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?