Book Review: What I Learned from Content Rules

By PATRICIA REDSICKER | Published: JUNE 9, 2011

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet Ann Handley earlier this year at her Content Rules book tour in Arlington, VA. I’d been following her on Twitter and reading MarketingProfs for several months when I became convinced she was emerging as one of the most influential voices in online marketing.

So it was a great joy to meet her, pose for a picture together and leave with one of my now favorite marketing books ever – Content Rules.

This book blew my mind.  For one, I had not yet made the connection between social media and content marketing – I was still treating them as two separate entities. Reading this book was for me the moment the clouds parted and the angels sang – it was then that I understood social media is impotent without content marketing.

And that’s why this book is so important.  I believe it has something for everyone. Whether you’re new in the game or you’ve been marketing all your life, Content Rules is packed with value and wisdom and is a resource that simply cannot be ignored.

So without further ado, here’s a comprehensive review ofContent Rules.

Author’s purpose

The purpose of the book is to equip businesses for success in content creation and marketing. It also shares and inspires through case studies the successes of companies that are already publishing great content.

Given the fact that virtually every company has become a de facto publisher, the authors’ intention is to demystify the publishing process and share the secrets of creating remarkable content –blogs, videos, podcasts, e-books and other web content. They believe that even businesses with no publishing experience can create and deliver relevant and valuable content to attract new business opportunities.

What to expect

The book begins with a ‘big fat overview’ (literally!) explaining what great content is really aboutand how content marketing is shaping business today. Everyone knows the rules (of marketing that is) have changed. But the book is not designed to sing to the chorus because the underlying assumption is that you already get that. Instead, the book focuses on three areas:

• The new rules for creating great content
• How to create different types of great content
• Case studies (success stories) that show companies that are creating great content

Here’s a summary of the most interesting ‘how-to’ chapters in the book:

A Blog as a Hub of Your Online Content (Chapter 11)

This is a significant chapter because a blog is the logical first step for brands that want to create and publish content. For those who want to go down this path it explains how to create great blog content by applying the ‘12 Blogging Guidelines.’ Some of the guidelines are standard, i.e. write killer headlines, consider comment moderation, and categorize and tag your blog post.  The most insightful guidelines are:

Design is important
Bloggers tend to focus more on the text rather than the design element of their blog platforms. This guideline explains why design is important: The idea that your blog should have its own personality and style cannot be overemphasized since these are the qualities that make it unique and exceptional.

For those who don’t have the resources to hire a professional designer, the guideline shows the must-have features in a generic template:

• A clearly visible RSS icon for subscription feeds
• A search box
• A clear way for others to contact you
• Social sharing icons (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and so on)
• An archive for recent posts (by topic or title).

Write the way you speakEven as a corporate blogger you can (and should) adopt a casual, informal tone when speaking to your audience. Why? Because your readers are people too. Don’t use buzzwords, jargon and corporate-speak. It makes you sound like a tool not a person.

However, that doesn’t mean you can be sloppy or careless about grammar and typos.  Even veteran writers need an editor to check the small stuff. Blogging is an opportunity to communicate your brand in simple terms using the kind of language that you would normally use with your clients. Rule of thumb: Be specific enough to be believable and universal enough to be relevant.

Don’t over thinkI think this is one insight that all bloggers will appreciate. This guideline takes off the pressure that we heap upon ourselves when we approach a blog post as if it were a science project. The idea is to relax and not feel compelled to “tell the whole, balanced story.” Bloggers are advised to leave a little room for the opinion of others. Remember, it’s OK to leave things unsaid.

Video: Show Me a Story (Chapter 16)

This is another compelling chapter that confirms what we’ve been hearing all along — that “video is hot!’ Not too long ago, Google and Bing introduced a new search concept called blended search. It enables search results to display not only as web pages but also as videos, images, news stories, maps and even tweets. In order to take advantage of this latest opportunity, the chapter explainshow to create great video content that shows an intriguing story. Some of Handley and Chapman’s tips include:

Start with the right equipmentVideo content can be accomplished with some of the tools you already have such as your webcam or your smart-phone (although you may need a tripod so that the camera doesn’t move around). There are some expensive, more sophisticated options as well. Here is a post from Nate Riggs that reviews some of the video camera options available.

Create your story
According to new-media maven Thomas Clifford, the difference between a drab video and one that truly engages is a true story. In other words, the best way to go about creating great video content is to create a mini-documentary that has three qualities:

• It features a true story about your company
• It stars real people that shows their personalities, i.e. real words from real people
• It includes outside sources such as vendors, customers, and stakholders to add credibility

Shooting and scriptingThis book does not claim to be an authority in filming. The authors recommend that you pick up a copy of Get Seen by Steve Garfield if you’re serious about video creation. However, they illustrate ten things that make for successful video content creation. These include good knowledge of your equipment, good lighting, being aware of shadows, staying away from background noise, stability of the camera, use of built-in microphone, perspective and framing.

Photographs: The Power of Pictures (Chapter 18)

This chapter is powerful because it shows how easy it is to create great photographs that add visual interest to your content mix.

Pictures are important because they put a human face on your business. Nevertheless, the authors advise not to rely exclusively on headshots, but to capture moments around the company that add personality and excitement to your brand such as holiday parties, summer picnics, company meetings or even pictures showing customers using your product. A good example isThreadless.com, which encourages fans to upload photos of themselves wearing T-shirts the company sells. These shots enable them to show off a fun and passionate side of the brand, which wouldn’t be possible with a typical product picture.

I like that the authors also explain:

• How sharing and tagging on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook can be an effective strategy to broaden a brand’s reach beyond its immediate customers and fans
• How to use descriptive tags in your photos so that they show up in a larger number of organic search results
• When to bring in a professional photographer

Case studies

The third section of the book is a collection of inspiring success stories (case studies) that show how other organizations have succeeded in creating great content. It also explains how you can ‘steal’ these ideas and make them work for you.

My favorite case study is Reynolds Golf Academy, Greensboro, Georgia. It’s the story of a resourceful businessman – Charlie King – who becomes the director of a golf academy, and his primary goal is to bring in hordes of new students. But with a very limited budget, he has to figure out a smart, affordable approach to spread the word about the academy. Most of us can relate to this story.

After reading David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR (the forerunner ofContent Rules), Charlie sets out to create content that will hopefully appeal to golfers looking to improve their game.

He launches a blog called “New Rules of Golf Instruction” in which he shares free golf tips and techniques through blog posts and videos. Then he writes a free e-book (with the same name as the blog) in which he challenges the old rules of golf and suggests a new, less-rigid approach. But the a-ha moment doesn’t happen for Charlie until a film crew for Golf magazine films him in an ad-hoc tutorial as he is demonstrating the proper way to angrily throw your club into the water. The video is posted on the magazine’s website and quickly goes viral registering more than 1.8 million viewings.

The results are phenomenal.  Since implementing the content marketing strategy, the golf academy has thrived, bringing in hordes of students and allowing steady business during a difficult economy.

You’ll have to pick up the book to read the actual ideas you can steal from this case study.

Personal Impression

The book is compelling, consistent and well organized. It speaks to a very broad audience(which is a difficult task to accomplish) and adopts a casual and friendly tone. Each chapter is comprehensive enough to stand alone as its own complete resource, yet the whole book is cleverly connected to allow continuity.

However, I would have liked to see the authors discuss how to measure content marketing. I think they missed an opportunity to shed some light on a pretty mysterious piece of content strategy. Being a fairly new concept, most businesses are still unsure of how to track and measure their content marketing efforts. Perhaps this omission was the tradeoff for reaching a broader audience.

In any case, I think the authors have been quite successful in their goal of “demystifying publishing” and equipping brands to create compelling content. Whether you’re a novice or an expert in content marketing, this is a book that belongs in your library. Just follow Handley and Chapman’s advice and you could become a success story as well.

Finding Creative People Is Easy (and Here's How)

JUN 7 2011, 1:34 PM ET25

Instead of searching for creativity, we should be fostering it in people we already work with—and redefining what it is


I recently asked a room of 40 executives to raise their hands if they thought of themselves as creative. This was a group who had been hand selected from their corporation as the future of the company, the big up-and-comers. Only three hands went up.

It feels as if just about everyone is looking to bring creativity into his or her organization. The theory seems to go that hiring creative people could bring much needed innovation, new thinking, and organizational revitalization. A recent study by IBM demonstrates CEOs' belief that "creativity" is the key to success for their companies in the coming years—more than "rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision." So, if creativity is the key to the future of business, then why aren't more executives raising their hands?

The fact that these professions may be overlooked as creative is in part because only certain fields are labeled "creative" and others aren't.

One reason creativity is hard to claim as a personal trait might the popular image of the creative genius: a lone figure, someone who was born to create and is driven by an inexplicable compulsion to make art. While these creative people inspire us, they aren't necessarily the ones corporate America is looking to stock up on. Then there is the equally popular counterargument to the creative genius theory, spearheaded by Ken Robinson, that we are all born creative and the educational system sucks it out of us by the time we're a few years into school.

This second theory is a little more compelling to those of us who aren't tortured artists and/or have bills to pay, because it implies that we could be creative again. However, many of us don't need to be re-taught to be creative, we just need to be supported creatively, especially at work. Creativity in the workplace requires context. At work creativity is not a personality trait. It arises out of an ecosystem.

Creative thinkers are not the rare commodities that we tend to make them out to be. If you are running a business and want the innovation, flexibility, and problem-solving power of creativity, you don't necessarily have to hire creative people. You probably already employ them. I define a creative person as someone who has the ability to identify and deeply understand a problem, and then solve that problem by breaking the conventions of the status quo. By this definition, tortured artist or not, all of us can probably think of plenty of individuals we know who are creative.

The best teachers are usually the ones who don't do things "by the book." The same goes for great doctors, entrepreneurs, mail carriers, and even tax accountants. All of them are in a position to know the problem well and, when given enough leeway, can find a successful solution. Even at our frog office in Austin—a veritable shrine to creative thinking—one of most creative staff members is the receptionist, Elena, who is an intensely skilled problem-solver. The fact that these professions may be overlooked as creative is in part because only certain fields are labeled "creative" (design and advertising, for example) and others aren't. This is a symptom of the larger problem, and a dangerous notion if we are relying on creativity to bolster the business world.

So what can you do? First, find the clever, original thinkers who want to do things a little differently and then give them the tools and the rules they need to do just that. Here are some tips for finding the creative people who already work with you: 

• Creative people are empathic. In design we formalize this through design research, but in other fields you might find that the people who are always thinking of the human point of view (either of your customers or your other employees) are very creative.

• Creative people ask for help. Creative problem-solving requires collaboration and the understanding that solutions will emerge while working with a team rather than alone in a cubicle. Creativity rarely thrives in an environment where colleagues are pitted against one another.

• Creative people ask questions (and question the status quo). Some of the most creative folks you already employ could be the ones who have been pestering you about making a change in the way you are currently working. Listen to them. 

• They might be hiding. Remember that the creative people in your organization might not be the current top performers. If your culture doesn't support them, they might be feeling stifled or underappreciated. 

We say we want these creative people to challenge the status quo and drive innovation, but this often requires behavior that most business cultures don't support: occasionally breaking rules, pushing things through without "permission," and not "making numbers." In many corporate cultures, those behaviors are considered risky. So, now that you've identified them, how do you support these newly found creatives in your workplace? 

• Redefine success. Find performance measures that reward creative thinking. This could mean rewarding teams as a group, or having prizes for the most fringe idea. It definitely does not mean sticking to traditional performance measures like quotas or number of billable hours. 

• Get physical. Provide physical space that supports sharing and "cross pollination" of ideas. Bonus points for physical space that supports building, drawing, and thinking with your hands.

• Encourage wild ideas and ideas that are backed by human need. This has to happen at the leadership level. Don't ask "How big is the market?" before you ask "What need are we answering with this idea?"

• Get in the habit of presenting ideas before they are baked. Allow for more ideas to be presented sooner and in rougher form. It's a lot easier to kill something mediocre before you've invested in it (financially and emotionally).

• Let team members really get to know each other as humans. We are much more likely to collaborate with people we know (i.e. have empathy for) than those who are just "That guy from marketing."

• Support qualitative research activities. Let people within your organization get in "the field" to learn about your customers or your customers' customers.

For those of you who are the hidden creative in an organization, be known. Take a few risks, find the like minds, and keep asking questions. And for heaven's sake, if someone asks you to raise your hand if you think of yourself as creative: Proudly claim it!
Image: andymangold/flickr

The Art of Design Research (and Why It Matters)

I think that if you replace the word "designer" with "content strategist" in the following article, the big idea still applies. Content doesn't exist in a vacuum.

The Art of Design Research (and Why It Matters)

By Jon Freach - May 31, 2011

Design can exist without "the research." But if we don't study the world, we don't always know how or what to create.

Recently, my colleague Ben McAllister contributed a piece to this section called "The 'Science' of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea." In it he cautioned against a simplistic view of research as it applies to the design process because it's often synonymous with science—a discipline known for providing "hard truths" about the world. This leads people to believe (sometimes falsely) that "the research" will do the same for business. I am a researcher and a designer, and his article does raise a worthwhile question: "What is research good for, and how can we use it for the purpose of design?"

Designers thrive when they have a working concept of what makes people tick, a context that allows them to shape their ideas by considering what people covet and use, and somewhere to focus all their creative energy. Research can provide the fuel for new ideas. To Ben's point, design research isn't a scientific endeavor aimed at finding truths. Our clients typically can't afford the large sample sets and extended time frames necessary for such a "scientific" process.

And sometimes design teams don't have the patience to see the value in dragging out a study in an effort to make it scientifically or statistically significant. We're just not wired that way; we prefer to make and experiment and then analyze later. So what is research good for?

1. Learning about people's behavior

Behavior is fertile ground for design. Not just human behavior, but systems behavior: social, technical, environmental, political, and economic systems. Increasingly, we are faced with ill-defined problems that are related to the workings of entire systems. Long gone are isolated problems (and opportunities).

Understanding behavior gives designers at least two important kinds of insight. First, it provides a sense of action in the world, which can lead to empathy. For example, how does a patient go about finding his or her way to the radiology lab at a hospital for a first cancer treatment, and what is that way-finding experience like? Second, understanding behavior provides some clues about practices and patterns. For instance, many cancer patients at certain clinics memorize their medical record number in order to get treatment, and those numbers can be tied to schedules, appointment locations, and treatment plans.

2. Understanding and analyzing culture

What is culture and why does it matter to designers? Isn't culture kind of a fuzzy concept that is always changing? Yes, and because its elements are so deeply familiar and obvious to us we often don't recognize them as contributing to "culture" at all.

Yet culture is another important system when it comes to understanding design because it deals with the relationships we build between each other, our things, our routines, our view of the the world, and our beliefs. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as consisting of "Webs of significance that man himself has spun...and the analysis of it [should] be not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning." Asking simple questions about obvious things can lead to unexpected answers and rich insights.

A designer can reflect on these insights and use them to influence certain nuances in their designs. For example, using the metadata associated with a cancer patient's medical record number, such as appointments, schedules, maps, and customized directions of the hospital, adds meaning to a simple and common interaction at a hospital—getting directions. Placing a pathway on the ground to follow enables those same patients, who might often be self-conscious of their bald heads after treatment, to navigate very social environments without having to process the stares of other visitors.

3. Defining context

Context includes the physical and virtual settings that behavior occurs in and that culture shapes and emerges from. Identifying touch points—the decisive moments where a customer and a business intersect—is an important part of defining context. Using our hospital visit example, the designer and the larger design team (including the client if possible) can learn about context by watching the patient go through a process to see what happens, where it happens, and how they cope. By being a participant-observer, or seeing it all in pictures or video "from the field," a designer can gain a first-hand understanding of the real context for his or her work instead of designing from a distance.

4. Setting focus

Ill-defined problems, short project schedules, and a lack of patience are common conditions in design, and these can often lead to poor solutions. Doing research demands being comfortable with ambiguity in the early stages of a project in order to attain eventual clarity. This usually occurs through a process of synthesis—cutting the raw data down to size to find patterns and themes. It is this clarity that can enable a designer to focus on the right part of the problem at the right time in the right way. "But what should we focus on?" is one of the most common questions in the business. Even the legendary Charles Eames expressed a similar sentiment when asked about the boundaries of design. He responded, "What are the boundaries of problems?"

Design research is not "a science" and is not necessarily "scientific." It gives designers and clients a much more nuanced understanding of the people for whom they design while providing knowledge that addresses some of the most fundamental questions we face throughout the process. What is the correct product or service to design? What characteristics should it have, and is it working as intended? "The research" won't necessarily provide cold hard answers. But it will generate some good and feasible ideas.

Confab 2011: Four Truths for Content Strategy

from Razorfish

Tosca Fasso   June 2, 2011

From May 9 through May 11, worldwide leaders and luminaries in the content strategy field converged in Minneapolis for Confab 2011—the first content strategy conference in the U.S.

Now that we’ve absorbed the wisdom—and the sugar calories from the much-talked-about cake—we ask: what emerges from Confab 2011 as the challenges we were wrestling with, goals we were aspiring to, and themes that were beginning to emerge as truths? Here are our top four:

1) Content is a Business Asset

Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic, the organization that produced Confab, uttered this phrase verbatim in her rousing opening keynote, and it was also the title of Monday’s afternoon keynote by Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent. Ms. Maltoni stated that a business of any size can use content to attract, interact with, and influence customers.  Or, more directly, that a website is a “direct-to-consumer warehouse.”

But perhaps the most colorful expression of this idea was Erika Hall’s insistence that we can’t think of content as “pink goo.” Content, she emphasized, is part of a system and requires a continual process—quite a contrast to the too-common approach of wedging content into boxes one time and hoping it behaves itself until the next site redesign.

2) Content Strategy is Change Management

Karen McGrane, Razorfish alum and Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science had the courage and insight to articulate the reality we’ve all been wrestling with: our jobs really do require us to ask others to do their jobs differently. That doesn’t exactly set us up to be the most popular people at the table, so we need to articulate to our clients and coworkers why doing their jobs differently ultimately makes their jobs easier (admittedly after some painful adjustments).

Perhaps a subtler expression of this idea came from Ms. Halvorson, who showed an infographic with content strategy snugly embedded smack in the middle of a rather scary chart. The message of the chart? On a team of information architects, interaction designers, visual designers, copywriters, and programmers, only the content strategist has a direct relationship with every other role. In other words, the buck stops at the content strategist.

3) The Web Needs Human Filters

“No one is surfing the web anymore. The waves are too damn big.” Steve Rosenbaum of magnify.net  and author of Curation Nation , surely intended some humor when he said this in his session, but he balanced it with the serious understanding that online content has become overwhelming. We’re constantly checking email, losing sleep to keep up with the digital deluge. As a result, users have expressed their desire for fewer, more relevant choices—choices a human (likely a content strategist) needs to make.

Randall Snare and Elizabeth McGuane, creators of the content strategy blog, “Mapped,” discussed “context,” the idea that in order for content to be truly useful, humans (i.e., content strategists) need to not just analyze and test, but categorize and position. To properly do this, they implored us to ask such questions as: where are readers consuming our content, what are they looking at, and where are they looking for it? 

Snare and McGuane also asked us to think about content as the story behind the data, and data as what gives perspective to the story. In other words, content professionals have at their disposal multiple types of data (including analytics, user testing, metadata) but data is just one factor. Snare and McGuane warned content strategists that while data informs the process, it should not be confused with the process itself.

4) Everyone is a Publisher

A major theme in Steve Rosenbaum’s session, this idea was pivotal to the Tuesday keynote by Ann Handley. Ms. Handley advised that people and brands should embrace the reality that everyone is a publisher and start thinking about the web as a way to connect.

While it’s fairly easy to blindly embrace this concept and just put yourself out there, the real challenge is to ensure that your content is, as Ms. Handley so beautifully stated, “the soul of who you are.”

In other words, the idea that everyone is a publisher is not just an opportunity—it’s a responsibility as well. Ms. Handley’s book, Content Rules, contains 10 super-smart steps for being a responsible publisher. Although she titled them, “10 ways to make your content rule,” Ms. Handley’s advice could also be labeled, “10 ways to make sure that your content is the soul of who you are.”

As content strategists, isn’t it really our job to ensure that our clients’ online identities reflect their souls—just as interior designers or architects would do for their clients’ living spaces?

Confab 2011 provided not just articulation of this responsibility, but inspiration for doing this critical work. It also connected content strategists with a common vision—and perhaps most importantly, with each other.