Why Traditional Content Audits Aren’t Enough

By AHAVA LEIBTAG | Published: JANUARY 24, 2011

I had the strangest thing happen to me last week.  I was talking to the lead on a big website project, and I asked him, “So what types of content do you plan to include?”  He told me, “Written, video, message boards, podcasting and downloadable documents.”

However, when he sent me the design specs for the site, there was absolutely no room on the page for video. When I pressed him on this issue, he responded, “We’ll worry about that later.”

Huh?

It’s what’s inside the box

Remember the movie Splash?

She’s a mermaid; he’s a lonely guy in New York looking for love.  They meet and begin a passionate love affair.  He brings her a beautiful music box one day, wrapped in a Tiffany’s box.  Now, remember:   she’s a mermaid.  She doesn’t know from Tiffany’s, as my Yiddish grandmother would say.  So, when he presents her with the box, she looks at it lovingly for a long time, kisses it, looks at him and says, “It’s beautiful.  I love it.”

Clients act like mermaids sometimes.  They think that a beautiful design will bring success.However, content professionals  know that what’s inside the box is what ultimately brings digital communication success. Understanding and cataloging what goes in all those boxes on your site is the first step toward providing your users with excellent content and satisfying the business strategy of the organization.

Three ways to start thinking about your content

While thinking about content may be tedious for some, it is absolutely critical to squeeze out as much information as you can about your content before design. When facing a redesign or migration, any content strategist will immediately plan a content audit.  He or she will also:

1. Create or modify existing user audience personas
2. Analyze any data, including user analytics, customer call center data, surveys, etc.
3. Read the business plan (if there is one)

Are traditional content audits enough?

While a content audit is necessary, it’s not a silver-bullet solution.

As we speak, there are two popular forms of content auditing: quantitative and qualitative.  The first is basically an inventory: URL, page title, what is on the page. This is useful, but only to a point. It doesn’t help you address these kinds of issues:

• The site has been neglected for years.  The content is outdated and the analytics do not reveal useful information.
• There is so much legacy content that a full-scale content audit would take months.
• The persona creation process reveals so many different personas that it seems pointless to narrow it down to three to five.
• The data are confusing, distracting or contradictory.

The second type, a qualitative audit, is an in-depth dive into the content—not only the URL and page title, but an assessment of the content—how good the writing is, what the page says, how it relates to other pages.

Moving toward multidimensional content audits

As I’ve been strongly advocating for moving toward multidisciplinary groups for your digital strategy team, I’m going to make the same recommendation for your content audits.  Instead of spreadsheets that list out your content, use a multidimensional group of documents to tell the story—not just about the content, but about the design formats you are using as well.

Here are some examples:

Combine your analytics and content audits on a spreadsheetSort according to actual IA order or by page views.  This might look like an Excel spreadsheet that has the following columns:

• Page title
• Page name
• Notes
• Page views
• Absolute unique visitors
• Bounce rate

In this way, clients can understand the full story of the page, not just one aspect of the content.

Pull out interesting notes from your analyticsDisplay these kinds of notes in graphical format:

• Peak user times
• Top pages by entrance and exit
• Whole sections that are basically ignored by users.  Powerpoint is a useful tool for creating graphics of analytics because you can easily export into Excel and create pretty charts.

Have your developers count the number of design templates or databases you are using
This can be sticky, but if done properly can inform both your IA and visual design.  Imagine side-by-side comparisons, or better yet, a snapshot of the template with basic analytics information listed below it. Request information from the call center about the top 10 issues or concerns they deal with on a daily basis and looking at the analytics on those pages.  Try to see if you can spot what the customer is struggling with on the page.  Better yet, see if your clients can spot it.

Compare your mobile and desktop analyticsSee if there are major differences in the way people consume that content.

Count the top types of content you post regularlyFor example, does video score high? Downloadable PDFs? Podcasts?

The goal of a content audit is not to simply collect data but to have the information you need to make good decisions. Creating and using multidimensional content audits will help you move forward into the design phase of the redesign.  Knowing what goes inside the box will help you avoid having to scramble and “just deal with it later.”

But, feel free to buy me something in a Tiffany box.  I promise I’ll love the box and what’s inside.

Publishing, Without Publishers

The Media Equation

link

By DAVID CARR

Published: January 16, 2011

In the not-so-distant past, a luxury brand like Richemont, the Swiss company that owns Piaget, Dunhill and Montblanc, would have killed for even the slightest attention from Jeremy Langmead, the editor of British Esquire. 

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Now, he works for them, building a menswear e-commerce site. 

Luxury brands have always advertised in the likes of Vogue, Esquire and Architectural Digest and tried to impress their editors enough to get mentioned in the editorial pages, as well. But now companies like Richemont are reaching out directly to consumers — and cutting out the middlemen. 

Last year, Richemont acquired control of Net-A-Porter, the 10-year-old online luxury fashion retailer founded by the British magazine editor Natalie Massenet. When it first began, people in the industry sniffed at Net-A-Porter, suggesting it was just a tatty e-commerce site masquerading as digital fashion magazine. 

They’re not sniffing anymore. Net-A-Porter sold for over half a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive purchases of a consumer publisher — if that’s what it is — in many years. Net-A-Porter now employs more than 900 people (more than a vast majority of newsrooms and magazines), features products from 3,000 high-end designers and has four million visitors a month — far more than InStyle.com from Time Inc., Style.com from Condé Nast or the Harper’s Bazaar Web site. 

“Brands, especially those centered around lifestyle interests or luxury, are increasingly becoming media companies,” said Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, a digital communications and consulting firm. 

Anna Wintour may still turn heads every time she’s near a runway, but frankly commercial products like Net-A-Porter are pointing the way forward not only for fashion, but for publishing as well. The mainstream media have lamented, then celebrated, the digital revolution, but the fact that creating and distributing content is getting cheaper — “Look, Ma, no trucks, no printing presses!” — has not been lost on the brands themselves. 

On Saturday, Burberry live-streamed its menswear show from Milan. Consumers who tuned in could not only watch the fancy model boys come down the runway in a variety of outerwear, but also click and buy anything they coveted and have it delivered to their door in six to eight weeks. 

The luxury brand LVMH has a Web site called Nowness that features all manner of daily specials. In the United States, the Gilt Groupe, a bargain hunter’s paradise for the luxury-minded, is now adding editorial elements every day and watching visitors spend more and more time there. 

And it’s not just fashion: Best Buy has been watching its in-store sales shrink under pressure from the Web and has responded with On, a digital mag-a-log with editorial content and advertisements from other brands. Thrillist sends out e-mails to subscribers with a curated list of local entertainment and retail options. 

One Kings Lane, an e-commerce company that sells designer home décor and furnishings, just acquired Helicopter, the hotshot design firm that helped start the well-crafted and much-missed Domino magazine, as well as doing work for mainstream publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Hachette, Time Inc. and Hearst. 

Apart from its burgeoning Web site, Net-A-Porter’s iPad app takes commerce and content not only mobile, but one step further. The magazine (if that’s what it is) offers a pleasing editorial narrative in the horizontal format with a parade of models and various frocks, but when the user turns the device to portrait mode, individual items pop in a retail environment, ready to buy with the swipe of a finger. And the twin revenue streams of advertising from other brands and transactions make it a promising proposition. 

Lucky, Condé Nast’s shopping magazine, neatly foresaw this future of editorial and advertising elements blending into a single reader experience, but the company did not take the last step of making it a place that people could buy from. Adam Lavelle, the chief strategy office of iCrossing, the digital marketing agency owned by Hearst, believes that those old lines are fast disappearing. 

“The days when you only had someone put together a television or a magazine ad out there and then waited three months to see if it worked are over,” he said. “The old line separating church and state is not gone, but is definitely a more blurry one. And brands that are authentic, not shameless or opportunistic, have a chance to create content that people will pay attention to.” 

With the acquisition of iCrossing, Hearst is working quickly to build out consumer experiences that go beyond the traditional dyad of editorial girded by advertising, in part because advertisers expect more and will go elsewhere — or do it themselves — to get it. 

Editorial credibility, once the sole province of old-line publishing houses, is now being bought and paid for by the brands themselves. Mr. Langmead, the former Esquire editor, will oversee Mr. Porter, a male-oriented online retail site that will serve as a companion to Net-A-Porter. 

Andrea Linett, the former creative director of Lucky, has gone on to become eBay’s fashion creative director, while Melissa Biggs Bradley, the founding editor of Town and Country Travel for Hearst, is now the chief executive at the travel site Indagare. And many journalists who were pushed aside as publishing withered are now finding that brands in search of an audience are still interested in what they do. 

“For us, this is nothing new,” said Claudia Plant, editorial director of Net-A-Porter. “For 10 years, we have been giving people information they want in a compelling, entertaining format while they shop. We fuse content with commerce and fashion.” 

Susan Lyne, the former chief executive of Martha Stewart Living, is now head of the Gilt Groupe. As it has added more and more editorial elements, consumers are coming not only to shop, but to browse, read and investigate, which used to be the province of magazines. 

“We are not in the publishing business; we are in the editing business,” she said. “But if I were in the media business, I would be concerned because it used to be that in order to reach a certain kind of consumer, brands used to have to buy ads in relevant magazines or with a certain kind of television programming. That’s clearly not the case anymore.” 

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com; twitter.com/carr2n 

Content Strategy: After the launch...

Sowing the Seeds of Content

Matt Geraghty   January 19, 2011

No tears or fears if you plan your post launch right. (Image via h.koppdelaney)

The breakdown: Congratulations. You’ve launched your brand new site and are getting accolades galore.   But hey, not so fast.  What’s your post launch content planning strategy?  How will you ensure that customers are compelled to come back and engage with your brand? Arguably you’ve really got your work cut out for you now.  Read on to see what some of our fine content strategist say you need to keep in mind going forward.

Cameron Siewert, Content Strategist
This may sound obvious to us, but to a lot of clients post launch planning is surprisingly low on the priority list. The determination of who’s responsible for keeping an eye on content post-launch—maintaining an editorial calendar, planning and executing updates, enforcing style guidelines, and governing the workflow on an ongoing basis—can’t be an afterthought. It’s not an extra task you can just figure out after launch and then pass around to whomever happens to have some time. It’s a critical issue that needs discussion and planning from the very start of a project, and it needs ongoing advocacy to maintain high visibility throughout. In other words, it’s an important job. No, you can’t just wing it!

Elizabeth Bennett, Senior Content Strategist
As my team prepares to launch an upgraded corporate website with a longstanding client, I have fresh content on the brain: How will we navigate the organization to consistently create, review, edit and publish fresh relevant content in a timely way? We have to support overworked business stakeholders, some of whom have never been involved with the site, to commit to regular meetings and deadlines for writing assignments that are not in their job descriptions. We’ll need to operate with an agreed-to editorial calendar for the first time in an environment with many unknowns, including whom on the client side will be the enthusiastic content wrangler we so desire.

We’re just at the beginning of this task and I’m counting on my team’s experience, persistence and creativity to take us to the other side. Our eyes are on the prize: Publish fresh meaningful content in a manner and on a schedule that’s achievable.

Erin Abler, Content Strategist/Information Architect
Since content management and archival strategy continue long after migration and launch, you’ll need to plan for the management and long-term preservation of your digital assets.  Work with records managers and archivists, if your company has them.  They’re practiced at wading through massive quantities of information and determining how to handle, classify, and determine the lasting value of your digital assets.  If they’re used to working with corporate records and legal evidence, they might have to take a fresh approach to the world of ad images, user-generated comments, and product descriptions.  But give them time.  It would be a mistake to leave them out of a conversation that sorely needs their perspective on regulatory requirements, compliance, and the general ebb and flow of company materials.

Erin Kissane has written that most content strategy work “involves planning for the ongoing assessment, management, storage, indexing, distribution, and display of content.”  Wherever content strategy involves process-building and planning, you’ll benefit from a solid understanding of the information lifecycle, from creation through disposition.  Start early, think broadly, and tap into your organization’s existing expertise – because sharing responsibility for content maintenance and long-term preservation may make all the difference in ensuring the health and longevity of your most important content.

John Alderman, Creative Director
If your goal is to keep your customers engaged, then you better be sure that you are engaged as well. You can plant the prettiest garden in the world, but unless you water and tend it, it will end up dead or feral.  Freshness and frequency count, both in a customer’s mind, and to search engines that are judging what’s relevant. But beyond the fear of failure, the exciting promise is that if you maintain your reliability and pertinence, you can create an ongoing relationship with your customers on topics that matter to you both. Demonstrating reliability earns trust, and publishing on a regular schedule can turn that first customer visit into a habit, whether it’s for video, news bits, white papers, or other compelling reasons to return.  Whatever you deliver, it’s important that there is someone in charge who understands both your messaging priorities, and what keeps customers coming back.

Can your content strategy handle the truth about governance?

from Brain Traffic

by Meghan Casey on January 6th, 2011

I’ve noticed a bit of a trend lately in content strategy blog posts. A lot of them only talk about the content side of content strategy—what content is needed, why it’s needed, who it’s for, what format it should be in, etc.

A whole lot of them are missing a really important component of content strategy: Governance. Specifically, the importance of:

• Getting everyone to agree with the core purpose—and structure—of the site, and the messages it needs to convey
• Empowering someone (or a small group of someones) to make long-term and day-to-day decisions about content

These things are just as important, if not more important, than the content itself.

Content strategy – governance = face-hating

Consider this made-up story of what can happen without governance, even with the best of intentions:

Once upon a time, a Content Strategist arrived at work, coffee in hand, eager to continue the challenging—yet fulfilling—task of overseeing his employer’s website content. Months before, he developed and implemented a content strategy for the site. It included a lot of really great stuff, from content objectives to an editorial calendar, and everything in between.

All of these things had helped to dramatically improve the site’s content. Content drafts required less editing. Calls to action were more compelling. Customer service was getting fewer calls from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for.

With all of these positive results, the Content Strategist was surprised—jaw-droppingly aghast, even—when he opened the site and found something on the home page that didn’t fit with the content strategy. Even worse, he knew nothing about it.

It was an interactive, Flash-based “Letter from the President,” full of company pats on the back, corporate speak, industry jargon, and nothing of value to site users. And, it clearly cost a lot of money to produce. Like half of the annual content creation budget.

The Content Strategist exclaimed, “Ellllgghhhh. Who did this? I hate his face.”

Once he determined that it was the Director of Executive Communications who was responsible, the Content Strategist grabbed his Editorial Specialist colleague for moral support and marched to the Director’s office. The following heated conversation occurred.  It might sound familiar.*

Content Strategist
"Did you order the interactive Letter from the President?"

Director of Executive Communications
"You want answers?"

Content Strategist
"I think I’m entitled."

Director of Executive Communications
"You want answers?"

Content Strategist
"I want the truth!"

Director of Executive Communications
"You can't handle the truth!

Son, I serve the most powerful person in this company. The person who signs our paychecks.

Who’s going to keep the CEO happy? You? You, Mr. Editorial Specialist?

I have more responsibility than you can fathom.

You weep for the home page and curse the CEO’s office of communications.

You don't know what I know. That interactive Letter from the President saved jobs.

And my existence, while grotesque to you, appeases the person who approves your budget.

But deep down, in places you don't talk about at content meetings, you need me in the CEO’s office.

I haven't the time or inclination to explain myself to someone who needs my protection but questions the way I provide it.

Better just to thank me. Or sit in a meeting with the CEO and indulge her every whim.

Either way, I don't give a darn what you think you are entitled to!"

Content Strategist
"Did you order the interactive Letter from the President?"

Director of Executive Communications
"You're gosh darn right I did!"

And so the Content Strategist bowed his head and left the office, with no recourse to fix the situation.

Hindsight is 20/20

The Content Strategist learned a lot from this experience. Rather than agonizing in his defeat, he took a more proactive approach. One that allowed him to salvage all the great stuff in his content strategy and prevent such a thing from happening again.

To gain alignment with the CEO’s office, he scheduled a meeting to discuss a few things with the Director of Executive Communications, including:

• Why content strategy is important to the business
• The content strategy document he uses to guide content decisions
• A proposal for establishing governance that includes stakeholder alignment, content planning processes, and a decision-making model
• Recommendations for how the interactive Letter from the President could be re-purposed to meet business goals and user needs
• A request to present the same information to the CEO to get her buy-in and support

The meeting was a success. You see, the Director of Executive Communications knew the interactive Letter from the President was a bad idea. But, with nothing compelling to stop him from following his marching orders, he found it easiest to please his boss rather than push back.

If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, you know that it’s pretty hard to say no when you don’t have anything formal or documented to back it up. Get some governance—and get more control.

*Adapted from the film A Few Good Men

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Content Strategy, Web Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Mobile content strategy

from Nokia's Forum.

Choosing which content to serve to your mobile website requires a good understanding of your users and the devices they use. Most mobile sites should be simpler than the corresponding desktop version as mobiles have lower processing power, a smaller screen, browsing sessions are often shorter and users have no mouse with which to manipulate the content.

Despite all this, mobile sites should not be ‘dumbed down’ versions of the original, but rather a version that has been targeted to a mobile context and user behaviour.

• Study user behaviour. Speak to and observe existing users of your desktop site. Ask them what types of tasks they would like to perform while on the go.
• Simplify your content. This does not mean reducing the size of articles but rethinking what content is required and how you present it. Does the site really need a slide show? Would a static image gallery convey the information equally well? In fact, you may not need a large collection of images at all. A single, well-chosen image, paired with a paginated article may suit your users just fine.
• Reconsider your approach to advertising. Common desktop practices such as filling a sidebar with ads, displaying ads inline within an article, or presenting ads which the user must ‘skip’ to view the content, are not suitable on mobile devices. Your users will be annoyed far more quickly on mobile if they are forced to download (and possibly incur data charges for) large quantities of advertisements.
• Paginate longer articles. Pagination enables users to explicitly choose which content to download. If the first page of the article isn’t interesting, they can move on. If the reading session is interrupted, the user can more easily return to the exact spot at a later time. Pagination also reduces the need for anchor points within the content, and the likelihood that content page weight exceeds browser capacity.
• Adapt content to the mobile context. Create mobile-actionable data such as URLs, email addresses, phone numbers and dates using the browser’s supported URI schemes. This enables the user to, in one click, perform actions that would otherwise require keyboard input.
• Serve mobile-appropriate content. Ensure all content served is appropriate to the device. This includes not only content size, but media format and scripting. For example, some devices may not support the png image format, HTML 5 video or certain versions of Flash Lite. Always determine device capabilities before serving the content. This can be accomplished in advance through server-side detection or ‘just in time’, on the client. See Device Detection for more details.
• Enhance content and functionality on more capable browsers. The most effective way to avoid oversimplifying your mobile site is to detect browser capabilities and progressively enhance functionality for more capable browsers.
  
  
  Mobile content strategy