To begin, no problem is more challenging or significant to organizations than effectively communicating their essential stories to important people inside and outside who need to know about them.
Yet think how often you share your content and the people you want to reach pay no attention. Then again, in this digital age, even if the people you want to reach do pay attention, once you send the message out, others can change it or add to it or make it into something, that you never intended and you may not like.
Why is communicating effectively so challenging?
The blunt answer is that the people you want to reach face an ever-rising tidal wave of content demanding their attention, but they don't have one more minute in their day. This MOOC welcomes that challenge. During our time together, we will show you how to develop engaging content in print and digital and social and mobile media that people you want to reach will use.
And in the process, you'll learn how to understand far more about your audience and how to make the content that you create more valuable to them. A rapidly increasing number of for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises recognize the ferocious competition they face to get the time and the attention of target audiences they want to reach.
So a really important lesson is that in a world that's becoming ever more complicated, the people you want to reach will pay attention to your content if it enhances their lives in ways they value.
Content strategy tells people what they want and need to know in ways that are credible and trustworthy and transparent.
Content strategy tells people what they want and need to know in ways that are credible, trustworthy, transparent. Content strategy is also related to, but quite distinct from content marketing.
Content marketing, it's explicitly crafted to drive specific profitable customer action.
By contrast, content strategy is crafted to help a target audience be better informed and smarter. So if you think about the world of mass communication, there is this spectrum.
It's a content spectrum. And journalism is on one end. Its goal is to inform people. And marketing is on the other, and its goal is to drive customer action.
Content strategy falls somewhere in the middle, but slightly towards journalism. So here's an example. Take a look at this picture. If you show this picture as part of a story of poor children in developing countries which is a major problem being addressed by many agencies, it's content strategy.
If your priority is to tell a story about children in the third world, who are served by the work of a non profit agency that focuses on improving their lives, then it's content marketing.
And if you're part of the audience who sees them, you get a different message from one that focuses only on the child versus one that also promotes the NGO that helps them.
Perceptive organizations are responding to people's needs to be better informed about products and services by creating content strategy, where information about topics that matter to the organization and its employees or stakeholders, shine.
The Philips plus project introductory video makes two points. The overt and stated one is that Philips has mounted a collaborative effort to meet people's modern day health and well being challenges.
Those are the words that any number of companies might use, but Phillips is committing major resources to deliver on that promise and they're doing it collaboratively with people in the region that they serve.
The second goal for Philips is that they have made a conscious decision to move from being a global company that makes products, to one that also innovates.
This story is an example of both of the Plus Project's goals. First, mounting a collaborative effort to meet people's modern day health and well-being challenges, and second, doing so through meaningful innovation.
The competition for time and attention of people everywhere is under assault, and pressure on their time will continue to rise.
Just think how of many times you and your colleagues or friends have talked about having too much to read, or to see, or to do, and not enough time to do it. There has never been a moment in history when there's been more information available, or when the challenges communicating effectively has been as great.
There's a tidal wave of new and seemingly ever-changing technologies also to deliver that information. As a result, most people say communications and media face constant, unrelenting change.
Yet that's not quite accurate. In the 1980s, we were teaching about the end of the traditional divisions between media and the move to content that would be available, kind of where and when and however people wanted it.
As part of this ongoing work to chisel out insights about disruptive changes that typify media and communications, the media management center reported on three forces that will not change as they shape all forms of communication in the future.
There's an ever-rising tidal wave of information about every subject, and it will continue to rise forever.
2011: 16M hits for "coffee cup". 2013: 130M hits.
If there are that many results for something as mundane as a coffee cup, think of the amount of information there is about absolutely every subject.
And if that isn't one way to think about it, try this. These get replaced by Google Glass. Google Glass is connected to my cell phone, which is connected to the internet, which is connected to the world. And on this little lens, I can ask Glass to give me a map to go around the world, I can ask it to show me the latest news, I can read the latest book ,or take a video of you if you're there.
Think of all the ways we've just begun to nick at, that will be opened up by thiskind of technology, by wrist watches and other things that will tie us to the rest of the world.
No amount of technological or scientific advance will ever add one more minute to that 1440 minute day that you have, and I have, and everyone has.
If you put together the first truth about the tidal wave and the second truth about the absolute number of minutes.
If you were interested even in coffee cups, look at all of the other activities that are competing for your time.
Eating, sleeping, working, learning, being with colleagues, being with family, significant others and friends.
The lesson here is that important things, like eating, or talking to your boss, or family member, are competing, all the time, for your attention, and for the attention of the people you want to reach with your content.
It's vital that you recognize that ferocious competition.
Indeed, it's helpful to picture the person or people you hope will pay attention to your content and recognize that their first priority, is something that matters to them.
It's not your message. Actually, even if the information you're sending their way is valuable to them, the pressure on their lives to do other essential things nearly always outweighs what you want them to know.
That's good, because if you can give people what they really want, they may give you their time. But how are you going to get the audience's precious attention?
To begin, you must have a far deeper understanding of that audience. One that goes way beyond what content creators typically possess. In addition, even if your content is valuable, and you can get them to pay attention, your messages must be engaging and delivered where, when, and how they want it.
If it's boring, or delivered at work when they only have time to read it later on on the bus, or at home, when they want to be with their kids, they won't look at it at all.
It's tempting to put your energies into turning out lots of content that matters to you. But it's not smart, and it's not strategic.
Well, if people are going to pay attention to your content, you have to give up sending out too many messages, non-strategic messages.
You really want people to care about all of the things you think are important, but once again. Remember the pressures on their time and the fact that just because you created content, and put it out there doesn't mean they will really engage it.
Whether you like it or not, target audiences you want to reach will only give you the smallest amount of time and attention. So, if your organization's strategic goals are going to be met, your content should only be sent if it is a central part of those priorities.
That's the only way to win. So what is the strategy part of content strategy?
In its simplest, most straightforward form, strategy refers to the direction and the goals that people, often leaders, have, when they're thinking about where the organization should be going.
Whether it's a formal plan or not, you need to find out what your organization's top goals and priorities are for the next one to three years, or if you're in a department or division, What are its top goals that can support the organizations?
Top goals are priorities. Every organization has things it wants to do if it's going to make progress. Those goals are strategies, whether it calls them strategies or not.
There are two steps that will greatly strengthen the likelihood of people engaging with the messages you want them to consider.
We just covered the first one, learn the strategicals of the organization and your role or department in it and focus on those goals and not a lot of other things.
What does it mean that you must understand far more about your audience?
It starts with learning with what matters to them in their work and personal lives.
The first imperative is to deliver value to empower customers. Think about what they value and how they behave.
How effectively can you develop content that truly meets your audiences needs and simultaneously conveys information that enhances your organizations goals?
For example, did you know that the more content you give people that they want, the more time they will spend on content that matters to you? Sadly, most content creators think that the message that is important to them should be carefully considered by everyone in the organization.
Well, there are two flaws in this approach. As we learned a moment ago, the content the organization wants to deliver should have value for the intended audience.
And it has to be told in an engaging way, where, when, and how the audience wants it. If this doesn't happen, the audience won't pay attention.
Further, for all but the most extraordinary events, only a fairly narrow set of people are likely to have interest and take time with the content you present.
So the more specifically you can describe and understand that narrow set of people, the better you'll be able to provide content that's meaningful to them.
So in summary, then, to be successful, you must understand the audience you're trying to reach. Make what you say valuable and engaging to them. That's the secret.
And next, let me talk about a powerful way for your content to enhance engagement.
Pretend for a moment that you're walking down the street and there's an old 1950s coffee or tea shop. It's noisy, plainly furnished with old chairs and tables, but it has a good cup of coffee. Now, one block further down the street, there's another coffee shop. It, too, sells good coffee, but it's got comfortable chairs clustered around tables in a way that invites conversation. Has wi-fi and connections so people can work on their computers while they sip their beverage. It gives off an inviting setup and people really do meet there to work or to talk or to see their friends.
What's interesting for this discussion is why people choose the first shop instead of the second, or vice versa. If you interview a 100 people and asked why they decided to go to the old, 1950s, simple shop, they would say things like, Mm, it's convenient, it's on the way to work, it's fast. If you ask others why they chose the other shop, the one with the soft chairs and the wi-fi, they would say things like That shop wants me to come in. Or, I meet interesting people. Or, it's my office away from work.
Now think back over those responses, and they're pretty literal. A couple of things stand out. The first is that none of the respondents said anything about coffee. What they did say many times with the words I, and my, and me.
What this example showed us is actually a penetrating look at how every human being makes decisions about using their time for making a purchase for goods or services.
The first thing each of us considers is ourselves and our time. For the coffee shop example, they talked about convenience, speed, socializing, getting work done. When we did research and engaged thousands of people with written, spoken, and video content, they responded exactly the same way. Their first consideration was them.
Using sophisticatedk research and new methodology we determine what experiences motivated them, to be most engaged with the content they saw. When we tested our research in the Americas, Europe Asia and Africa, there were of course cultural differences. There are different ways to tell a story. Yet we suspected that how people decide to spend their time with content is not a function of culture. And that's exactly what we found. You will easily understand this when you see the list of experiences that prompted people to spend more time with content and become more engaged by it.
Some of the key examples where the content makes me smarter, gives me something talk about, looks out for my interest, has the element of surprise or humor, it inspires me.
But you always need to bear in mind the context, whose receiving the content and where are they when they want to access it? That's a package, all of those things operate together. It's important to also think about two other experiences, context and convenience.
As each day passes the impact of convenience rises. The more convenience you make access to the content you want people to pay attention to, the higher the likelihood they'll give you some of that essential resource, their time.
Think about your own life, and you'll understand the importance of convenience. If someone sends you something to read, but it arrives when you're driving a car, or riding a bicycle, you'll pay no attention to it.
If the message you get is a video, even a terrific and interesting one, you may not open it because you were doing something which was more important to you. It's inconvenient to view it at that time. If any of these situations apply, it's as if the content you care so much about does not exist.
The point is, you have to understand your audience, and once again, where, when, and how they want to take in the information you send.
And then there is context. When we began in truth one, when we discussed the rising tidal wave of information, and some of the technologies that frame the context around content strategy, Here's a deeper summary of what, that context is, and what it means to every organization.
First, the rise of social media, has changed how fast information flows. The communications landscape is awash with information. And then engagement, which driven by content. And it's now critical to communications really having an impact.
Companies and organizations are fast becoming publishers, broadcasters, innovators, and content influencers, and so are you. And then the time is now to bring all that power of content forward.
Of course the challenge, is to simultaneously, make it engaging. If content then is everything, how do you make it magnetic, attracting and lifting audiences?
Content must be story driven, useful, findable, current, engaging, flexible, and sharable. And the biggest word there is story. We think in stories, we react in stories, whether it's data or any other kind of content.
What's the story? And then as listed on the right, it also needs to be available in the most appropriate formats and channels, that matter most.
Not to you, but to the audience. And don't overlook in all of this the use of gaming. If they are well done, games are a powerful way to tell complex stories. They're also the story form that younger people often prefer.
Yes, content is king. If it is strategic and tells a story that's valued by the audience. In this course, you will learn to develop and distribute your content, and drive engagement with audiences that you want to reach. In the following weeks, we'll look at how you can not only understand that audience more deeply but how you can take whatever content you strategically select and present it in such a way that the audience gives it more time.
Because it says to them, and they will say in themselves, that makes me smarter. It gives me something to talk about.
You know, taking up people's time with non-strategic content is not only wasteful, it teaches the important audiences that you want to reach to pay no attention to everything you say.
What we know is that people will only learn about things that they're motivated to learn about. That is to say, people will accept what they need to know from an organization that delivers what they want to know.
You compounded blowing up the first by saying there really are no more mass audiences. For most people in organizations, they want everybody inside or everybody outside, to take in their message. They can't.
The organizations we see being particularly successful at reaching mass audiences are doing it because they aggregate a number of targeted audiences. So think about something as ubiquitous as Facebook. Facebook has a large mass audience, if you will, because it serves a number of different smaller audiences with a variety of needs. High schoolers are on there for a very different reason, John, than you and I are on there. And ultimately Facebook success in the marketplace is being able to aggregate all those targets into one product. And that's really where organizations need to be focusing if they want scale.
There really is science behind this. People's emotional and cognitive limitations are real. They can only attend to a certain number of topics deeply at one time. So people only pay attention to topics when they're motivated to do so, and there are things that precede motivation, and that's what's most important to organizations.
The idea that self-interest and social identification precede motivation. So organizations have to understand their audiences' social identifications and self-interest needs, so they can craft messages that serve them where they are.
Not only do I have to understand you and what you're interested in, I have to understand you, your lifestyle, your needs, and behaviors, so well, that I can predict what you need even if you don't know you need it.
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is asking someone, what do you need? No one knew they needed an iPhone until iPhones were invented.
Organizations that are most successful are going to get ahead of that curve by understanding people's lifestyles, behaviors, attitudes, and crafting their messages to serve them where they are and advance their lifestyle in some significant way.
First, you gotta give me something that you just know I want. Because like my favorite newspaper, or magazine, or TV show, I'm going to come there because I know I'm going to get it. That's number one. And then you're going to anticipate a need cause you know so much about me and you're going to meet that need.
Exactly. And it may not be the message that I thought my organization initially wanted to deliver. It becomes something of a blend where the organization is serving its needs by understanding the audience better.
There are a number of steps we go through to develop personas, but the key for organizations to understand is they're based on research.
They're not based on intuition. So it's about interviewing people in the target market. Following them and seeing what their daytime experiences are.
Learning about the target market from external stakeholders. Learning about the target market from secondary research that's been done. Crafting a real understanding of who the target user is.
A major drug store here in the United States has used personas to help understand the aging population in the United States and how their shelving needs to be recrafted to serve an older American. So they're using actually, a suit that mimics aging.
The arthritis in your hands, what it's like to stand up, your ability to see the signs. And they've lowered the signs. They've made the shelves so it's easy to reach without asking for assistance. And they've increased the size of the type on the sign placard, so that people could see them as they continue to age. And their goal is really to appeal to that target market.
I think it's really important for us to stop looking at media as old and new media and start looking at media that meets people where they are. So if you think about communities where mass transportation is the primary way that people circulate throughout the community, we start to see print media work quite well, if it's available through mass transportation outlets.
However, if you think about a community where people primarily move around through cars, we certainly don't want people reading while they're driving a vehicle, Then all of a sudden, we have to think about iPods, music, something that's more audible, something that's read at home after the commute, as a way to communicate with people.
I think the one key to understanding segments is the harder it is to measure something the better it is in understanding an audience.
Geographic measurement, where someone lives, what block they're on, or demographic measurement, how old they are, how many children they have, those are weak measures of segmentation because ultimately, two 35 year olds may look very similar but have very different needs.
Something like psycho-graphic measurement. Who they are? What they need?
Segmenting based on those needs, values, motivations to consume information, those are going to be most successful for organizations. So again, the more difficult something is to measure, the more successful it is going to be as a segment in the market.
What's really important to keep in mind, especially if you're with a small organization, you think because you only have 12 employees, they must all be similar.
But if you have some people in sales, and you have some people in product management, and you have other people who are handling your media components, ultimately, all those people have different psychographic needs as it relates to your organization. You have to understand the psychographic bend those people bring to the table to effectively communicate with them.
If you run a larger organization, your goal is to understand the subsets in your organization's marketplace, so that you have several buckets of people, if you will. So I'm not suggesting you have to follow 1200 people around to understand what their individual needs are, but I am saying understanding your communication base in a different way can help you craft better messages.
What I encourage organizations to do, like radio and television stations that are really looking at day parting in a significant way, is to understand what's happening in someone's life in the morning that's different than the afternoon, that's different from the evening.
When you're in the morning looking at a television station or listening to the radio, you're interested in the weather and what it takes for you to be successful that day at work or whatever you're going to do throughout your day.
At noontime, you're looking for something totally different. Updates on the news. Maybe. But something that's kind of light and helps you get through your day.
At the end of the day, you don't need a repeat for what you've already seen. So dayparting is sort of the beginning to understanding that. But deep understanding really comes from understanding the target market. In a way that you've never really thought about them before.
Many people are interested in giving to service organizations that communicate a message about how it's going to affect their particular community.
But effects in communities can mean very different things. You may be interested in, for instance, how it's going to affect what's happening on your block.
I may be interested in how it's going to affect my children, and ultimately understanding the difference between what you and I value in our lives, allows those messages to be more thoughtful.
Should you be at the center of the target or should I be at the center of the target?
So service organizations really need to understand that self interest, the social identification pieces of audiences.
But we've talked about the first week and we certainly implied here That there's that, all that emotional, internal self I bring to the message you provide.
So I think the experience work is very important to understanding audiences, because when you start to look at some of the experiences and how it creates an emotional reaction to material.
So one particular example of say the time out experience. When we look at people who are consuming some kind of media messages because they enjoy a release from their regular life.
It's one of the reasons we see the success of reality television in America today. But also think about this is particularly attractive to women. We see women creating time out experiences especially if they're raising children. Working and then have a moment in the evening where they can curl up with a cup of coffee and now we even say the iPad, and consume material.
Time out experiences are not going to be fueled by you throwing information at them.
It's going to be a soft touch that really understands that moment in a woman's day. What kind of information she's looking for and make her more interested in your company's message.
And then the last big question, we began the MOOC saying it looks like, and we're finding more and more, that people dream in stories.
Think in stories, even when they get data and spreadsheets and information, They sort of take it and turned it into a story.
We see narrative storytelling as a huge piece of this. Stories really illuminate things for people, but the important thing to keep in mind when you're working for an organization is, Your definition of story may be different than mine.
So you really have to, again, that's why the target audience really matters. You have to understand the target's definition of storytelling, so that your company can achieve a successful relationship through the narrative it wants to share.
In general, marketing is about understanding consumers and designing products and services to meet their needs and wants and, and communicating this to consumers that you've done this.
Marketing is relevant to content strategy in two ways. First, any content you produce is aproduct that you should market. To engage the people you want to reach, you must understand them.
Second, the content strategy needs to benefit the services or product that your organization creates.
Part of your content strategy is to be meaningful and relevant to the products your organization makes. That's true no matter what type of organization you're in, for-profit, not-profit, or government. In short, it should help to brand your products or services.
Strong brands relate to experiences that marketers know are important to the consumer segment that they're trying to target. We define experiences as the thoughts or feelings that consumers have about how the product helps them achieve some goal in their life.
If you look at Coke's advertising, it doesn't emphasize the product, brown fizzy liquid, at all. Instead, it links Coke with the experience of feeling happy. Then, when consumers want to feel happy they drink Coke and are taken to the Coke experience of happiness. By speaking to these experiences, they can engage the consumers in the brand.
The most important thing is that in thinking about content strategy, you really make it clear in your own mind what the concept of brand is all about, and how you want to be relevant.
The best tool for doing this is to write a positioning statement that specifies who the target segment is, what the core concept of the brand is and how this is different from your competitors. You use this positioning statement to make sure that your content is relevant to the same experiences the brand speaks to.
The positioning statement is central to a content strategy because it is what keeps the content on strategy.
Ex: The company is Shenshi, a Chinese clothing retailer. It's not really their real name, but the case is based on the real company. The company wants to expand its brand of clothing internationally. They've already had a fair amount of success in China.
The brand has been very successful at creating three experiences for its consumers. The first experience is inspiration. Which is about making people believe that they can accomplish things in their own lives.
Many brands have been successful because they inspire their users. A famous example is Nike, which challenges its customers to just do it.
A media brand that creates inspirational experiences for readers is Better Homes and Gardens. To understand how they create inspiration, consider their regular column, I Did It, which usually features normal people who just did something special to their home or garden.
The focus of this column is not on how they did it, which would be much more of a utilitarian experience, but on the fact that they were able to do it.
The second experience is identity. Which is, seeing oneself as being a successful person. Many fashion brands help their users by projecting a certain image. Just think about the image that wearing a Rolex watch or carrying a Gucci hand bag creates.
The brand, North Face, projects a different kind of image. But is also creating an identity experience.
The third experience that Senchu wants to create is utilitarian, which is all about giving useful advice and tips on how to use clothes to appear successful. One contact point is a sales person coming up to you in the store and recommending a certain shirt or tie to go with some suit that you're buying.
So in their positioning statement, Shenshi makes it clear that the segment targeted is men who dream of a brighter future, and the concept is that Shenshi makes you feel and appear more successful than you currently are.
This means that our strategy should be to make sure that our content is also associated with these three experiences. And the content should have these three experiences in common so that when someone encounters the content, they have the same experiences that they have with the brand, and vice versa.
It's true that over time and every organization, you'll produce many different pieces of content, most likely even across different platforms. The key is that all of them should be tied to the experiences that your content strategy calls for.
This consists of having the general thematic storyline that is relevant to the experiences.
For example, with Coca Cola, the storyline is that Coca Cola is about enabling people to make themselves and others happier.
The idea is more familiar than it may sound. Think about things like Harry Potter. Its story line began as a book, that was then turned into movies, audio presentations, rides at theme parks, and all sorts of other content.
The story line at an abstract level has been told many times before. There is this bad guy Voldemort who wants to conquer death and rule the world. Harry Potter is the chosen one, who must stop him and save the world. One of the themes that comes up often is that Potter has to choose between doing what's right and what's easy. The task of fighting Voldemort seems impossible. And the audience is inspired by the courage he shows to do the right thing despite how futile the effort seems.
Participants can propose a thematic storyline for Shenshi. As you saw in the Coca Cola and Harry Potter examples, keep it general enough to that any individual piece of content will tell its own story, but rich enough to hold all the pieces together to make sure that they're relevant to the brand and experiences it's associated with.
And remember that the process begins with an organization having a brand for it's product or service that's based on creating certain experiences.
It will then create content that focuses on a common set of experiences. The content engages consumers by creating the experiences, which in turn reinforces the product brand in the mind of the consumer.
Experiences are the way people feel about things. It's how content or a consumer product makes them feel, particularly with content.
Does it make me feel smarter? Does it make me feel good about myself? Does it make me want to take action on what I read or heard or saw? It goes well beyond the utility of the content, or the utility of the consumer product.
Certainly we use content for the utility it gives us. We buy consumer products for the utility they give us, but we have choices in content, and we have choices in consumer products, and we pick the ones that tap into emotional responses.
If I've driven to the market in a Mercedes or other luxury car it's going to make me feel prestigious, or important. If I make that same trip in a high mileage car, like a Fiat for example, it's going to make me feel frugal, and like I've done well with my money. If I make that very same trip in a hybrid or an electric car, something like a Prius, it's going to make me feel like I did something good for the environment.
So the tool, served the same purpose, no matter which one I had, but each of them would make me feel different, and we consume content for the same reasons. We pick content that gives us experiences and makes us feel certain ways. All products and all content create user experiences.
The first thing we ask is what do we want people to feel. That's what experience is all about. So what's the relationship between audience experiences and audience engagement?
Engagement is something that's been studied for more than 50 years. And it's been defined a lot of different ways. But typically it's been defined by how much a person uses content.
How often they come to it? How much time they spend with it? But that's really an outcome. It's really not a definition of engagement.
Engagement is really the collective set of these emotional experiences that people have with your content or with your consumer product. It's how they see your brand in their head. It's not what you think about your brand. It's what they think about your brand.
Experiences matter for three reasons.First, all content will create user experiences. It's going to make your readers, users certain some things, act certain ways, take action on things. It's inescapable. You can not make experience free content, even if you tried.
Second, years of research show that experience drives usage. If people have positive experiences with your content, they will come back to it more frequently. They'll spend more time with it. If they have negative experiences with your content. They're going to use it less, they're going to come to it less.
Third, you as the content strategist have the ability to shape those experiences to make them positive or negative, to make them stronger or weaker. So you have control.
Experience contributes to usage and you can control those experiences. So how do you determine which experiences are right? By that I mean, which experiences are most likely to drive engagement?
Media management center research identified more than 40 experiences across all media. Some of those were positive and drove increased usage of content. Some of them were negative and inhibited usage of content.
For this program, we've selected four that we think are the most powerful, and that you should really be focused on using.
- It makes me smarter about things that I care about.
- The second is that it looks out for my interests.
- The third is that it's convenient (easily accessible).
- It gives me something to talk about and share with others, what we call the social experience.
During those one on one interviews, we found that there were hundreds of common themes, common statements that people made. So we took those statements and we put them into surveys and gave those to thousands more people.
From that, we were able to find these common experiences that went across all media, and all people. Here are the consumer comments that underlie that particular experience.
So what's the process for creating a powerful experience? As with all things in content strategy, the process starts with understanding your audience.
Who are they? What are their lives like? What are their goals? What are their aspirations? Once you understand that, then you create a concept for your content.
So in this case study, it's not about what we do, it's not if we make affordable trendy clothing. It's about our service to the audience and that's built into the concept statement. In the case study where it says, we're for younger men who dream of a brighter future, the Shenshi brand of trendy but affordable fashion makes men feel and appear more successful to others than they are.
Know how this concept statement, does three things that all concept statements have to do. It describes the target audience, in this case young men.
It categorizes the product, trendy but affordable, and it describes the point of difference from similar products. It makes men feel successful. The concept guides the organization's creation of all its contacts with its audience.
And contacts are everything: publications, websites, mobile data, tweets, advertising, packaging, marketing, customer service. Once the concept is defined and you're delivering on those contacts, that builds the audience's idea of the concept.
How they feel about it then reinforces what they think about you. It becomes a two-way street. Consider one of the great global sports empires, ESPN. They operate seven US sports channels, an industry leading website that has editions for four countries, US, Australia, Brazil, UK. So look at their concept statement. To serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about. We're played.
And everything they do is in service to delivering that experience.
Experiences are applied at three levels. The message level, the distribution level, and the strategic level.
The goal is to be strategic. An application at the message and the distribution level reinforce the overall strategic approach.
For the content strategist, the first thing you want to think about is, what stories am I going to tell, and what stories am I not going to tell?
If we think about our case study, an expanding company that's building lots of new plants, and is proud of that fact, nonetheless, telling a story about opening a new plant is probably not going to drive the experiences that you want for your audience.
But, if you've got a customer who's recently gotten a promotion, in part because he now dresses well using your fashions, now that's a story that you do want to tell, because it reinforces this inspiration, aspiration experience that you're trying to drive.
You can tell it is a just plain facts case or you can enhance it with story telling arts. You can make some simple choices, are we going to tell this story in text or are we going to use something like a photo montage?
When you move up to the distribution level you're now thinking about how all these messages, all these stories come together.
On any given channel, as a content strategist, you're not going to do this just one way. You're going to have a Twitter account, you're going to have a YouTube channel, you're going to put out press releases, you're going to send customer emails. You might have a magazine or a brochure. And what you have to do is make sure that all the messages, all the stories, on each of these individual channels matches the experience you're trying to deliver.
What experience matters for the audience, that has no meaning. What does have meaning is a story about someone rising in the organization, who is a young men, wearing our clothes.
And tell it then at the distribution level, where, when and how, that young man and other young man will be.
The strategic level is where it all comes together. This is where you want to make sure that all of your channels are delivering the same message in the same way.
First at the message level. Let's take a look at these two Canadian newspapers. This was in 2006. It was the day that the Canadian hockey team had lost all chance of getting a medal in the 2006 Olympics. And on that very same day, the women skaters and the women skiers took two golds and two silver medals.
The newspaper on the left took a real just the facts ma'am approach as you can see. Serious, somber, not particularly engaging. The newspaper on the right clearly they were thinking they wanted to drive that talk about it and share experience. That headline is a headline to debate over, to talk about over at the water cooler.
They focused on their message. We want our readers to talk about the things we write about. And they stayed on it, now that's at the message level. The editors at both papers had exactly the same material to work with and chose two different ways to do it.
We saw Apple's ad, we know that they focus on simplicity, so let's look at all the ways they do it. The message level in content would be comparable to, the individual, design elements in their products and everything is simple.
If we compare product components to the message level, they do it with every component. Look at the way the power cord plugs into a Mac book. It's a magnet. You just slap it on there. You don't have to fuss around trying to stick prongs into a slot. It's kind of a message level. The product itself is comparable to the distribution level in the content world.
So if we look at one of their products The iPad. It's so easy it doesn't even come with an owners manual. Even a two year old can learn how to use it. Then at the strategic level Apple pulls that all together, every element of design, every product, every customer contact walking into one of their stores.
Looking at their ads. They're all simple. Everything makes it easy. And this differentiates them from their more complicated competitiors.
I think I hear you saying one more thing, and the one more thing is, that's the sort of recipe, those are the steps, but the powerful message is, content strategy is by itself prioritized and important. But if you really wanted to have impact.
If you want to engage your audience with it, at the beginning you said, you create experiences whether you want to or not. So plan 'em. Understand that audience. Create an experience which makes them want more and makes them want to come back. And if you do that, then you'll have great content and an experience. And the audience will give you more time and come back more often.
Well, John, professional writing doesn't have to be dry. In fact, in most cases it should not be. Don Fry, an editor and writing coach who has worked with thousands of writers, puts it this way. He says that voice is how the author creates the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page. Or, I would add, the screen.
Like most writing coaches, Fry emphasizes the importance of speaking in a natural way to readers. In order to hold the attention and interest of an audience, the writer needs to speak in a voice the audience will recognize as someone like them.
Another way to put this, voice is the equivalent of a phone call from a trusted friend. You immediately tune in to what this person is saying to you.
People face a title wave of content, and they don't have one more minute in their day. People tune out a lot of this information because it's boring, it's uninteresting, it's not valuable to them.
So first you need to win their time and attention. What is it about your content that makes them want to read it? The voice that readers hear in your content should be a kind of personality.
Who is that personality? What is the tone of that communication? Voice conveys the persona of the writer. We also talk about tone in professional writing.
Tone is the mood of the writer's voice, tone gives a writing voice nuance, depth and color.
Ask yourself what is important about this information? Why do people need it? What is your relationship to the content? And to the target audience who will read it. Are you an expert, informing them about something new? Or perhaps, are you a member of a community of usersof a product or service, commenting for those in the know.
So, what about the Shenshi case? Perhaps you want to create content about affordable vacations in places attractive to middle class young people. Or maybe create a website covering entertainment news of interest to the Shenshi customer.
Each of these excerpts has distincitve voice and tone. The New York Times editorial voice is firm, measured, and harbors not an ounce of doubt. The Page Six voice, on the other hand, is the snide, cliche-ridden tabloid. The celebrity chaser. Intentionally disrespectful.
Tone and voice are core identifiers. When writing for your business colleagues, the same principles apply. Be yourself. Be direct. Be specific. Your voice conveys your personality and authority. Your tone conveys emotion, attitude. Do you sound like someone who knows what she or he is talking about? Does your writing voice make them want to hear what you have to say?
Focus on how it is valuable to your audience because people will give you their time if you give them something they value. Will it help them keep up with information in their field? Will it help them get ahead in their careers? Will it give them something to talk about with their friends, colleagues, their bosses? Or is it their personal time out? Is your content what is missing in their lives?
You also need to consider and know your defining value. Could your competitive edge be convenience for example? Is one competitor perhaps reliable but only available once a week? Can you deliver updates more often via cellphone or email? Does your content make you stand out from your competitors?
For example, if your organization conducts research on a topic of particular interest, you could write about it on your organizations internal website and eventually publish it for external audiences. Your competitive advantage is your deep knowledge of the issue.
Look at this graphic that summarizes what I've been saying. You want your content to be in the upper right hand quadrant: Convenient, accessible, colorful, readable.
Start with, what is the best media window in your reader's day to engage with your content? Is your idea best delivered as a business-to-business publication, a mobile app, an email newsletter, a podcast, a tablet feed, maybe mobile alerts? Or should you think about a portfolio strategy?
Your audience uses many information devices during the day. Mobile in the morning and all day long. Smartphone or tablet on the train or bus. Laptop or tablet in meetings and at lunch. And always, mobile during dinner. You need to make sure to leverage this information, to truly engage your audience with your important stories and content. So then, what do you need to know about your audience's information use?
Consider the top three markets for smartphones. In China a Google survey estimates that half of all urban Chinese use smartphones. People use them during often lengthly commutes for checking on news, participating in social media. And reading email. Now this is content prime time for this audience. This is the media window you want to hit. India is rapidly converting to smartphones. Projections are that 100 million smartphones will be sold in India over the next three years. And in the US, nearly two thirds of adults already use smartphones.
So then how do you think about the best points of contact with the content you're providing? You want to list and then prioritize all of the connections your audience finds useful.
Does your audience want your information on multiple platforms? Would your readers appreciate email alerts, mobile updates? Perhaps documents or media they can download from the cloud. You need to ask yourself, does your strategy differentiate your content? Are your points of contact the most convenient for your audience? Understanding your audience and how they take in information is the key.
The prime rule says internationally known authors Stephen King is write a lot and read a lot. Sound simple? It's effective. When King was asked what he reads, he answered everything I can get my hands on. King offers lots of good advice in his memoir on writing.
So be like Stephen King, read every day, feed your ear. Don't limit yourself to business documents and news publications. Read good writing of various kinds. Consume fine craft. Your vocabulary will improve as you read. Your writing will become more fluid. It's true what they say about what it takes to perform on a great stage. you gotta practice, and practice, and practice some more. Write often. Like any other skill, with attention and hard work, writing improves.
Be direct and clear. You want busy people to pay attention to you and read what you are working so hard to write. Get to the point. Just tell me. Don't adopt a different vocabulary or tone or voice when you write. Do not overwrite, William Strunk advised us 95 years ago in the Elements of Style. Just tell me what you want to say. Tell a story the way you would tell it to your friend or a colleague. You always know how to tell a story to someone you know.
As best-selling novelist Elmore Leonard made a really important point. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Use active sentences, not passive. Most of us talk this way in normal conversation. Someone did something, someone said something, someone felt something. The active voice sweeps up the reader and takes her along for the ride. The passive voice just buries the momentum under a rock.
Write with nouns and verbs, Strunk said. Use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. Eliminate unnecessary language, or as Strunk said 95 years ago, omit needless words. Keep it simple. Focus on one idea per sentence.\ Make your content easy to consume. Voltaire put it this way: the best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
Write for scannability. Everything should work to welcome the reader. Headlines, captions, pull quotes, every word on the page or screen should enhance the reader's experience. Whether the content is in a newspaper or a magazine, On the website, a tablet, or a phone, readers will first scan then zero in on what catches their interest.
Invite action. In internal documents, keep recommendations crisp and to the point. On the web, provide searchable data, links to useful information, social media links.
Revise. The first draft is rarely the best. Writing is mostly about editing. Author James Michener noted, I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. The reader benefits from all of that work. What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure, said Samuel Johnson.
And know when to violate these rules. The best writers can use descriptive language to illuminate elegantly. Writers who follow these rules still manage to speak in distinctive voices, but when strain from these norms, know why and be sure your method is effective. Mark Twain put it in his classic way, when you catch an adjective kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them. Then the rest will be valuable.
Whether the work is a business analysis a novel or a long forum magazine feature, it usually has a shape like a small heel.
In the beginning a business report might state the problem being examined, during which the story begins to gain momentum. Then there's the middle, the history and analysis section during which the story moves smoothly through the chronology, description or other structure of the piece. In the end, the work will gain speed as it approaches a conclusion.
When you are writing a long piece, finish your first draft before stopping to revise it. If you stop part way through the piece you will often loose your way. Your pacing will suffer. You may start to write about details you'll just have to remove later.
You will lose your focus, and sometimes you lose your control of the piece. The truth is that, as you become a more experienced writer and take on more challenging tasks, you're able to write longer and more complex reports or stories without a lot of pausing and reorienting.
The great novelist William Faulkner said something terrific about this moment, when a writer stops to tinker and then loses momentum. He said, when my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar. You will know better than to stop your story and give it sugar.
Author Ian Banks said about this process, writing is like everything else, the more you do it, the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along. Just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished, and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence along the way, there's a chance you'll never get passed the first chapter.
And after all, you know the job of the opening section. Depending on the nature of the work, it is to state the problem and suggest the motive examination. Or to state the question being answered, or the problem to be analyzed.
Don't allow yourself to become bogged down polishing the opening of your project. If you do, the rest of the project, which it probably organized itself in your head, will begin to unravel.
Every writer, myself included, has had the experience of launching a big piece with all the zest and confidence in the world, and then feeling it begin to go off the rails as distractions hampered our progress. Sometimes, you just can't get it back. You have to start over.
One of my mentors, who wrote more major stories than anybody else at the magazine where I worked, was so adept at structure and speed, that he told me sometimes he would just skip the first section entirely, so that he could speedily get the rest of it down on paper.
He had it in his head. He needed to capture it on paper. Now, I'm not advising you to do that, at least not until you're much more experienced than I am. Get the story, the book, the white paper, report, or study, down in the first draft before you go back to revise it. Once you know what it looks like, you can analysis its flaws, polish its gems, and rewrite at will.
I find that if I read it aloud it's a powerful tool. You must read your work aloud. You will hear what's wrong with it. What's missing, what needs to be cut. You may not want to do this in a cubicle with 47 other people listening, but often you can do it there very quietly, or go out in the hallway, or go outside, or do it in the privacy of your home, but do it. You will reap the benefits from the first time you try it. It's like having a terrific editor. You can hear the holes in the piece, the false notes, the rambling that needs to be trimmed.
Revise. The best draft is never the first one. Almost a hundred years ago, a writer named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, gave writers everywhere some very tough-minded advice. He said, whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it, wholeheartedly and then delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.
That phrase, murder your darlings, morphed over the years to kill your darlings. This is a phrase familiar to generations of professional writers. Revising, after all, is about brutal honesty.
Those three paragraphs may have taken you half a day to write, and you may find them absolutely stunning, but they've got to go. Revising can be painful. So is working out in a gym for three hours per day and going without food and water. Stephen King maintains that only brutal cutting and revising can produce the sound finished draft you are capable of producing.
Lillian Hellman said, nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped. At least in the first draft. Yes, it can be painful and tedious. No, even the best writers have to revise and revise. Johann Sebastian Bach said, analysis, reflection, much writing, ceaseless correction, there is all my secret.
No matter the type of content you want to get across, no matter who you want to reach inside or outside your organization, you must tell a compelling story, and use the media that the audience will pay the most attention to.
What's the difference between multi-platform and multi-media? How do you think of those two big concepts? The internet and devices that access the internet have gotten so much more powerful over the past few years. They're now able to deliver rich media experiences from virtually anywhere; from your phone, tablet, laptop, even your car, refrigerator, glasses or your watch, We hear this so often and it's become so ingrained in our lives, that we have a tendency to shrug it off.
So for the purposes of this discussion, I'm using media to refer to the type of production used to tell a content strategy story. That could be images, audio, or text. When we refer to platform, we're talking about the content's destination, mobile, tablet, or even wearable media. Multimedia then refers to the use of more than type of content. Multi-platform means you're producing content for multiple destinations. One of the first steps to producing excellent content is recognizing that every platform and every media type is different and should be treated that way.
Let's start with the media that content strategy uses. How does storytelling change across multimedia?
Different types of media deliver different experiences. Think about the story you might garner from a single photograph, for example. It's self-contained. It captures as Henri Cartier Bressond said, a decisive moment.
Now, think about multiple photographs. They offer possibilities beyond a single shot. A progression, or a series of events, maybe parts of a whole. A complete portrait of someone in various venues performing various actions. Moving images, such as motion graphics or video, allow you to dig deeper into process.
Consider a complex health story for example, about a breakthrough in targeted drug delivery. Motion graphics might be a great choice here, to be able to watch the drug travel through the body to the precise location of the tumor. Each format is useful and valid.
There are brilliant storytellers using all of these formats. But I say this with one huge caveat. The biggest mistake you can make is to set out to do a video story, an audio story, or a photo story without knowing what that story is. Format follows story, not the other way around. You've probably heard the phrase, form follows function, which is a principle in modern design and architecture. The same concept applies here but with a twist. Format follows story. Look to your story to give you clues about how to tell it. Is it a visual story? Is there a process involved? Are there people involved that could be photographed or videotaped? If so, what kind of photos and videos would that produce? Would they be any good?
Let's say I work at the lab I mentioned a minute ago. I've been working on that targeted drug delivery. The story is explanatory in nature. My job as the storyteller is to explain to you in riveting detail how this delivery system works. It travels through the body. It identifies cancerous cells, attaches the drug to the tumor, and then that attacks the unhealthy tissue leaving the patient tumor-free. I'm talking about process, I'm talking about impact. I want you to know why this treatment is better than chemotherapy, which affects the whole body. I want you to know how many lives it has the potential to save. How many people are affected by this disease? All of this is important. It's a great story and one that deserves to be out there. It's fiction for now, but we're on our way, I think.
Now, think about how that story would change if I covered it in stock images of anonymous scientists in white lab coats bent over microscopes pouring things into beakers. It seems ridiculous, but the reason you're been able to conjure those images is because we've been shown those images so many times. They're everywhere. And that's the case of someone saying, we need visuals for this story. It's about science, give me some scientists. Instead, what should happen is this story requires visuals. It demands illustration. Maybe that means an interview with the person who's been affected by this work. I want you to see the emotion on their face and hear it in their voice. Maybe it's an illustration of how this process works. An animation. Maybe it's a graphic that charts the impact this system might have. These are all ideas that come from the story itself. Not the other way around.
How do you account for the interaction and interactivity and response of your audience? This is where things get really exciting. One of the advantages of producing content for the web is that it's got interaction built into it. Think about how you might interact with a magazine, or your television. It's fairly passive, fairly limited in how you can interact. The browser is different. It requires some effort on your part. You must choose, you must click on things, or paw at them on a touch device. It's about give and take and exchange. I keep coming back to this concept of a conversation that you used, John, to describe content strategy, because interactivity gets to the heart of this idea. It allows your audience to make the most of that dialogue by actively participating. This participation can be something as simple as a series of clicks, I ask you for content, you deliver it to me. Or something as richly interactive as user generated content. Every interaction is a point of contact with your audience. Every click matters. So that means there's a, really a sliding scale. And, different types of interaction on that scale.
It's up to you to decide what type of interaction is most important. Not only for your organization, but for the story itself. Some stories you might want to tell in a linear fashion. There's a strong central narrative that will carry your audience through the content. Others might be more fragmented in nature. Consider for example a trend that plays out differently in different regions or for different age groups. You could ask for a user's zip code or for their age. And I'm saying user here as a shorthand for somebody who's engaging with your content online. The point is, you can tailor that content specifically for him or her. So let's look at a few different types of interaction on that scale.
Some of these blend together. Some of them it makes sense to blend or keep them apart. The first is a type that we're all familiar with, your basic interactivity. When you build a website, for example, you're trying to anticipate all the different types of information somebody might be seeking. Perhaps that person is simply looking for a customer support number. Perhaps they're looking for a new product that they've heard about. Everyone's familiar with the objectives you might have when you're browsing the web. But these can play out on a story telling level too. Your audience has different needs and desires. Interactivity allows you to seamlessly address those. Simultaneously by offering them a choice. It's no longer about one-size-fits-all content because we have so many different ways to produce stories across many different platforms.
The second type of interactivity I'm mentioning here takes this to the next level. It's not just about doing the research and providing information for different audience segmentations. It's about being able to anticipate and respond to your audience's needs. You could factor in someone's geolocation, for example, to provide site-specific content to that person. You could use analytics to deliver custom-made content that responds to the individual's behavior.
Next up, we have participatory, which is both highly coveted and very difficult to do well. It's when the user is participating not only on the basic interactive level, but by doing all of the things we've talked about, clicking, scrolling, calling up content. They're also actively participating in generating content. On a basic level, this could be a forum where users post their own questions and comments on a given topic. On a richer level, they could participate in the storytelling experience by telling their own stories. We've seen many companies do this very successfully recently by asking people to contribute to the creative development of a commercial, for example, or to upload a photo that represents their personal twist on a given topic. This also really helps to build community.
Now, transmedia, and I'm not talking about the company, I'm talking about something that plays out over multiple platforms, combines all of these ideas, really integrated across platforms. It's about a story that you tell on multiple devices, one part might happen on your phone, another part happens on a different screen. This is becoming more common, especially as habits change, and many people now are using a second screen to layer on a second experience the way you might look up something online about an actor while you're watching TV, or participate in a social media conversation around a live event. Transmedia is about engaging your audience at different moments in time across multiple platforms but still as part of that single experience. Finally when I'm talking about interactive experiences it's important to remember that some of this can happen face to face. You shouldn't be afraid to mix and match and maybe even consider a live event. That pulls in something happening elsewhere.
It's really important to realize that people use different devices differently at different times of day. Someone connecting on a phone first thing in the morning from bed is experiencing something very different from someone connecting on a laptop in the middle of a workday. Someone searching for your content from their phone in the middle of a retail store has a very different agenda from someone browsing from their couch on that same site at 9 p.m. You have to be ready for that and be able to understand what that means for your stories.
Moreover, think about what it is like to use each of these different devices. Think about the screen size, it's a huge difference in terms of what people are willing to commit to and how they can see. I certainly can't tell you that mobile users all behave this way and desktop users all behave another way. It's much more nuanced than that and requires a great deal of user testing and research that my colleague will talk about next.
The key from a storytelling perspective is to remember to keep the experience appropriate to the platform. Remember the constraints of a small screen when you're thinking about how to tell the story. Some things simply aren't possible when you're dealing with limited real estate. It's important to tell the story that fits. The device, both narratively and from a design perspective.
Let the content of the story guide you to the media, and then let the platform shape the scope of your storytelling. It's really a delicate balance and one that requires, again, a great deal of research, which we'll cover later in the course. So let's think about Senshu now and think about how we can bring this together, and how can they provide value to their varied audiences, and do it across platforms using everything you've covered. Sure, and when we're talking about the multiple platforms and the multiple types of storytelling, there's ample opportunity here. And I would come back first to the experiences that they're trying to create. Inspiration, identity, utilitarian. Almost too easy to do online. I will walk through the different levels of interactivity that we talked about and go through an example for each one.
On a basic interactive level, you could look at a blog. Companies have been very successful offering expert advice and opinions to help you identify your fashion within the larger scene. And tie in the products as well. On a complex interactive level, you could give them a survey, what type of outfit are you looking to buy, what's your style, what's your price point, and you could offer five or six examples that have stories that go along beside them. Anticipatory. Maybe they're connecting from a mobile device and you know they're already in your store. Very different game here, right? We can look at what they've chosen already, suggest things that might go with it. You could even interact with someone live by paging them from the store itself. On a participatory level, photos are a really easy way to go. It's low cost for them, they snap a photo of something that they find inspirational in the street, upload it to the web and contribute to the larger community to help this fashion market emerge. When we began the mook, the very first week we said the heart of content strategy is being able to have and tell a great story.
Human centered design or design thinking is as much a process as it is an action. It combines a knowledge of users like persona development with a platform for delivery that creates customized content experiences. The design process starts by identifying specific user needs and opportunities. And then, it involves rapidly prototyping potential solutions to those issues. Evaluating those solutions to see what works and what can be improved is at the heart of human-centered design. And then you iterate over and over again until you get it right. Design needs to be an unending process of improvement. Human-centered design is so much more than just type and color. It's grounded in research and user understanding. Designers need to try to study users in an anthropological way. What is that user doing? What do they see? What do they hear? When they encounter or need to encounter your content, do you have their full attention? Are their hands free? For example, consuming content on a mobile device means stopping what you're doing or at best looking at it while you look at other things, where if you're using an internet enabled device like Google Glass, then you actually are seeing the content while you're interacting with the physical world around you. And this is just the first of many devices, like watches or other ways that internet enabled devices are going to change how we consume content. Human center design is really all about identifying the delivery form for content, determining the right tone and emotion of that content, optimizing interactions that lead to the content and shaping the way the content is written or recorded. Most of all, human center design is goal oriented. The designer of that content needs to know what a successful outcome is, so that improvement can be measured.
How do you evaluate the design of content? John, the most important thing, the most important thing is to be able to measure the effect on particular users of what you do. The approach has to be both qualitative and quantitative. For example, you need to understand the motivations of the person producing the content. For example, the Drudge Report has content from all different kinds of sources. Their goal is not to have you spend a lot of time on their site, but rather to click on a link, spend time with someone else's content and then come back.
That's completely different than what Uber wants to do. Uber is a brand new digital car service. What they do is the same thing you might do on the streets of any city, which is hail a cab or call a town car. Instead, you use their smartphone application, and what they want you to do when consuming their content is believe that you will feel different or be different if you use their service. So their goals are very different, they want you to spend time, but come away with a particular feeling.
Usability testing is all about watching and listening to people in all forms, to real people, and understanding whether you've achieved what they need to do. So when should you do usability testing? You cannot do usability testing early enough or often enough, and that means testing your own designs but also your competitor's designs, so that you can create a baseline to measure your own content against theirs. Design is an iterative process. There are series of phases and all designers are going to cycle through those phases multiple times. A good design process is going to start with the idea. It will be a low fidelity, quick, rough hewn prototype that gives you an initial and broad based feedback. It moves on to a higher fidelity prototype. That looks more like the eventual product, but tests very specific features or individual actions. For example, if you wanted to test navigation, you need to have structure. Does your content have categories or groupings? If you wanted to test a layout, you need to know at least what a single screen's worth of content should look like. If you wanted to see how a user is going to move through your eventual content you need to have a pathway. So that's multiple screens.
For example, if Shen Shu had an article on how to manage your boss, we would need to know what a successful outcome would look like and determine what would the user do next. Do we want to measure influence by seeing if the user shares the article with their friends? Do we want to measure comprehension by asking a poll question that evaluates whether they understood what was written? Or, would we want to encourage the user to browse other articles or maybe even look at other products? Usability testing helps us know whether we achieved our goals and help the user achieve theirs. Without it, we'll never know if design is successful.
Whether you're testing navigation or layout or branding, any usability testing is always better than none. Usability testing is going to work at all levels of fidelity. Some of the key findings included: if a user were to look at more options before deciding what to read, they're more likely to read a story to completion. If they read for 80, 90 seconds, they reach a subconscious breaking point. They have to decide, do we want to keep reading, or do we bail out of this content? That's a really critical point to reinforce why they need to keep reading, or to direct them to more of your content, lest they to go to someone else's. There are overall two kinds of reading patterns: scanners and methodical readers. Younger readers are much more likely to be scanners, but both groups read very deeply when they find what it is that they want. More findings from this research will be available online. All right, so, so far, the process has touched on everything but one item, aesthetics. How much does that matter? Graphic design choices also matter. That's the way the content helps match the tone and voice of your brand. When you're selecting type or color, you're adding authenticity and conveying trust and credibility. The Coca Cola Journey site uses the brand's trademark visuals and branding color, like the corporate logo and the ubiquitous red, but they combine that in a way that subtly reinforces the idea that Coke is the drink of summer. The content of an article like Posh Popsicles never actually needs to mention drinking a Coke. Instead, the design and content reinforce a connection between Coke, summer and childhood. So let me summarize by saying each of you, everytime you create content, are doing it for a particular person in the audience you're trying to reach. And now you have new tools to do that.
Well, there are a number of characteristics that make social very unique. The first is that it's real time. That means that not only are people conversing in real time, but as we're going to show you, you could monitor that. And actually engage and come in to the conversation as a result.
The second is it's very content focused. And what that means is that people are looking for content that relates to their lives and the challenges they are facing both as an individual and professionally.
The third is multimedia. Which means a lot of times we think in business in terms of putting out white papers and articles, but also, video's playing a bigger and bigger role. Also it has very diverse delivery, there's multiple levels of social that will really help us get the content to the right people. The other thing is, it's very customer controlled. Actually, it's people creating sites for, to link up with other people. That's really a hallmark. And it's people who are seeking expertise on a worldwide basis is what really makes it unique.
Well, a lot of people, that when they think of social, they think of the social networks. In the United States it's like Facebook and there's, there's other ones across the, the world. The key is, social networks are basically built by companies to link up people in a social conversation. But those conversations are very wide and I, they are not really very deep, in other words, there are people talking to each other, but they are also talking to other communities.
There's another side of social that's very, very important for my business as well as a content perspective, and that is a virtual community. Virtual communities are, are formed by people linking together by themselves to deeply discuss a topic or a subject of interest to them. In other words, this is where the real deep conversations are going on, both with text and video and audio, about topics that both professionals and consumers find very, very important.
So if communities are that important, tell us why people seek them out, and what does that mean for the content creator? Actually, there's two reasons that communities form. Virtual communities form first off based on our passions. In other words, they're things that we're deeply, deeply passionate about. And very motivated to talk to other people about. And so passion's become a thing that create communities on multiple levels.
The second thing that, the reason that they happen, is based on trigger events. Now, a trigger event can be something in our lives, like, I'm going to retire, I'm getting a new job, I have to move. But it can also be external events, like there was just a hurricane or tornado or something that people feel passion about, an event that happens. Those are reasons why virtual communities come together, both in the terms of passions as well as trigger events.
So how are virtual communities important when it comes to distributing content? First, they're looking for experts who can help them on their mission, and they're also then looking for a place where they can dialogue with other community members about what they heard from the experts, and what their opinions are. And so, these communities are basically self-forming. And the thing to keep in mind is that they have multiple levels.
When I look at a social community or virtual community, basically there are three rings that are important. At the center are the experts. And these are the people that are the trusted agents and the experts in that particular topic area. The next ring out are the influentials. These are bloggers who are essentially talking to thousands of people about the very topics of interest. And they are very, very influential in terms of saying here are the topics that we need to do, here are the trends that we need to keep track of. At the outer ring of that are the occasionals. And the key is occasionals are people that are occasionally in the market and occasionally outside.
The real key is that if we put out a great piece of content, the influentials will pick it up and they will talk to tens of thousands of the occasionals and in that way an idea or a piece of content that we can go put out will actually go viral. And so they're always looking for exceptional ideas and then let it go viral through the community.
So if success in social is developing timely and, and relevant content, why and what are social visitors really seeking? Well basically there's two things that a social visitor is seeking, first off they're looking for clarity. You know help me understand what's going on, and they're also looking, seeking guidance, in other words what we want are, is someone who is an expert. Who can say, here's the things you ought to be focused on, and here's the things you ought to be considering to help make sense, in a very complex and confusing world.
So how can organizations, or me as an individual in them, determine what is particularly relevant to social visitors? Well, if you really want to make a connection with a virtual community or with a group on a, a social network, what you have to do is three things.
The first is understand the mission that they're on. Then identify the hot topics that are of interest of them and then help them filter through the amazing amount of content that's available and focus them on what is really relevant. Basically, to understand and where a virtual community is going, you have to understand the mission and find, you know, where they're, where they're moving forward and what they're trying to address within the community.
To do that, we'd like to first do a diagnosis. And that is, to monitor the social community, the virtual community, and figure out, what is their challenge that they're trying to address? What problem are they trying to solve?
The second thing is develop a guiding policy, and what that means is, how can we help them deal with it? In other words, what is the overlap of our expertise with their needs so we can drive them forward? And then based upon that, what are the coherent actions we could take? By coherent actions, I mean a set of activities, it could be putting out videos, it could be writing articles, it could be doing webinars. That would help that group move forward and address the mission that it's on.
So within that, then, or perhaps around it, what do you mean by filter and focus? Well, what we need to do is create what we're looking for is compelling content, and how do, and by compelling it means, something that is urgent for them to read and basically there are some tips that I can give you.
First off you need to have a very compelling headline. In other words, people are looking for solutions but they don't have time to look at a lot. So you want it to be something that grabs their attention. Then tell them the importance, in other words, why is it important for me to read this or to watch this video.
You want to establish your expertise. Tell them what is your right to tell them the things that will solve their challenge. And then keep it very short. What we like to do is have a short summary, stressing the importance of taking some action items. So what I like to do is to tell them some information that's useful for them, but then boil it down to three action steps. Here are the one, two, three things. That I would recommend you do that gives them a reason to move to action and it makes your content much, much more compelling. Not only tell me something, but tell me what to do as a result of it.
So, if I'm in this community and the community forms increasingly in the cloud, does that mean that I ignore the social networks? Not at all, the key thing you want to do is remember that your virtual communities are forming and, and interacting at all levels of the social cloud. So at the top you have the big social networks; those are the Facebook, Twitter and other ones here in the US, and then there are other ones, there are different ones across the world. And that's, that's the top of the pyramid. But the next level down you have the passion communities. These are where people are talking about things that are very passionate about in their lives. The next level down, we have essentially the thought leaders and the bloggers as well as the video sites. At the bottom, we have the virtual communities. And the key is, we can link up with them at all levels because they're all there.
So the question you're asking is a question I hear all the time. It's how can I make maximum impact with minimal resources? So if you're thinking about trapping, you know, while you may put out a lot of articles on your website, nobody's going to go there to read them, because the communities that are talking about it are blissfully unaware that you even exist, and so the key is that you gotta go to them.
And so by using a monitoring system, which we'll be talking about, you need to identify where there are people talking about this. There are people across the world talking about trapping, inhumane treatment to animals, and thousands of topics. And they would love to know your content exists, but they don't know that. And so what you need to do is to develop a plan to take the content that you've done and essentially go multimedia. For example, I may take an article that I wrote on trapping, why not make it into a couple of two or three minute videos, and putting them on a place like YouTube where people could watch them. And maybe I'll go to a blogger who's talking a lot about the concept of trapping, and I'll just let them know that hey this is agreat peice of, of work I've done, it would be really relavent to your article. They're looking for content to drive out to their thousands of readers. And so what you want to do, is you want to reach out to the social community. Because these virtual communities are not going to come to you, but that's how you get maximum impact.
You do a larger article, make it into a bunch of videos, make it into some blogs, you can start a blog for nothing, and then go on and tell the people that are looking for the content that you've got the content. And in that way you become an expert, and they become very engaged with you, as well as with your not for profit.
So the advice that you're giving me as part of this is, to go multimedia? Yes. You need to work smarter, not harder. And the key is, I can write things but most people don't have a time to read a big article. They don't have a time to look at a white paper, but you give me a couple minute video on what you've done in three major action items, I might listen to that while I'm having lunch in the office. I could listen to it at home very easily. And so, what you want to do is you want to realize that the world is now digital. It's no longer print. And as, and as digital, we want to think about how we can use audio assets, video assets as well as articles in print to get to the markets that we want.
And as, as you think about the younger people, they're more likely to watch a video than they are to read an article. And that's why YouTube is the second largest search site is because people are out there. So I recommend thinking about doing something big, then making a lot of smaller things, then marketing that out to the communities that are interested in it, to let them know you've done the content.
In today's world we don't have time to create 10 or 20 great pieces. So let's do one that's really super, an, an example of trapping, and then let's take that and make 30 different thing that we can market out in terms of blog articles, in terms of videos as well as many articles that people can read with three action items and essentially what we'll be doing is, we're going to be working smarter and not harder.
So traditionally, we've created content and then put it on a website or a newspaper or in a magazine. Why is that a bad strategy in today's world?
Well, because today your audience is everywhere, and they're very time constrained, and they don't have time to come to your site and read about it. We need to go to them. But how then do I connect with my audience? Well, the key thing is that we respond to different sort of messaging and so what we want to do is to develop and test some alternative messaging, and what we called differentiate messaging to figure out the best ways that we can attract them to our site.
So what do you mean by differentiated messaging? Oh by that I mean your content should really be structured around Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Essentially we respond differently to different messages. And so we need to test those out, and what I like about Maslow's is he gives us a structure to do that.
First off on, in, the, here, there are the basic needs is what Maslow addresses which are our physiological need, air and water, but more importantly from a marketing standpoint and our safety needs. We want to be part of a group, we never want to be left behind. And so when we're talking, say, about our trapping article, we may want to say be with the group, or join others in taking care of this, is a good use of that, a good message relative to Maslow. The next level up are the psychological needs which are essentially self esteem, or a need to belong. And that would be a message like, you know, keep up with all the other CEOs or be a part of a group that's doing this. We want to be a part of groups, and so a message that way will bring in people that are resonant to those sorts of messaging. The final, the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, are the self-fulfillment needs, essentially achieving one's full potential, and so those are kind of like be all you can be, you know. Really help the world become a better place, those are all, you know, self-fulfillment and self-esteem issues. They become really a big part of the Maslow hierarchy of need.
So what we want to do is to develop for any content that we have, the whole series of different short messages based on Maslov's hierarchy of needs, go on and test them, and then see the one that is really producing the most readership to our site.
Okay, so I found my best message. Where do I publish it? >> Well, the key is you want to publish it everywhere. Once you have the best message, you want to go out to the different communities that are essentially looking or discussing that topic, and you want to get out to all the different levels of social to go. So I would want to put it out on the social networking sites. I would want to tell the virtual communities. I'd want to tell the influential bloggers. I'd want to take my video and put it out on YouTube. In other words, you want to get the message out to as many people as possible, who are concerned about the topics that you're discussing, and have them come over and you know, essentially learn of your expertise, and to read of your content, or watch it.
But the other thing is mobile, and can you talk about how you see those two? Are they the same, are they different? What do you mean when you hear those words?
Well, I think that, you know, mobile is a very important component in a social strategy. Essentially it's a delivery mechanism to deliver content to people, and so one thing is, if you're building your website, especially if you're on a little budget. You need to look at how it's going to look on mobile devices and adjust that accordingly.
The other thing is for communities. We may want to build an actual mobile app that will help them on their journey and works very good in, in the trigger event communities, to essentially, hey, give them a tool that will allow them to move forward, and so we can use it as an app, but more importantly, you know, especially for a small company, Using it as a delivery device is a key part of how we get the stuff out.
Today if you have every watched young people, they're not going to to be reading a newspaper. They're going to be watching it on their iPhone and their mobile phones or Andriods. Mobile's becoming more and more important and we need to beware of that as we create our content.
And as you're creating your websites and you're creating your content, look at it on a mobile phone just to make sure that it looks right. And sometimes, a little adjustment here and there makes a huge difference when you're viewing it on that little teeny screen.
Actually there are a lot of free tools. That are very, very useful. The first one would be Social Mention. What you do is you can actually punch in any topic, any competitor, or even yourself, and you can see what's going on in social right now.
For example, if was Sinchew, one of the things I'd want to do is I'd like to know worldwide, what are people saying about men's fashion, who are the people that are talking positively about it or talking negatively about it, and with a tool like Social Mention, I can determine how strong the conversation is, where it's occurring, and so forth.
Another great tool to use is the, a tool called Alltop, and what Alltop does is you can put in any sort of a topic, let's say if I was Sinchew, I'd look at men's fashion. What it displays for you is who's talking about that now, and it shows you their actual articles and their content that you can use, and so if I was Sinchew and I was doing a site, and maybe I wanted to bring in the current best of trends in things other than men's shoes and my products, this would be a great way to do it.
How can I use social monitoring to find the experts? The key is as we talked about, experts are everywhere and bloggers, and things are the people we want to find.
So one great tool is, is a tool called We Follow, and what it does is it essentially you punch in any topic that you want to look at Any company you want to follow. And what it does is it tells you the experts ranked from 100 being the most, the strongest expert on down, well on any given topic. So what you want to do is, you want to look for the key bloggers that have thousands of followers. Those are people you want to link up with. As well as people you want to follow because they're at the center. Of these discussions, and they're the people that you know to get the content out.
One area to ensure clarity is around the area of governance. Who sets the policies? Who decides the guidelines? Who says the content is okay? If no one really owns the content, and too many people have to approve it, then you have this question of, does it get up in a timely manner? And we also need to think about succession planning, because who is going to take over the content, and worry about the content, after the initial creation?
Kristina Halvorsen builds her organization around five D's, and she uses those D's as sort of a framework. So it's discover, define, design, develop, and deploy.
So let's talk about the first D, it's discover. And it's everything that you need to do before you actually put any content out in the public's view. It's thinking about your purpose, and getting your objectives set. But this may also include some user research. And not exactly the kind of user research we think of like surveys. It may be interviews with stakeholders. So, what about your board of directors? What about your employees? What do they think about your content? But it also takes a look at your current technology, and what kind of functional requirements you're going to need, as well as, what are your competitors doing? And what are the industry trends? But all of this cannot happen without first a content audit. And the content audit needs to actually list every piece of content you already have. Because, if you have this inventory, you know you can reuse some of it. And you can know what you've put out previously. So, a content audit would include what's the subject matter? What are the keywords? Where do you find it? Where is its current URL? You also need to start out with a content style guide. And I know we've talked a little bit about this in the course. But the content style guide is a guide for you as a commissioner of content, but also as a writer of content. And you need to think about the search analytics, the legal requirements. And who is going to own each piece of this content and who is actually going to approve it. And included in that is what kind of translation requirements you need if you need extra languages.
So, let's go to define. Well, one of the first things you need to define is, how are you going to think about success? When you set your objectives, you also need to think about what is achieving those objectives. What, what does it look like? How do you think about success? If you're asked in a year from now, did it work? How are you going to analyze, yes, it worked well? So you need to set that at the beginning and have it aligned with your objectives. Another area in this particular D is actually thinking about QA, and how are you going to ensure quality assurance for your content? Which of course refers back to your governance policies. Who is actually looking at the content, in order to be sure that it meets your original objectives? And your style guide and workflow design get defined here as well. And importantly, what is your content migration plan? After your initial use of the content, what happens to it? When setting up your editorial calendars, you need to consider seasonality. And your homepage and blog topic mix. How frequently are you updating your calendar and your multimedia mix?
Design/develop/deploy: Coding.
If you outsource, you get the value of different mindsets, and skills, and you can almost more easily impose a style sheet for a voice and messaging. Sometimes it's harder to impose a style sheet for your own employees. Either way, you need to ensure digital capacity, and an ability to find your audience, and for your audience to find you. And you need to have key search terms, tags. And connect to other through partnerships, as Randy talked about in an earlier section.
Sometimes outsourcers are able to create the content and distribute it for you. And so you get the advantage of their distribution mechanism. When you keep the content creation inside, you know that the content creators really understand the brand, and the concept that you want to convey. And you can ensure that there's an appropriate time to research and to write.
Sometimes organizations think it's easier to outsource without realizing that there needs to be a layer of in house management of external vendors and an ability to explain purpose and expectations. Sometimes outsourcing content goes to public relation firms, to speech writers, professional freelance whitepaper authors. And to digital agencies.
I'm a small organization, I have a few people, maybe someone does a little video or a little writing, but I'm really tiny, how do I think through outsourcing? So small businesses especially have the problem of how to decide about content sourcing, yet oddly enough, the majority of small businesses plan on having more content. So they need to think about how they're going to do it this year, but also how are they going to do it in the years to come.
Large brands need to consider outsourcing with metrics for timely response. And how to manage many collaborators. If you insource or outsource, you need to do several things. You need to create an editorial calendar. You need to decide if you want to do some insourcing and some outsourcing, and which falls into what category. You need to be sure to investigate what you already have with your inventory audit, because, of course you can repurpose some material. You need to decide who is responsible for search engine optimization. And, you need to create a style guide. Some companies don't do this, but it's actually important whether you are having inside writers or going externally.
If you find writers you like, you really ought to go ahead and book them. For sometime in the future, because they may not be available when you want them, and you're going to be disappointed if you can't get them. So here are some essential questions to ask, if your going to decide about in-sourcing or outsourcing. Do you have a good manager of outside resources? Are you able to locate others who can create content? If you outsource, do you still have an internal person who will own the content?
And one final point, if you decide to use a celebrity, and many people do, think about an authentic and genuine person who has a relationship with the content you produce. If you do use a celebrity, also be absolutely certain whether they're international or local, that they'll be with you long enough to go the whole journey and be there for you and for your audience.
Brands are using credible journalistic content to reveal stories that will engage their customers and enlarge the relationship. Traditional media has seen this trend, and is now figuring out how to become a bridge between the brand and the customer as a host of content. Traditional media always was the middle person by hosting advertizing, and now it's figuring out how to host content as well. Brands want to use content because 70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than advertisements. And report that reading content from them makes them feel closer to the sponsor. And 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles. These results come from the international newspaper marketing association.
So, where is media in this? They have an established audience and platforms. So, sponsored content has begun to appear in traditional media in new ways. It's even spawned a new name, Native Advertising.
The idea of custom publishing has been around for a long time, but traditional media is gearing up to meet the content challenge in new ways, especially in this digital era. So what's the problem here? Well traditional media has usually maintained a separation of editorial content from the advertising teams. So there wouldn't ever be a conflict of interest. There was always worry that if you did not maintain a wall, the coverage of brand acts, whether it was a bank or a store or a non-profit. Would be tainted by the advertizing dollars that the brand spent with the media company.
The separation is still being maintained in media organizations, but the emphasis on advertizing as the primary revenue source is being offset by the opportunity to host credible content. Here are some examples of how traditional media has created new outreaches to brands to showcase the media's ability to host content. Now this content could be created either by the brand or by the journalist in the media organization. As long as it's created in a credible journalistic methodology.
The marriage of content and audience with traditional media as the bridge is one potential content strategy. Another, of course, is for the brand to build the audience directly. This is such an important point, and it's growing everywhere in the world in every kind of media. Digital, print, social. The lesson is clear. Use branded content, but be absolutely transparent about where it came from so your audience can trust you.
The global nature of digital transmission means laws that rely on boundaries, have enforcement issues. There is a world intellectual property organization, WIPO. Which is in Switzerland and is an agency of the United Nations. With a 186 member states, and works to encourage creative activity, promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world.
Surprisingly, the U.S. Constitution was the first national document to enshrine the right of intellectual property. In article one, it says that Congress shall have power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Now, when we talk about intellectual property, we're including property, patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks. The history of intellectual property is fun. It starts with the ancient Greek Sybarites. They loved to experiment with recipes and they invented new dishes. So they created a monopoly on a particular delicious dish, and this becomes the first known instance of intellectual property. The ancient Romans began trademarking guild protections. And in renaissance Italy, there was a limited monopoly granted for transporting marble across a river.
Patents actually do grant protection for an invention, but disclosure is a must. The word patent actually means open. And patents will extend for 20 year terms. And you can get patents for a process, for designs, even for plant invention. One interesting fact about patents is they can't be injurious. So for example, you can't get a patent to counterfeit US dollars.
Copyright comes from a 1976 statute in the U.S. and it's for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. But corporations can be authors too. And that has a different time frame, usually 95 years from first publication. One of the interesting things about copyright is that it's automatic. You can copyright your own material with a C inside of a circle. There's also elements of fair use under some national laws.
So under the US law, you can use copyrighted material as long as it abides by four elements. One of which is how much you take of the original material. And another is whether you've transformed the use in some way. The reason for fair use is that newspapers may want to quote someone, or may want to use a couple lines of poetry, or other opportunities to actually use someone else's work. Another word within the intellectual property canon is trademarks. This is a unique identifier and comes originally from a 1452 London swordsmith, who wanted to make sure that his blades were particularly identified as coming from his shop. You can trademark words, slogans, designs, pictures. They can be for particular or generic items. It's rare that one can get protection for words that have common everyday use. So Apple or Windows have different meanings. So it's much easier to get protection for invented words, which is why you see many companies think of new words when they're naming new products. But also, as you think about your content, if you want it to have a particular word, you might want to be thinking about how could you legally protect it.
Now, another term within intellectual property is trade dress, or a nontraditional mark. And a good example is the blue box from Tiffany. It's instantly known that this represents the famous store. So as you think about intellectual property you must always be aware of the need to protect your content, and in all marketing and in all content creation, you need to consult your legal counsel. So be sure that you do not infringe on someone else's property. >> This is such an important topic. Content is moving rapidly around the world. We've given you a framework that uses language from the US intellectual property not because it applies. It's even changing here. But because it helps makes you literate about the ideas behind literary property wherever you are. The takeaway needs to be whether you get it online, the government, or professionals, find out what applies in your situation to that precious content that you've worked so hard to help develop.ar