Panelists:

•   Nicky Smyth @nickycast, nicky.smyth@bbc.co.uk
•  Kevin Kearney: @kkearney; Kevin@hardcandyshell.com
•  Carola Thompson: @carolafthompson; carola.thompson@sap.com
•  Jim Nieters: @jimnieters; jnieters@mac.com

 Stream-of-consciousness notes:

•  Not about a set of features, strategy needs to be there from the beginning.
•  About coming up with an idea, focusing on an idea and then executing it well.
• Products that succeed are those that reduce complexity – reduce friction.
•  People reference the Henry Ford quote if I asked people what they want I’d have built a faster horse as an argument against research.
• Design Thinking is about the ability to have the insight into what people’s behavior means… gleaning insights by observing how people interact with the product.

 How do you get a company to embrace design thinking? Moving from technology to people...

How can we move design thinking more upstream? How do we move into areas where we’re really not sure what we need to build? Getting out and interacting with users, doing field research, observing what’s going on, doing innovation workshops in which we brainstormed – were able to very quickly accelerate the innovation process and come up with ideas.

Is “big D” design dead? Design thinking can be applied outside of a design firm – use it to design business models, not just products and services.

Recommended reading: Business Model Generation:

Integrated thinking - yin and yang of creative/analytical – Smyth recommends the book Business Model Generation

If you have someone with an idea, lock them out until they develop it – otherwise the organization will kill their innovation.

Emotional connection – we talk about this in terms of playfulness

There’s a difference btwn “Clippy” and something that expresses itself in a way that is human or real.

B/c a lot of technical innovations come from engineers, the interfaces are cold and dead. Interface should be playful, make human, emotional connection.

People think things are cool when they *work*.

Design had never been responsible for innovation. You have a technological innovation, then you have a product, then you look at behavioral needs and then you get to the marketplace. Smyth doesn’t completely agree w/ this… white space disruptive innovation, but it’s not always apparent what the product is going to be.

Disruptive technologies come out, and then competitors try to jump on board and want to copy the success – but they are generally copying the wrong features (e.g., gestures in Wii,

Technology wasn’t disruptive, but context of use

Creating new business model, new context or new marketplace

Resonance is a better concept than disruption. By understanding resonance w/ users we can come up with new markets to innovate.

Great design is about designing great products.

Should design thinkers be allowed to fail? Is it okay to take risks and fail?

Culture of innovation and safe failure has to be driven from the top down.

How do you remain inspired, keep courage up to go through the effort again?

1.     Live it. Be the audience you’re trying to reach. Dive in, explore, engage in the digital space. Use the tools. Be on Twitter. Follow a variety of people across disciplines, interests, perspectives. Observe what’s interesting, what gets retweeted, what generates replies. Use bit.ly to track the links people click through to. Download apps. Play with new tools like Gowalla and Foursquare. Observe your own interactions, how you use it, what the barriers are.

2.     Rethink your business model. What do you sell? You aren’t in the advertising business, nor the digital, creative, media relations business; you are in the INFLUENCE business. At Waggener Edstrom, we used to think of ourselves as storytellers and media relations pros. But the media landscape is changing, compressing – it’s more challenging than ever to get our stories told through branded media influencers. So how do we solve this problem? We encourage clients to think of themselves as publishers. Brands are media. What do we sell? We sell a destination, we sell content, we sell consulting to develop a process and workflow.

3.     Don’t navel-gaze. Look around, learn from complimentary disciplines. Think like publishers, journalists, creatives, producers, PR pros, consultants. These disciplines are colliding. Think holistically. Don’t be the hammer that sees every problem as a nail. Think about the problem that needs to be solved (selling the product), and then think about all the different ways you can achieve this. Some are digital, some are traditional and most are a combination of both. Because audiences don’t live in media silos.

4.     Don’t panic, the fundamentals still apply. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, and don’t go on a mad dash after the latest shiny object trend. Stick to your fundamentals. Who is your audience? How are they influenced? Where do they spend time? Answer these questions and then go back to #1.

5.     Embrace the learning process. Don’t try to be an expert, be a constant learner. When we think of ourselves as experts we become entrenched in our space because we have a lot to lose. Let it go. Don’t try to get to the top of the learning curve, embrace the constant incline. 

Stream-of-consciousness notes:

Aim to find the sweet spot between brand awareness and entertainment. 

Brand media is about representing the brand through story and content, not amount of product shown. Don't make the content suffer just to get the brand's message heard.

Portable audience/fans is very important.

Paid marketing is always safer, but social media is more authentic.

Think of the goal not in terms of advertising or reach, but rather "mindshare" – e.g., Ikea’s objective was for the audience to remember the brand.

Getting into branded online media not about cool factor, but about strategic goals.

Common theme among all the film sessions: syndicate. Go to where the audience is.

Reach audiences directly by using branded entertainment as PR materials; tell stories without relying on media coverage.

Temp case study: show about horrors of temping, made fun of industry, but captured right audience.

Don't think in terms of just speaking to your customers, but rather engage them as fans. Market branded entertainment to the core brand enthusiasts and leverage them as fans. For example, Cleveland created a blog contest in which the enthusiast blogs who contributed the most views to a web series got written into the finale.

Reaching out to core audience is the key to viral distribution. Get the core personally invested in the success of the campaign.

Web series branded media – how to ensure that it captures entertainment worthy story, not marketing feel: Create environment of collaboration and engagement in which the brand feels excited about working with you. The message is part of what the company represents.

One of the biggest challenges is how to universally measure engagement and impact. In part b/c every brand has a unique set of objectives. Sentiment analysis is one good way to measure branded entertainment.

Distribution is a big challenge. You are expecting a lot of people if you ask them to come to your site to consume and enjoy your show. Need to syndicate as much as possible – go to where your audience is. But also need to think about the brand objectives – is it about getting the story out, or about driving inbound leads back to the site?

 Panelists:

• Tim Schigel @schigel
• JB Baptiste @peerset
• Paul Berry @teamreboot
• Dave Knox @daveknox
• David Binowski @dbinkowski

What is influence? It’s not the same as reach.

Trust + expertise + attention = influence

Identifying influencers has become more complex. Yes we can still use heuristics to identify influencers based on who writes frequently on a brand or topic, but the web – social media – has democratized influence, meaning, influencers change over night. And these influencers are difficult to predict.

The solution then is real-time monitoring. Publishers have a particular vantage their dedication to real-time that makes this monitoring feasible. Publishers take the first step in hosting the conversation – and while it’s generally not possible to find the influencers ahead of time, a savvy editor can use existing toolsets to closely follow and identify influence as it builds.

There is also a role for brands. The reality is that brands do drive the conversation. But social media can only be scaled so far. Responding to hundreds of tweets is not the best use of resources for brands; rather, the opportunity – as Paul Berry of the HuffPost sees it – is in the aggregation. Hosting the conversation.

What about the role of experts? Reach does not = expertise. The tail is getting longer in the expert category. Community is sharing the expert role – who says a beauty editor is more influential than your best friend when it comes to a lipstick purchase?

But in this democratized, distributed space, the very value of influence is unclear. As Dave Knox of P&G notes, the value of negative influence is abundantly clear; but what we haven’t seen is the value of positive influence. [I’d actually disagree. We’ve certainly seen the impact of positive influence in the political sphere (Obama, Brown), as well as in the non-profit world (text for Haiti).]

Finally, what about buying influence? Can – should – brands go there? The reality – as Binkowski of MS&L notes – is that brands have been doing this for a very long time. Celebrity endorsements – it’s not for no reason that Ashton Kutcher is #1 on Twitter – it’s his job, he’s paid to influence. Yes, you can buy it. But whether it translates to value is the question. Berry (HuffPost) suggests that brands shouldn’t try to buy anything more than a very effective message. The message needs to be carefully shaped to hit that perfect target that is influence. If the message isn’t right, the vehicle won’t help.

Brands need to understand where the influence pivots are, and put their energy there.

Kristina Halverson, @halvorson

Synopsis:

Kristina Halverson’s presentation was one of the highlights of the day and can best be summed up by this great soundbite that came out of the Q&A at the end of the panel:

How should UX Strategists think about working with Content Strategists? Very closely. Yes, UX strategists, creative directors DO need content strategists because people don’t come to your site for an experience, they come for the content.

Stream-of-consciousness Notes:

Analogy of all the clutter on the web similar to Wall-E…
social media triggers an impulse to share w/ others when we find something that delights or inspires.

LIES WE TELL OURSELVES: we've already got the content, it's just writing, it shouldn't take that long, they can just fill in the blanks afterward, we're going to wait for the client to take care of this later.

Distinguishing COPY from CONTENT:

-        THIS IS COPYWRITING we sit, research, do a draft, we finalize, we revise, we finalize and we get paid.

-        THIS IS CONTENT: audit, analyze, strategize, categorize, structure, create, review approve, publish, update, archive.

We're typically in denial of the complexity of what we're working with.

We forget that content needs to be maintained over time. It's the content that we leave out there to die on the vine that hurts our brand the most.

We look at content like boxes we can check off on a spreadsheet. But CONTENT IS NOT A FEATURE.

Content strategy, what it is:

Plans for the creation, publication and governance of content. Content strategist should be at every kickoff meeting.

Everything you can access online is content.

-        text and data

-        graphics

-        video and animation

-        audio

When we talk about the needs for content strategy, we’re typically talking about text because graphics, video and audio are more tightly packaged.

-        page copy

-        articles

-        links

-        labels

-        flash elements

-        alt tags

-        error messages

-        task instructions

-        etc…

Strategy is a plan for obtaining a specific goal or result. 

Content strategy is not highlevel thinking. It’s not “we want our content to be 80% video and 20% text”… we’re not just talking about the what, we’re talking about:

-        what

-        why

-        how

-        for whom

-        by whom

-        with what

-        when

-        where

-        how often

-        what next

Messaging in content strategy = understanding that we want to impart upon our users as they interact w/ content. What do we want them to know. What do we want them to understand.

User Experience Research is important: We need to engage the people who will be using, consuming the content.

Compare Mint.com home page to Quicken. Compare the message take-away. Triggers vs. products.

Business objectives + user goals

Is each piece of content meeting my business objectives?

Is each piece of content meeting the user’s objectives?

REI.com content is driven by an editorial calendar.

Room & Board – Artisans & Craftsmen expert pages – have 2 writers on staff, manage their content production via an editorial calendar.

Quicken – writer only had boxes to work with, not strategy of what the content was intended to achieve.

Content inventory

Don’t forget internal audit – who are your content owners – who produces it, who QAs it, etc…

Understand skillsets, internal politics.

The reality is that content is messy. Most organizations are not set up internally in a way that is conducive to getting it right. Our agencies need to look at where it's going and catch up and make some changes. A few small changes can help you get there.

Alignment is one of the most important things a content strategist has to do.

• govern
• guide
• measure
• maintain
• create
• source
• execute
• approve
• deliver
• push
• pull
• exchange

YOU ARE A PUBLISHER

Books and resources:

-        Edward Tufte – Envisioning Information

-        http://www.mediajunk.com/public/images/user_experience_garrett.gif">Elements of User Experience – this diagram is 10 years old, still see it tacked up in cubes.

Scott Belsky @scottblesky and Jeffrey Kalmikoff @jeffrey 

Synopsis:

Crowdsourcing has acquired a negative perception as a platform businesses are using to access to free labor. In fact this is a misperception – crowdsourcing is best applied as a source of wisdom of the crowd. What any one person thinks is not so important, but what the crowd agrees upon – the consensus reached – is very valuable. However the model of crowdsourcing being applied in spec contests and the like puts the model at risk. To be sustainable, businesses need to follow 3 key principles when using a crowdsourcing model:

 1) It should foster community. There needs to be:

•  incentive for conversation and learning
•  incentive to engage beyond a specific transaction
•  a culture of collaboration

2) It should tap collective wisdom.

• in gaining opinion or insight, the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts

3) It should nurture the participants. It should be structured in such a way that

• the work benefits participants’ reputation
• participants are able to build relationships
• resources aren’t wasted
• the terms and facts are crystal clear

Stream-of-consciousness notes:

The practical understanding of crowdsourcing could use a bit of definition. 

Misconception: Crowdsourcing = access to free labor only

- Businesses have crowdsourced wisdom and labor…

What any one person thinks is not so important, but what the crowd agrees upon – the consensus reached – is very valuable.

Crowdsourced labor examples:

• Mechanical Turk
• Traditional Spec Contests

Wisdom & Labor examples:

• Digg
• Threadless
•  

Crowds vs. communities

 Have to think about the sustainability of the source

Crowd (according to Wikipedia) = common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a political rally, sports event – or during looting – or simply made up many people going about their business in a busy area. 

Key points:

• common purpose
• based around an event
• interpersonal isolation

The idea of interpersonal isolation is a key advantage point – alleviates awkwardness

With crowds, sourcing exists in sprints – defined start and defined end ; necessary for sustainability to avoid fatigue of prolonged engagement

Sustainability: issue of crowd fatigue that comes w/ constant starting, stopping, starting… the idea that you need to keep up some sort of participation over time to stay involved causes fatigue

Sustainability exists inherently in the organic, adaptive nature of communities

The idea that a brand can continue to give something back to the community – e.g., Harley Davidson – if the company went out of business, the community would suffer.

The participant side of things:

What risks could make crowdsourcing a short-lived phenomenon?

(From business side – what can businesses do to mitigate these risks?)

Risk example: discount sushi… seemed like a good idea at the time.

Businesses should avoid participants leaving with the sense that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Risk example: Football team vs. strip club

Sports scenario – everyone has a vested interest in everyone succeeding. System built on incentive for collaboration. To each team member’s advantage to inspire others, so that the organization grows. Versus strip club – organization is structured such that is counter to collaborative mentality – everyone is competing for the one “winning” spot, everyone is competing for the prize.

Businesses should structure crowdsourcing in such a way that emphasizes a collaborative mentality.

Output should be better than what is currently available – this requires collaboration to be sustainable.

Risk: careless engagement

If your only reward is personal gain, sets up an environment in which people treat it like a game.

Risk: Wasted neurons

Traditional spec contests create a lot of waste – wasted productivity, wasted time, wasted ideas, wasted work – all these things that can’t be used again.

Risk: No contextual reputation

You’re not developing a reputation that actually follows you.

Idea that spec contests are an opportunity young unknown designers to compete on an open playing field – but reality is that

Sustainable crowdsourcing:

#1 Can it foster community?

-       if there’s incentive for conversation and learning

-       if there’s incentive to engage beyond a specific transaction

-       If there’s a culture of collaboration

#2 Does it tap collective wisdom?

-       if in gaining opinion or insight the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

#3 Does it nurture participants

-       if work benefits reputation

-       if participants are building relationships

-       if resources aren’t wasted

-       if the terms and facts are crystal clear

Example of a community doing it well: Quora – question asking business – can connect w/ friends, intersection of question and relationship 

There’s more incentive for a community to curate itself than for a crowd. As it evolves it will take on more focus, not less.

Richard Ziade, Tim Meaney

Synopsis:

The state of publishing can be summed up by Sturgeon’s law: “90% of everything is crud.” We are sacrificing quality for quantity. The art of composition – mise-en-scene – has largely disappeared. The idea of assembling content around an editorial vision is also gone on the web today. All content is created equal, so it just sort of streams by. And far from the concept of an ambient content stream that we dine upon, we are in fact haplessly gorging ourselves. Why? As noted in the NYT article about why people share articles, people crave shared experience.

So where do we go from here? Richard presented a series of “hopeful signs” to counter Tim’s “issues,” but they were tentative at best. Whither the editor. I think I missed the revenge part… perhaps that came in the form of our mid-session emergency evacuation?

Stream-of-consciousness notes:

Mass broadcast, shared cultural moment.

Andrew Sullivan Atlantic article, “Why I Blog”

Has become a political pundit, curator of the web

Today a shared experience, publishing is a frictionless exercise

So what does the web look like today?

Content is smaller.

Content is briefer.

It arrives quickly.

And dies away just as quickly.

There is way, way more if it.

Where are the masterpieces on the web?

“90% of everything is crud.” Sturgeons law.

The quantity of content is far outpacing the quality of content.

Issue #1

Where is the quality? How can I find it?

Issue #2

We’re gorging.

Content gluttony.

We’re in such a hurry to take in content and share with others.

NYT article about why people share links – what people are looking for is a shared moment.

Issue #3

Where did composition go?

When you had newspapers and magazines, composition was an artifact, a thing, and you anticipated it.

Issue #4

The mass produced, artificially-flavored web.

Content farming.

Domain media – harvest search results, look for places that is lacking on the web and farm out to content creators.

Hopeful sign #1

There are – not a lot – but some curators on the web.

Andrew Sullivan – has really embraced the real-time characteristics of the web, but puts care into it.

Hopeful sign #2

There is some good, aesthetically designed content on the web.

Pictory – an example of a site that puts care into the aesthetic.

Concept in theater – putting on the stage – film, art, music. How we frame a shot, composition.

Hopeful sign #3

Not all content is commoditized crap.

A List Apart. Don’t publish often, but when they do, it’s always really good.

Contrast that to eHow and content pumping.

Is there a better way to produce and consume stuff?

Hopeful sign #4

We actually look forward to some things on the web. (very, very few, really)

The idea of assembling content around an editorial vision is gone on the web today. All content is created equal, so it just sort of streams by.

But the web is really about people – it’s changed the way we socialize and connect.

The magic formula:

 The personal value of content: Topic I care about X Source I respect X Source I trust

Technology X Engadget X Someone I trust

People I trust

Take-aways:

Reclaim craftsmanship on the web.

The web is about people.

Rachel Lovinger (@rlovinger), Razorfish and Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane)

Synopsis:

Three streams of a product strategy are design strategy, technology strategy and content strategy. Content strategy is often the missing link. So how do you approach a content strategy? Four stage process: discover, design, develop, deploy. The majority of the discussion dug into the details of what the discover process looks like (“a really scary spreadsheet!”) – both quantitative/get the facts and subjective/assess quality. Overall, presentation contained a lot of good content, but such deep detail that the content is more suited for a handbook than a presentation. Hope Rachel and Karen make the slides available.

Stream-of-consciousness notes:

Product strategy

-          Design strategy

-          Technology strategy

-          Content strategy

Content strategy often tends to be the missing link…

Discover

Design

Develop

Deploy

Get the facts:

What is the content?

How is it organized?

What different types are there?

Roughly, how much content is there?

Assess the quality:

Is it communicating clearly?

Is it appropriate for your audience?

Is it appropriate for your brand?

Is it meeting your biz needs?

First step: Where is your content?

A step-by-step guide to analyzing your content:

-          Get the facts – objective audits, quantitative

o   Content inventory – what content do you have? Look at all the pages of the site, make choices about what content to evaluate

§  How deep do you need to go? Can’t just click around randomly, need to have a strategy for determining which pages to look at

§  How do you ensure you see examples of all the different content types?

§  What are common pathways

o   Content organization

o   Content model

Content inventory = a really big spreadsheet

Step 1: determine an approach

Why do this?? When is it useful?

-          To understand the story the site is trying to tell

-          To get a sense of the range of pages that need to be designed

-          To determine the range of content types the site will support

-          To decide what content to eliminate or migrate

-          To evaluate whether people can find the content they’re looking for

-          To make decisions about a new navigation structure and content model

-          To decide if content needs to be migrated to a new section

-          To find gaps in the content where needed information is underrepresented

-          If you’re doing a redesign

-          If you’re launching a new CMS

-          If you’re merging content from one site into another

-          If you’re migrating content

When is a content inventory unnecessary? Why NOT do this?

-          You can learn 80% of what you need to know by sampling representative content

-          When the site is too large for a full inventory

Content organization – How is it structured?

Content model – what different content types are there?

-          Content formats: article? Video? Audio? Image?

Other factors to consider

SEO

-          Does the content follow best practices for titles, descriptions, keywords and URLs?

Accessibility

-          Does the content conform to guidelines for accessibility?

Assess the quality

-          Do you have all the content that needs to be there?

-          Is the content up to date? Are the examples presented fresh?

-          Is it communicating clearly?

-          Is the content relevant to its intended audience

-          Is the tone and style appropriate for your goals and the reader?

If you can’t answer the question why do you have this on your website? Then you probably shouldn’t bother.

Zombie content: There are words. And there is punctuation. But I don’t know what it’s trying to say. Is your site being read by robots or humans?

Appropriate tone and style – e.g., “Motrin Moms” – not just a social media cautionary tale, but also content strategy. Also Skittles Twitter campaign – picking up random content that doesn’t build towards message – is this really creating business value?

Margot Bloomstein, Principle of Experience Inc.

Synopsis:

Why do you need a content strategist? Because words are cheaper than comps. Because a cohesive UX requires a conduit between the designers, the copywriters and the brand strategists. Because effective message delivery starts with a good message architecture. And because messages across channels become disjointed without an editorial calendar to ensure consistency and adherence to message goals.

Stream-of-consciousness notes:

Carrots: carrot vs. stick = fine as a metaphor, but people don’t really want carrots. They want cookies.

What is content strategy?

Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery and governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience. (as per 2009 Content Consortium)

Designers…

How do you visualize abstract concepts without concrete terms? (make us look hip! Traditional, but not conservative. More like Apple…?) Totally subjective, what does this mean???

Better approach: unpack these concepts with a content architecture, hierarchized  list of shared attributes that stem from that core concept, e.g.:

-          Confident but approachable; an accessible market leader

-          Simple

o   Minimal detail with clean, streamlined, unfussy ID

o   Inviting, friendly, supportive but not fawning

-          Prioritize key messages

-          Use real copy for more unified concepts – e.g., colors should be relevant to the types of words being used

Budget?

-          Fewer rounds of creative revision easily pay for content strategy-driven concepting

FACT: words are cheaper than comps

Content strategy can help offer clients a sense of predictability

Predictability for clients

-          Plan for photo shoots

-          Anticipate content types

-          Gather testimonials

-          Write to exact specs for keywords and character counts

Message architecture should be consistent with the IA and design of a site.

IAs and PMs:

How do you plan for the future if you don’t know what you currently have – or what you need?

Content strategy requires a quantitative and qualitative content audit.

-          Content head count – how much and what types of content exist

-          Check for parity in length, consistency in structure

-          Evaluate quality

How do you judge whether content is good?

-          Is it current?

-          Is it appropriate?

-          Is it relevant?

Content strategy drives brand-appropriate calls to action and site nomenclature

Content strategy drives opportunity

-          ID new content types

-          Prep the client for them

-          Research case studies

-          Gather testimonials

Sell your client on not wasting their money

Content strategy is different from copywriting – like how photography and design aren’t the same thing.

Search engine marketers:

How do you write meta and ad copy when the copy on the site is changing?

And where should the user experience begin?

Rather than filling w/ keywords, can you use it to begin setting the tone and experience?

-          Map ad copy against the message architecture

-          Translate meta content for tone, not just keywords

Social media strategists:

How do you get brands to stop talking about themselves and start engaging?

Good conversation demands good content strategy

Can’t have social media strategy without content strategy

Content strategy can help you prioritize communications goals to ensure consistency… even on Twitter.

Editorial style guidelines and an editorial calendar support writers for a consistent multichannel presence.

You need to have a workflow to plan, create and expire content.

In summary, content strategy =

-          More airtight solutions

-          Save time, budget and energy on iterations

-          More chohesive UX

-          Higher conversions