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Content Strategy and Location-Based Marketing

Tuesday night, the inimitable SchneiderMike, senior VP of the digital incubator at Allen & Gerritsen, held court at Meadhall for a meeting of Content Strategy New England, talking location-based marketing as it relates to content strategy. He literally co-wrote the book on location-based marketing, and his passion for the topic is infectious.

Despite the noise and the distraction of about a thousand beers on draft, Mike dropped a ton of valuable insights, some of which I have captured below:

  • The biggest opportunities for content strategy beyond the checkin come from the semantic web. How can LBS leverage data — history, tips, friends, etc. — to enhance context and create more informed user experiences?
  • People expect an experience around a place. What are the content types within an experience? Is place a content type? A place has structure — how do we define that?
  • A huge challenge for content strategy around location is fragmentation. A place can exist in multiple databases. As much as possible, we need to own the standardization of our venue data across all platforms and enable our content to be served across all of them.
  • Food for thought: there’s no W3C standard for location. Relatedly, we need to expand our editorial style to account for location.
  • We need to start thinking of the web as a giant database.
  • Context, context, context!
  • Some services of note:
    • Ditto – An app that addresses your intent, most relevant at or before the decision point for what you want to do, semantically leveraging structured content and metadata to make recommendations.
    • Forecast – Another app centered around intent, sharing your upcoming plans with friends.
    • Über – Request a car direct to your location
    • Where
  • “Media organizations have a shit ton of content,” and they’re adapting it for LBS.
  • Apps should be smarter by looking at checkin history, friends, etc to make recommendations. Draw conclusions. Leverage rating data against location to make real time recommendations.
  • Can content enter the Uncanny Valley and be too participatory? There are good and bad uses. Be relevant and useful. Don’t overreach beyond reason.
  • “We’re all layered.” As content strategists, we need to understand these layers and how individuals want to use those layers. What channels make sense for which content/engagement? Use the right channel.
    • We need to wrangle these data streams in a social CRM.
  • Re: daily deals, these will continue. But we need to make deals feel like content
    • We need to push smarter, more relevant deals — things we know they want. Groupon is a Ponzi scheme. Apps like Level Up type stuff will grow, integrate into point of sale system.
  • Foursquare does not look at itself as a media channel, and it needs to. Brands need to know impressions and “dones” (for tips). That’s how we’ll get to effectiveness. How effective is History Channel? Who knows?
  • Checking in to TV shows is gaining in popularity, as a means to find others who share your passion.
    • There is multiple screen convergence happening while watching television.
    • Hashtags add context and community to the viewing experience.
  • Checkins are an unnatural behavior; there must be a great motivation to do so.

A lot of food for thought. Thanks, SchneiderMike! Want more? Check out this cheat sheet excerpted from “Location-Based Marketing for Dummies,” including the five rules of location-based marketing.

1 Comment

Georgy, November 10th 2011 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Business, Content, Social Media

Mandy Brown and Erin Kissane at Content Strategy New England: A Pragmatic Approach to Editorial Style

Last night, Mandy Brown (left) and Erin Kissane spoke at Content Strategy New England on “A Pragmatic Approach to Editorial Style.” Brown is co-founder and editor for A Book Apart, contributing editor for A List Apart, and community and support manager at Typekit. Kissane is an independent content strategist and editor based in NYC and Portland, Oregon, and a former editor at A List Apart magazine.

Kissane started by comparing the process of creating a website to wearing braces — after you get everything straightened out, the braces come out but you’re asked to wear a retainer — which almost nobody wants to do (or actually does). So a style guide could end up being like a retainer — something designed to help keep your content on the straight and narrow, but easy to shove in a desk drawer and forget about. Kissane said a good style guide should really function like a railing on a stairway you can grab when you’re about to fall.

Ultimately, a style guide should help create consistency. Here’s how it can do that:

  • It provides guidance on voice, style and tone. While content strategy has moved beyond this, it’s still essential. An organization needs to define its voice, outline any tonal shifts and elaborate on its style (formal? not formal?).
  • It defines mechanics and length. This includes spelling and capitalization, length of pages and headlines or instances where one should refer to a house manual (e.g. Chicago, AP)
  • It clarifies how we structure our links. Do we links nouns or verbs? What kind of relationships should links show? This is a codification of human judgment in order to help people make calls down the line.
  • In the case of images, a style guide distinguishes communication from decoration. Content should communicate, and images are no exception. Is this achieved through screenshots, diagrams, information visualizations, illustrations?
  • You need to balance consistency with a healthy variance, varying appropriately from channel to channel.

What happens when style guides go wrong?

  • It is simply not in use.
  • The style guide is isolated, either physically (e.g. a print copy shoved in a bookcase somewhere) or  by being created by a separate team, individual or consultant.
  • It’s frozen – it doesn’t grow due to a hyper-level of detail that does not make for  easy editing, or only one person is capable of suggesting and implementing edits.
  • The content of the style guide is arbitrary or mechanical, i.e. reflecting one person’s pet peeves or going to an absurd level of technical details.
  • The guide descends from on high and doesn’t match the realities or meet the needs on the ground.

How can a style guide stay flexible and adapt? How can people feel ownership and investment?

  • Make the style guide appropriate to the needs of the organization. Fit the existing content creation process and workflow.
  • Strive for consistency, not uniformity. Consistency in style will help the reader move through the content. Uniform content is dull to both read and create.
  • Create principles, not rules. Share these principles to help people understand why the style guide says certain things.
  • Provide real-life examples across all applicable channels, showing how the rules play out in a way people can grasp.

How can a style guide help our content remain authentic?

  • Personality matters. Help convey a sense of character — anthropomorphizing the characters may help achieve this (“our organization wears these clothes and says these things”).
  • Be honest, because people will find out if you’re lying and they will call you out. Case in point: the Cooks Source scandal. A style guide should help define who you are and encourage transparency, which will help inform future responses and communications.
  • No bullshit. Eliminate jargon and trendy language. Just do it. Unsuck it. No mercy. Compile lists of words common to both the organization and the industry and banish them.

How do you integrate a style guide into the fabric of an organization?

  • Put the guidelines where people do their work. Post it on the organization’s wiki or intranet. Weave components into page templates or build them directly into the CMS. Don’t be Clippy, but do provide timely and relevant support.
  • Use your own content in the style guidelines.

How do you convert style guide users into style guide evangelists, in order to help it live on?

  • Building off the idea of sharing principles and not rules, be sure to communicate the why along with the how, so people can appreciate the rationale rather than just blindly follow a process.
  • Ease the adoption process. A style guide should not be delivered with a thud, but rather adopted over time. Let people know who to ask when questions come up. Offer a presentation or a Q&A to explain the style guide for people and allow for feedback and questions.
  • Develop a plan for ownership. How can people contribute to help the style guide change over time? There should be an owner/point person for the style guide, but the time and resources to do the job need to be built into their job description.
  • Plan for evolution. Create a procedure to allow the style guide to adapt and change. Host it in a wiki, where discussion modules can help people collectively evolve the document. Establish a decision-making process. Develop a process for communicating changes to the guide.

How do style guides tie into broader content strategy efforts?

  • Strategy and tactics work best hand in hand, and having a strategy behind your style guide will help it live longer and be more useful.
  • A style guide can be a gateway drug into deeper content work. It is a discrete goal that most people can understand. If they buy into the process of developing a style guide, it may be easier to get them behind more nitty-gritty content projects.

Some good points came up in the Q&A:

  • How can you measure the effectiveness of a style guide? Think of it in terms of measuring the effectiveness of the content. If you ask users to complete reading comprehension tests, how do they perform? Can you measure its effectiveness in terms of recovered productivity?
  • One example of a great style guide? The Economist.
  • Design and content styles should work together from a shared set of principles. Much like you may A/B test functionality and images, consider A/B testing words, as well.
  • Kissane and Brown talked about the idea of agile content development (much like agile software development) and the value of an iterative process (though it works better in-house).
  • When it comes to employing a style guide for distributed publishing processes (e.g. multiple contributors to a blog), including some potentially reluctant writers, they pointed out that the process of writing helps you understand what you are making and what you did. It helps to have an opportunity to synthesize an idea to make sure you understand and can communicate it.

Thanks, Mandy and Erin, for an engaging and informative talk!

Stairwell photo by estherase/Flickr Creative Commons

3 Comments

Georgy, November 16th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Content

Guest Post: Content Strategy is Simply Librarianship

Today, I hope you will enjoy this guest post by my friend Lis Pardi. We both attended Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy New England talk a couple of weeks ago, and I thought her perspective on the event, coming from an information science background, was an interesting complement to mine, which comes from a writing/content creation background. I plan on posting more later on about content strategy from a writer’s perspective, but for now, here is Lis’ point of view. What do you think?

Two weeks ago, I went to the Content Strategy New England meet up Georgy talked about in a previous post. As Kristina Halvorson led the Q&A, I felt the same excitement as Georgy about the community. Halvorson talked about organizing content, letting the end-user guide you to the information they want, creating content solutions that allow for growth and other tenets of her profession. After about 10 minutes of listening to her explain the basics of content strategy, I couldn’t take it any more. I pulled out a pen and wrote in the margin of my newspaper, “This is all librarianship!”

As a recent graduate with an MS in Library and Information Science, this was easy to spot. Librarianship is actually everywhere, in professions you’d never expect. There are librarians in most law firms and working for nearly every orchestra and museum you’ve ever heard of. And then there are sneaky librarians with titles like “information architect,” “usability designer,” “ontologist” and “content strategist.” The sneaky group usually identifies themselves as “information scientist” so they can drop that pesky word “library” (and gain an extra $30,000 in their salary).

As I begin my job search, I’ve been alternating between saying I’m a librarian and an information scientist. At tech conferences, I insist on introducing myself as a librarian even though I have no intention to work in a library. I want to get people used to the fact that there are more things we can organize than books.

There’s a problem with the way we librarians have managed our image. We’re responsible for showing people that most of us aren’t bespectacled bun-wearers anymore and that librarians are more than paper pushers. We are experts in search and finding your information needle in a haystack — and the internet is the biggest haystack anybody’s ever seen.

Saying I’m a content strategist or a usability designer, knowledge manager or an IA is limiting. I am a librarian, and I will organize everything.

Lis Pardi is an information scientist and librarian for hire. Contact her via her website or follow her on Twitter.

Photo by naughty architect/Flickr Creative Commons

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Georgy, June 10th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Content, Events

Kristina Halvorson at Content Strategy New England

On May 24, I attended my first Content Strategy New England event, organized by my friend and higher ed partner-in-crime Rick Allen. The speaker was none other than Kristina Halvorson, author of the book on the subject, Content Strategy for the Web (Amazon affiliate link). It was hard to turn down an opportunity to hear her speak, for free, to a small but enthusiastic audience at the lovely Microsoft NERD.

While I have long identified as a content person, the idea of “content strategy” as a field is new to me (and everyone else, apparently!). But as she described the tactics and methods of practicing content strategy, it just felt like common sense — at least to me.

Here are some of Halvorson’s points about content strategy. I won’t attempt to define the entire practice, just a few points that stood out to me:

  • It’s about having a content lifecycle
  • It requires thinking about the substance of your messaging. What are you trying to say, and what do you want people to leave with or act upon?
  • Content should be findable, usable, contextual
  • Establishing and adhering to workflow and governance are critical. This is not maintenance; this is human oversight. Who are the decision makers? Who has buy-in?
  • A proper content audit and assessment takes into consideration not only the content itself, but skill sets, workflow and politics.
  • No one cares about content strategy; the term means nothing. It may be best to not even mention it. Instead, focus on identifying pain points and key performance indicators, then introduce the solutions (which, of course, would be functions of content strategy).
  • A lot of selling content strategy involves switching places. You, as the content strategist, need to appreciate the client’s reality and mediate between it and a user’s reality. The client needs to find an objective place where (s)he can understand the problems with their site. It’s up to the content strategist to ask the right questions that raise those problems into view and demonstrate the problems to the client.
  • Content strategy is not just about web copy; it also ties into social media channel upkeep.
  • Content strategy would fail without collaboration. It cannot happen in a vacuum.
  • By evaluating search engine usage, you can discover a site visitor’s natural language and use that to inform content strategy.

The thing is, many of us have been doing this for a while. Now, it has a name, a hashtag, a meetup group and something of an identity. Its importance can’t be understated, but it often falls by the wayside. Sometimes,  you need to hype and brand something to give it the recognition and value it deserves, even if it’s nothing new.

One thing that Halvorson said that really resonated with me was that content strategists should, at heart, be writers. After all, it’s about effective communication, and in one sense or another, that is a writer’s stock and trade. I also appreciated that she believes no one can be an expert at everything, and we need to find our niche and collaborate with the experts in other areas. But I also believe (as I expect Halvorson would agree with) that a little knowledge can go a long way, and knowing enough about related web disciplines to know the right questions to ask, and to understand why a no means no and a yes means yes, can be very valuable. To that end, I know just enough about server infrastructure to be dangerous.

The best part of the event was that it was question-driven. Halvorson didn’t give a spiel, then leave 10 minutes for questions. The hour and a half she spent talking was almost entirely dedicated to addressing concerns and offering solutions, ideas and perspective to people’s concerns. It felt more like a private workshop than a speaker event, and that’s pretty special.

The content strategy community assembled at the NERD struck me as committed, engaged and hungry — hungry for understanding, education and collaboration. It was a great group of people and an awesome event, and I look forward to future gatherings and connections.

Amid all the talk about content as king, here — finally — is the sewing circle working feverishly to make sure that the emperor has clothes.

Photo by 42Jellos/Flickr Creative Commons

1 Comment

Georgy, June 1st 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Content, Events

New Habits, New Horizons

I won’t be coy about it — I am definitely in the midst of shoring up my identity and tweaking my presence online. Not for any specific reason, other than my own personal branding and reputation management. This very blog is one manifestation of that effort. But what else am I doing? There are a few little changes in my online behavior here and there that I have made, and I’ll be interested to see how they bear out. I thought I’d share them to see what other people think.

LinkedIn - Spurred in part by Chris Brogan’s recent posts about efficient uses of LinkedIn, I’ve put in some time over the past few days tidying up my LinkedIn profile. (This article also gave me lots of good ideas.) This has included:

  • Reaching out for new connections
  • Soliciting some recommendations (although I need to go back and write more of my own)
  • Updating my profile (including my summary, interests and headline)
  • Beginning to use LinkedIn status updates (I tried subscribing to a feed of my contacts’ updates but there is a lot of noise. Sigh.)
  • Making sure my resume is aligned with the one on georgycohen.com
  • Making sure this new blog was being ported over via their spiffy WordPress plugin.

Still on my to-do list are diving more deeply into LinkedIn Groups and tackling some questions over at LinkedIn Answers. While we’re on the topic, do you want to connect on LinkedIn? (Use the e-mail address linkedin at georgycohen dot com.)

Meetups - A significant component of your online presence is your offline presence. For a while, I was going to a lot of meetups. Then I burned out. I think, in part, it was because I wasn’t being very selective. I also learned that meetups consisting solely of people with vaguely aligned interests in a room with a bar aren’t really my style. I like a theme, and preferably some sort of a talk or presentation. Even if I don’t broaden my network, I at least want to learn something. So, with all this in mind, I’m hitting the circuit again. This week, I attended a Content Strategy New England meetup, where I saw Kristina Halvorson speak. Next week, I’m going to “Where’s the Bus 2.0: The Wait is Over” and perhaps another CSNE event.

Public Speaking and Presenting – I’ve realized that I need to gain more experience and confidence in this area. My Ignite Boston experience really lit a fire under me, in that respect. I can’t wait for Podcamp Boston, since that is a great opportunity to expand my presenting/speaking experience. I’m also pitching a few presentations in the higher ed arena and toying with few other ideas for public speaking opportunities. I don’t expect overnight success, but I am focused on moving forward and finding new ways of getting my name and ideas out there.

Google Reader – I love Google Reader. It’s my morning (and afternoon and evening) paper. It’s my informational train station. But I’m increasingly using its social functions, in the hopes that bonding over content can build more meaningful relationships. I try to make a habit of regularly browsing through the articles shared by People I Follow (even though it can be tempting to make those the first thing Marked as Read). It gets me out of my own habits and headspace to see what interests and motivates other people. Even if it is not directly relevant to my professional or personal interests, what I read there at the very least gives me additional perspective into the person who shared the content. I’m also making a point to share more of the content I read via Google Reader. I am not a big fan of bookmarklets, but the Note for Reader one has proven immensely useful for bridging the gap between Reader and my browser.

What changes and tactics have you tried to shape your online habits and identity? What works for you, and what doesn’t?

Photo by vespar_avenue/Flickr Creative Commons

1 Comment

Georgy, May 27th 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Content, Meta, Personal Branding