” create a difficult choice that’s also difficult to remember.
• Privacy settings, when listed in several menu categories, make it unclear if they control the same or separate areas.

• Page layouts on different platforms communicate differently. One platform uses action words to call attention to information: heading words like “settings” look like buttons requiring a click. Amidst all this apparent need for action, the privacy policy link gets lost on the page. The other platform interface is less action-oriented and more information-oriented, relieving the pressure on the user to click. As a result, the "Privacy Policy" link has more prominence.

3. Surface: Be transparent. If users have to go hunting, then they worry that something is being hidden from them. That makes them less trusting and more wary of a site.

• Don’t make me look: people are not motivated to learn about privacy policies, so they will not look, and one click can be too much.

• Don't make me dig: if it requires several taps and scrolling, it feels buried and “sneaky,” like the site might be hiding something.

• Be available: if a higher-level icon is not available on every page, or not at the point of action, that can lead to user frustration or mistrust.

4. Embed: Don't make me hunt. Put the link into the text, at a natural point when I am interested in finding more information. If the site doesn’t link its brief text to the full version, then the user has to go hunting for it. This can be perceived as “trickery,” eroding trust.

5. Associate: Tell me what the consequences of my actions are.

• Associate actions and outcomes—don't just provide a bare on/off choice without letting users know what each choice means.
• An uninformed decision leaves the user in the dark as to the outcome of their choice to, for example, turn on Location Services for a search engine.
• Informed decisions can be made when the site highlights what the consequences of such a choice will be, and follows up with the option to continue or cancel.

• Associate information with state–tell me on the same screen what the icon means; don’t make me scroll down a long screen to find out.

6. Value proposition and consequences: Why should I do this? Give consumers a reason why personal information is needed, and the value proposition.

• If an app requests permission to use current location, and also explains why, users are usually happy to comply. Brands earn trust when they clearly and simply outline the consequences of a choice.
• If an app doesn’t really need the user’s current location, and provides no justification for needing it, people aren’t likely to agree to giving the information up.
• Opaque statements like, “Hardware Controls Take pictures and videos” or warnings about consequences—“if you turn off cookies, some features and services may not function properly”—cause user anxiety: what does that mean? What will the impact be?

7. Informed consent: When did I say this was ok? Did the user make a choice, and did they understand what they were choosing? Give people the opportunity to understand and agree to the terms of providing their data. Be clear about what is being collected, and what can and cannot be controlled.

• Action-based radio buttons are an attention-getting way to both give the user a sense of control and to indicate a choice previously made. By contrast, links tend to get lost.
• Explanatory language that includes vague words—“such as,” “things like,” “for example”—does not fully convey all the possibilities, and may obscure the larger potential outcome.

Conclusion

While the six design guidelines and our growing list of actions have helped with initial design development, this is still just the beginning. Designing is a highly iterative process. As designers become involved, more design constructs enter the picture. This naturally leads to the identification of additional actions. In our current iterative design process, we have already identified at least two additional actions that will be addressed along with some other new actions in a future article.

The Digital Trust Initiative is an independent effort to study digital design and privacy policy in digital technology. The work of the initiative is funded, in part, by a variety of partners: Yahoo!, Create With Context, AOL, The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), Verizon, and Visa. The views expressed in this article and the conclusions drawn do not reflect the views of these partners. Further, the partners have not independently verified the results of the study, nor do they make any representation as to the accuracy or value of any statements made herein.

Image of girl feeding Dalmatian courtesy Shutterstock.

via UX Magazine http://uxmag.com/articles/7-actions-that-earn-user-trust

Testing, Testing, One-Two-Three

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Elizabeth S. Bennett   May 14, 2013

 A series of tubes. (photo by nezume_you)

Here you are. You’ve developed a digital strategy that includes building out the content on your (or your client’s) website and mobile platforms. You’re excited. and fairly certain based on business goals, the competitive environment, and what you know about your target audience that your plan is a good one. Now it’s time to test out the vision with real people to make sure you’re on the right path.

Your goal is to get a good sense of how and whether people respond to your content. What’s the best way to go about evaluating all those words and images?

In my experience there is absolutely no substitution for listening to how real people respond to and interact with your site/experience. That’s not to say you can’t gather some useful information from surveys and other quantitative means at certain junctures, but you will never know your customers/audience/visitors until you listen to their experience in their own words.

Having said that, it’s time to figure out what you’re going to do with these real people when they turn up at your testing facility. How are you going to ensure that you’re eliciting valuable and reliable responses?

There are many approaches to user testing, and it’s important to be thoughtful about which path to take. I’ll be looking specifically at three approaches to testing content and when each one best applies. I’ll also explore the inherent risk in testing content, namely the impulse to zero in on the tone and style or format of the content at the heart of your experience, at the expense of broader learnings.

Testing the Experience

One approach is to focus on the experience. I doing so, problems (or successes) with content should become evident. With this method, you’ll provide some context for the respondent, observe them interacting with the experience, ask open-ended questions, and pick up on verbal cues and body language that invite investigation. Patterns of behavior will emerge and you’ll get a sense of how the experience is and isn’t meeting expectations.

Strengths: Provides a comprehensive customer perspective on the experience. If done well, findings will include what is and isn’t working with the strategy, design, content and interactions.

Drawbacks: May not yield precise degree of detail you or your client is seeking about the content.

When it works best: Really any time, but it’s a particularly good approach when the strategy and experience hasn’t yet been vetted by real customers. It’s also good for testing a complex experience where gaining a foothold on the big picture should be a prerequisite for testing the content.

You might say I cut my teeth on this method back in the day, when I was a consultant at Creative Good, a customer experience consulting firm. I corresponded recently with Mark Hurst, the company’s president and founder, and I asked him how he and his colleagues would test a content concept. He said he never thinks about content as its own phenomenon.

Hurst says that when his team members speak with the customers of clients one-on-one, they don’t set out to test a visual concept and then a content concept. “Those aren’t separate things in our worldview. Instead we look at the user experience overall, one unified experience that is created by the visual and the interactive and the content and a constellation of other factors.”

It can be much harder to sell the big picture testing scenario to clients who often think about their digital experiences as separate pieces in a puzzle, says Hurst, especially when there are multiple business owners responsible for content. But if you immediately zoom in on a sliver of the experience, it can have the opposite effect of sharpening your focus, Hurst says. “You’re cutting out a whole spectrum of observation and knowledge that you could be getting.”

Testing the Content

 As the name suggests, this testing approach is focused exclusively on the content – be it prose, labels, marketing messages, or digital assets. The idea here is to invite testing respondents to comment exclusively on content with some specific goals in mind, like assessing tone and voice, article length, video style, navigation labels, etc.

Strengths:  Opportunity to probe deeply into content elements, editorial strategy, tone/style, and basically anything you have questions or concerns about.

Drawbacks: Chance you may miss out on crucial strategy/experience findings by focusing exclusively on content.

When it works best: You’ve already vetted the strategy and experience with your target audience and believe it to be ironclad, but you have further questions about how successfully the content is supporting the strategy; you accept that this method is more of a usability study rather than a research method that could influence the overall direction of your site, app, etc. You might also use this approach when your experience and content are still in the concept stage to get an initial read on how customers or visitors respond to your vision.

Colleen Jones, principal at Content Science, a digital content strategy consultancy, and author of a recent content credibility study, says that you can definitely conduct targeted testing on content by “focusing test protocol (questions and tasks) on content issues instead of design and experience issues.” As an example, Jones says that instead of ending a task at finding content, you can end it with answering a question that requires both finding and understanding the content. Or, she says, you can focus the task on understanding the content only.

With content as the focus, Jones explains that the overall experience is a secondary matter. “If the experience causes or exacerbates content problems,” Jones says, “then you can still observe and note that. But, the experience isn’t the focus.”

Sometimes Jones tests content at a very detailed level, such as sample text, imagery, or video. “We have tested samples of text content that reflect different approaches to voice. One sample was lighter and more humorous in tone than the other.”

Jones says the approaches above have been very successful for her clients. For instance, she worked with a health start-up to test and evaluate tone of voice on their site. “We had to experiment with the right techniques in protocol to bring out real response and get at issues we’re interested in without biasing the results,” she explains. “You want responses to be as organic as possible.”

My experience is that when homing in on content – or really any single component of an experience – there’s a risk that important findings won’t emerge. Let’s say you and your client have agreed to test a site’s Videos page.  You might get some very useful feedback about videos, but you could be inhibiting respondents from providing other perhaps more valuable feedback. If you haven’t established the environment for broader observations,  respondents might not have the opportunity to say how much they dislike the homepage or that they’re super excited about something on a competitor’s site. That’s why I only recommend using this approach if you’ve already vetted a site’s overall strategy and experience through qualitative testing.

Testing the Content in the Course of Testing the Experience

This is a pretty straightforward hybrid between testing the overall experience and testing content in isolation. You and your client can feel confident that you did a thorough job of testing the experience and you still get to satisfy your or their need to zoom in on content questions and concerns.

If you’re hankering to ask overtly about content, this is your opportunity to do some investigating without making content the sole focus of your testing. My recommendation would be to test the overall experience, like in the first scenario, but set aside some time at the end of each interview, say one-third of the total time allotted, to inquire about the most pressing content questions. Best to keep the questions open-ended to elicit the most organic responses. 

Strengths:  Opportunity to dig deeper into content elements while gaining critical information about the overall experience

Drawbacks: When time with respondents is often precious, it could be that you miss out on important strategy/experience findings in an effort to glean content insights. 

When it works best: When broad experience testing isn’t going to address the content questions you need answered. In order to move ahead with your work and validate the experience, it’s vital to know what users think of the content.

I recommend this approach if it’s not the first time you’re testing the experience. If it is and you or your client think it’s critical to call out some specific content questions, I would keep them to a minimum and develop your research plan around testing the overall experience with the expectation that any glaring content problems will arise when you let customers engage with the experience as a whole. 

Choosing and Selling the Best Approach 

As the content expert in the room, it will be up to you to educate your client about different approaches to testing content as well as to advocate for the one you think is best suited to the occasion. It will be helpful to have some case studies at the ready to illustrate how and when each one works best.

Speaking of case studies, we’d love to hear from you about your experience with testing content and if you have anything to add to the above approaches and when to use them. Thanks for adding your comments to this post.