Does your website have similarities to a Flea Market?  Learn how Content Strategy can help.

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—Ian

As a part of my preparation for 2010 I finally cleaned up my bookmarks. In the process of doing so I got to revisit some great agencies that I forgot about. Sleep-deprived, I culled that list and combined it with some Smashing Magazine links and a Hongkiat list focused on top design and curated my own Top Digital Agency list. After being being blown away by the work I went back and checked what sort of presence those agencies had on Twitter. Surely more data and different agencies would deliver different results but I think the numbers are interesting.

Tweets

Avg # of tweets = 327 (minus Weightshift’s Tweets = avg. drops to 214)

% of agencies with no Twitter accounts = %36

% of agencies with <100 Tweets = %60

% of agencies with >1000 Tweets = % .06

Followers

Avg # of followers 1491 (minus Big Spaceship’s Followers = avg. drops to 951)

% of agencies with <100 Followers = %47

% of agencies with >1000 Followers = %40

% of agencies with >10000 Followers = % .03

Following

Avg # being followed 264 (- Sevenedge’s Follows = avg. drops to 171)

Number of agencies Following more than they are being Followed = 4

Number of agencies with >1000 Followers not following anyone = 3

Miscellaneous/Pet Peeves

Number of annoying, long-loading flash intros = 3

% of out of date copyright footers = %36

Last year I harped on how Content Strategists need to be well rounded in all areas.  A similar strategy should be applied to digital agencies and Social Media.  When I didn’t find a Twitter account for an agency, or found one that lacked significant tweets or followers, right or wrong I took them less seriously. While some may prefer calls, emails or form submits (a turn-off) what works for potential customers, especially given the intra-agency work seems more imperative than what we like. It used to be you could be a great _______ and someone else did the marketing and selling.  9,170,000,000 Tweets (and counting) are changing your brand’s perception with or without your help. Soon the rule will be: Tweet first, Google second. Long live the generalist and his ever-longer list.

What are your thoughts about being an agency and having an active Twitter account?

Oh, and Follow me @eatmedia if you like.

—Ian

A few weeks ago, I decided to prepare and can my own pickles for the first time. Without an expert canner to guide me, I obsessively read up on the dos and don’ts of pickling and canning.

I found the process to be quite easy and enjoyable, as long as I adhered to the steps. Back in the office, I triumphantly told Jonathan of my success, and he said, “there must be some sort of connection between pickling and content strategy.”

There is. And here they are—what preparing pickles can teach content writers:

1. Do your prep work. My grandmother was an excellent pickle-maker, and her secret weapon to ensure delicious and crunchy pickles is an ice bath. Before you even get started on the pickling, you need to soak the sliced cucumbers in ice for at least three hours. You can’t rush this part of the process, even if it does eat up most of your Saturday afternoon.

Before you start writing, you need to put in the time and do the essential research that will inform your writing. Thoroughly read your background sources, and spend the time referencing additional sources that will strengthen your piece. You want to put in this time BEFORE you get going—if you don’t, you might end up with a less-than-appetizing finished product. No one likes soggy pickles, and no one likes less-than-compelling content.

2. Don’t forget to wear your gloves. Having decided that my pickles should be both hot and sweet, I spent the better part of an hour carefully slicing countless jalapeño and poblano peppers. I was more careless than careful, and the oils from the peppers seeped into the pores on my hands, and painfully burned for the rest of the afternoon.

When writing potentially hazardous content, be sure to wear gloves. If you don’t, you might continue to feel the pain even after the piece is complete.

3. Sterilize. If you don’t wash, dry and sterilize your mason jars and lids, you could end up with poisonous pickles.

Same goes for content writing: you want to make sure that your piece is germ-free, clean and entirely your own content. Even the slightest bit of unwanted substance puts the entire jar at risk.

4. Listen for the ‘pop.’ When your mason jars are packed full of pickles-to-be, you place the sealed jars in a hot water bath and boil for 10 minutes to process.

After carefully removing the jars from the hot water with a pair of tongs, they’ll begin to cool. Over the next hour or so, you’ll hear a loud ‘pop’—which means that the jars are air-tight, and the seals have taken properly.

Before your draft becomes a completed piece, you need to make sure that it ‘pops’ as well. Read the piece aloud. Does it have that Je ne sais quoi that makes the article shine, or do you need to take a step back and re-process?

5. Store in a cool, dark place. Being a pickler requires patience. After you have canned the pickles, you need to let the jars sit for at least two weeks to let the spices infuse the cucumbers. You could eat them earlier, but they probably wouldn’t taste much like—or nearly as good as—properly aged pickles.

Writers rarely have the luxury of sitting on a piece for an extended period of time. Unless you’re on a tight deadline, do allow any time you can spare apart from your writing. Be patient. Walk away. Sleep on it and revisit in the morning with a clear head. You’ll see something that you didn’t before.

Your pickles (and your content) will thank you.

—Wendy Joan

(Jalepeno photo by Beau B, mason jar photo by Brown Eyed Bombshell, Pickle photo by Wendy Joan)

This video is titled “The Right Way to Wireframe”. I think there are many ways if the end result meets/exceeds the client’s business objectives—but it rocks nonetheless. The content strategy exercise and wireframing exercise are/should be inextricably linked, it’s all content we are experiencing but it is an experience we are creating.

—Ian

Kevin Allen has done some great writing for Eat Media in the past. In this video he portrays writers 1-4 on MyRagan TV

“So, I think I know what I’m talking about there…Sparky.”

The comments on the video are classic.

—Ian

You’re making your readers angry. Stop it.

Content strategists often get very wrapped up in the concrete deliverables of the content creation and production process, and that’s understandable, because they are the sorts of things that are easy to make into line items in a proposal budget. If there is a sexy part of content strategy, it’s content creation and delivery.

But the final piece of the content strategy puzzle is often the part that gets the least thought and fewest resources once the sexy part of a project is “completed.” Of course we are talking about site maintenance, one aspect of content governance.

In the olden days, many sites often had a “contact webmaster” link that would often open an new email, or send you to some onerous form, or worst of all, send you to an FAQ page that had the sorts of questions that no one had ever or would ever ask.

Even if you were able to send a message about your problem, the chance of getting any sort of meaningful reply was vanishingly small, if you received a reply at all (That’s right, I’m talking to you, Newsvine. You’ve never responded to TWO queries about my account. But hey, I’m just one more ANGRY user who no longer partakes of your product.)

But all those user inquiries do go somewhere (even if it’s an unmonitored mailbox or some sort of auto-reply bot), and how those emails are handled is going to go a long way toward making your users happy. Anytime you can get a kind human response out of a computer means a lot to the puzzled and frustrated human on the other end.

Here are several tips on how to be the best website manager you can be:

1.    Know thy CMS. Chances are if you are the one checking the system admin inbox you are also the person updating the content on a regular basis. If you were really lucky, you got to participate in the design and beta testing of the site, so you’ll have fixed many of the UX flaws that might have made your visitors angry. But, inevitably, there were items that got pushed to “YourSite 2.0” and some wonky features that got left “as is” because no one wanted to go to the trouble/expense of fixing them, rationalizing that, “people would figure them out.” Regardless of how you ended up where you are (and how bleak that landscape might be), learn your platform inside and out. Know how the content needs to be tweaked in the back end so it looks and performs its best on the front end. Whether you’re using Joomla, Umbraco, or, God forbid, RedDot, you must become one with your CMS.
2.    Be a problem solver. The vast majority of people aren’t writing in to pay you a compliment. They have an issue. Give them an answer. And if you can’t give them an answer, or if you know the answer to their question isn’t going to make them any happier, apologize, sincerely.
3.    Take accountability to the next level. If you see the same issue cropping up over and over again, don’t blame the users; take a hard look at your site and fix what you need to in order to create a better and less frustrating user experience.
4.    Become an expert in the site’s subject matter. If you are running a site about cars, you better know your bias-plys from your radials. This is going to make your job easier in the long run and is going to make the provision of excellent customer service faster and more reflexive.
5.   Be nice. You will be asked stupid questions and you will be asked them over and over again. It may be the 10,000th time you’ve been asked something, but to the person on the other end, it may be their first experience with your site. Make sure it’s not their last.
(And for the truly off-the-wall questions, have a sense of humor. Years ago, while working at a ski resort in Colorado, questions like, “At what altitude do the deer turn into elk?” and “When it gets really busy, do you use both side of the chairlift?” were commonplace. Roll with it.)
6.    Be open to new ideas. You will receive a lot of suggestions about how to improve your site. Some of them will actually be good. Politely thank everyone and quietly implement the best ideas.
7.    Know when to escalate. Some people will be asking about your products and services. You should consider this an epic fail for your site and something that rates pushing the panic button if it happens too often. If people are contacting the webmaster and asking how to buy your products, you have a huge UX problem.

Most of what you need to know about being a website manager you learned in kindergarten. Be kind, helpful and patient. Listen. Share your knowledge. This is all basic stuff, but considering how rare it is to encounter it in the wild, it certainly deserves another mention.

—Jonathan
@bentpiton

Photo of The Minotaur and The Hare by Jim Linwood

Hiring is easy on paper. I am usually really good at hiring but this year I selected an employee that wasn’t right for our team. In retrospect I knew he wasn’t right after a few days of working with him but I had deadlines around the corner and no other candidates on the radar. After a month of deadline chasing it was crystal clear it wasn’t going to work—he knew it, I knew it and the rest of the employees knew it.  I compounded an already bad problem by keeping him on a project because of an impending deadline. Nothing makes a potential employee watch You Tube all day quicker than the combination of being paid hourly and knowing you aren’t getting hired FT. This mistake on my part led to: two late/micromanaged projects and  lots of do-over’s.

Scope Management involves more than saying, “that’s going to cost you extra.” I want our company to do great work. I want us to work on projects that allow our employees to shine and leave our clients thrilled. But the reality is when you are starting out you:

a. Need to build up your reputation and pay your bills

Which leads to…

b. Going above and beyond

And…

c. Sometimes doing too much out of scope work.

Scope definition at the outset of a project is usually clear if you did your homework. Scope-creep near the end of projects is the silent resource/profit killer that isn’t always as obvious. I said yes to out of scope work on a number of projects this year that neither made the client happy, saved time or made the project better.

A few times this year I let my frustrations become visible to clients and employees. When I give 100% and my 100% isn’t good enough I get flustered. When I should have given 100% but was pulled in too many directions I get frustrated—see the difference. There were a few meetings I was on where clients changed their mind, or vendors came unprepared, and my tone went to absolute shite. Passion may beget perfection. But unburnt bridges beget friendlier drivers. Ya know?

Not committing enough time to marketing and handshaking. I wear many hats at Eat Media, such is the life of a business owner and such is the life of business in its 2^nd year.  There are long-nights, business lunches, fires to douse, servers to reboot, proposals to re-do and credit card machine salesman to say “Please take me off your list,” to. During the past year I have been in one of two places—my desk and the whiteboard wall—good for work, bad for the sales pipeline. Face-to-face marketing and handshaking are absolutely necessary and I did not do a great job of being out there in 2009. I relied too much on our blog and Twitter and not enough on meeting people and creating relationships in person.

Not sticking to my strengths. Creative/CS and big picture strategy are my strengths. Content Strategy forces you to make many disparate pieces fit together and that jazzes me.  Unfortunately great Content Strategy takes time and time management can be a start-up’s worst enemy. You need to have laser like focus but be able to drop and roll for a fire at any moment. Once you have the fire under control you need to hand off the hose. I spent too many nights in 2009 editing XML, making love to Photoshop and making sitemaps.

Growth requires honesty. What were your 2009 mistakes?

—Ian

@eatmedia

This past weekend, I undertook the laborious task of sorting through stacks of The New York Times from 2009 and late 2008. From those countless newspapers, I cut out 21 stories, and whittled down the list to bring you what I consider the best of the best stories I read over my morning coffee this past year.

In Booming Gulf, Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies

By Katherine Zoepf, December 21, 2008

Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. ‘I’ve been doing this for four years,’ she said, ‘and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’

In a journalistic sea of black burqa news reporting, a refreshing look into the profession of choice for young, working women in the Persian Gulf—flight attendants.

Ex-Detainee of U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal

By Jane Perlez, Raymond Bonner and Salman Masood, January 5, 2009

Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months.

As the country anxiously prepared to welcome a new president (who vowed to close Guantanamo Bay within a year), The New York Times published this terrifying look into the six-year imprisonment of a Pakastani man never charged with a crime.

Iraqis Snap Up Hummers, Seeing Them as Icons of Power

By Rod Nordland, March 29, 2009

In a country with at least 20,000 Humvees and a war-weary population, who would think there would be a market for a civilian version?

An interesting look into the Baghdadi elite, and the not-so-culturally-different idea that driving an oversized SUV exudes wealth, power and confidence.

No Job and Soon No Benefits, Race to Help Son Stay Cancer Free

By Kevin Sack, April 20, 2009

‘You just feel that you’re at a loss, that you’re at your wits’ end.’ I ask myself, ‘Do I really have to lose my home to save my son’s life?’

When Danna Walker found out that she had lost her job with DHL, she was more worried about finding health insurance for her 21-year-old son who has been cancer-free for just one year, than putting food on the table.

This story made me want to send it to every member of the House and Senate, because if the Walker’s story can’t swing votes, nothing will.

You’re Name’s Not on Our List? Change It, Beijing Officials Say

By Sharon LaFraniere, April 20, 2009

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much. That is also why the government wants her to change it.

A new law in China requires each of it’s 1.3 billion citizens to replace their handwritten identity cards with computer-readable ones, Chinese citizens with uncommon names might not have any choice but to change their names.

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut

By Charles McGrath, May 15, 2009

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes.

Did Jack Kerouac invent fantasy sports? Doubtful, but the writer kept a secret pastime that none of his Beat counterparts had ever heard about: he “obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.”

Made in India, But Published In New Haven

By Peter Applebome, May 31, 2009

Alert readers of The New Haven Advocate and its sister publications in Hartford and Fairfield County may have noticed a consistency among the bylines in its newest issue: Annie Rani, Dev Das, Nidhi Sharma, Asmi Rana, Neha Bhayana, Shreya Sanghani, Vijeta Bhatia and others.

Peter Applebome’s “Our Town” column on outsourcing local journalism was the catalyst for a previous Eat Media Blog post. An interesting—albeit depressing—look at how the global job pool might very well be eliminating the need for local, on the ground reporters.

E. Coli Path Shows Flaw in Beef Inspection

By Michael Moss, October 3, 2009

Ground beef is not a completely safe product. . .

This article has my pick for the most-informed scare tactic report of the year. As a self-disclosed vegetarian, countless meat-eaters brought up this article to me, vowing to never eat ground beef (or, at least, non-organic ground beef) again.

—Wendy Joan

(Writer’s note: All headlines mentioned in this article are from The New York Times’ print edition. Photo by fraley_tera)

I ate my first Hershey’s Chocolate Bar in many moons the other day, and from the first bite, I knew something was wrong.

Hershey’s chocolate has always had a cakey texture to it. I could have identified it in a blind taste test no problem. But this bar wasn’t quite right. It was close, but an oily texture had crept in and was taking the edge off the sweetness. My palette was not fooled and it was not amused.

So I took a look at the ingredient list to see if something looked off. It did. One of the sub-ingredients for the milk chocolate was the acronym PGPR. A quick search of the Internet revealed those letters to stand for polyglycerol polyricinoleate. It has been many years since I have taken organic chemistry, so it was unnerving to see a completely unidentifiable compound had migrated into an American icon, the Hershey Bar. My Hershey Bar. The Hershey Bar I would purchase as a treat while I was living abroad because it tasted like home. Say what you will about the quality of Hershey’s chocolate, but it’s one of those things that should never change. It’s American comfort food. The menu at McDonalds may change in countries around the world, but a Hershey Bar was a Hershey Bar no matter where you bought one.

And now it was not. It had been adulterated, and in a very underhanded way.

Another glance through the Internet revealed that PGPR is a non-ionic surfactant made from castor beans that in 2006 was added to the chocolate recipes of both Hershey’s and Nestle as a substitute for the more expensive cocoa butter. Now we were getting somewhere. My chocolate bar had been injected with ersatz cocoa butter with the hope that few people would notice. (I can totally understand Hershey not wanting to have PGPR spelled out on the package since it contains the word ricin, a poison that’s also derived from castor beans.)

But I had noticed and I was pissed off. I headed for Twitter to tweet my dismay to Hershey, but, to my astonishment, Hershey isn’t on Twitter. More swearing ensued. A quick look at Hersheys.com revealed a complicated contact form that wanted me to part with a great deal of personal information. The swearing reached another decibel level. But before I could get too mad, a fire erupted in the office and I spent the rest of the day putting it out.

I awoke the next morning with a start, realizing that I’d left a half-eaten open Hershey Bar on my desk. Our office is in South Florida. Like every other structure in this humid, subtropical climate, we have ants. I pictured my desk swarming with millions when I arrived, the scent of fried ants wafting from my smoking iMac.

I flipped on the lights and saw that my desk appeared as it had when I’d left, Hershey bar sitting there in the open wrapper. There was not an ant in sight. I sat down and picked up the Hershey Bar to put it in the trash. One dead ant fell out of the wrapper. I saw two more lying on my desktop.

I tried not to jump to conclusions.

Then I had a grand idea: Maybe the fact Hershey bars with PGPR now kill ants is actually an unadvertised feature. I was getting added value here and didn’t even know it. Hershey’s just hadn’t figured out how to market a combination chocolate snack/pesticide.

So Hershey’s, you have a big problem here. Not only do ants find you product unpalatable, but it appears to kill them. Is my evidence anecdotal? Perhaps. Does that matter? No. Will I be buying another Hershey Bar again? No.

So what are the content strategy takeaways?

1. Being cheap is never a good content strategy. Maybe you get to make a fraction of a penny more on each chocolate bar, but you’ve ruined your product in the process.
2. Don’t make it hard for people to get in touch with you. I should not have to give up my phone number and birthday to a submit a question on your website.
3. Being a huge, iconic company without a social media presence is insane. McDonalds has 11 staff members on its Twitter team. Look at what Dell has been up to. It’s not too late, but get with the program.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

Content Strategy is not Copywriting. Design is not Window Dressing. Information Architecture is not Boxes and Arrows.

Content Strategy (CS) isn’t a new practice, but it may be the most comprehensive practice, and one made possible through the maturation and morphing of many puzzle pieces—editorial, print, digital, design, CMS systems, SEO/SEM/search, IA/UX/IxD and advertising.

When done correctly, Content Strategy requires practitioners to follow every piece of content, in every direction, for every use case and optimize the message in order to support business goals. That last line is the anvil in the pillowcase—“in order to support business goals.” Long gone are the days of wanting a website because brick and mortar businesses were “old hat” and Red Herring was four inches thick.

Results matter. And if the downturn in the economy has taught us anything, it is this: Seeking out short-term gains are fools’ errands. Content Strategy, or at least the type Eat Media practices, is firmly rooted in a long term strategy we call “What Then?”

It goes like this:

“Let’s do a content inventory”

“What then?”

“We should tag it and see how it aligns with new biz strategy.”

“What then?”

“There’s going to be a boatload of content that doesn’t fit anymore.”

“What then?”

“We need to create a sustainable content cycle to support their message.”

“What then?”

“We should look at the CMS and see if it will support this new taxonomy.”

“What then?”

“We need to look into how their Social Media strategy is tied into this message.”

“What then?”

We zoom in and out, micro-to-macro until we have looked at a client’s content problem from every angle and we reach this:

“Traffic and sales are up. Way up.”

Getting to this result is all well and good, but how do we know, how well our CS work has actually performed? When paired with SEO/SEM, we can definitively tell what was clicked on, in what order at what time. When Content Strategy is paired with a quality information architecture plan, we can see measurable results that align with how information is organized throughout the site. Similarly, when partnered with tried and true user experience techniques, Content Strategy speaks volumes, and subtleties in button placement and checkout behaviors shine clear as daylight.

But on its own, not so much. The analytics attributed to Content Strategy remain an asked and unanswered question that many of us are still quantifying.

Listen up, Content Strategists

In order to make the leap from buzzword to boardroom, Content Strategy needs to do more, fast. Without analytics, measurement and a crystalline clarification, our relevance is not rising outside our circle. We are simply defining and redefining what is and isn’t CS—erecting and mending fences. While we (me included) think CS is the cat’s meow, many of the decision makers I talk to have a hard time discerning IA from UX from CS from “whatever the programmers are supposed to do.” This is where our work should be focused.

Here are my propositions:

1) I only differentiate IxD from UX by scope.

Go ahead slaughter me for this!

2) UX is its own animal. UX’ers initiate the kind of changes featured in Smashing Magazine. I speak some UX but feel it should be more intertwined with CS.

Someone may have written the speech, but UX is the face and the voice. And that’s just fine with me.

3) The best programmers I’ve worked with are uber-keen on message and user experience. As we begin to build leaner, more targeted applications and websites we need more programmers (front and back-end) to think more about content.

One programmer/friend is the best copy editor I’ve ever known.

4) IA can, but probably shouldn’t operate independent of CS.

See below.

5) CS and IA are the same thing, or at least they should be.

I, for one, cannot do CS without doing IA. You start talking about CS problems and I open up OmniGraffle/ConceptDraw and look for the nearest whiteboard. I start thinking about relationships and content life cycles and wireframes. I recently spoke with Karen McGrane, President of Bond Art and Science and this is what she had to say on this the CS/IA relationship

“I think all those ‘word’ functions should be owned by a single role, and the content strategist has a broader sense of ownership across a site. I could also make the argument that IA and CS are really the same role and you should recruit for whichever one (or both) will help you attract the right people. But in the long run I would imagine that information architecture would be seen as a function of CS rather than a role and a job title of its own.”

—Karen McGrane, President, Bond Art + Science.

Project-by-project practitioners develop, organize and choose the appropriate tools and tactics. While it is impossible for one person to excel at all these fields, it is time that we ask more of ourselves, and one another, in bridging the gap between practices. In my mind, IA and CS fusing into a single practice will deliver more a comprehensive, cost-effective solution with richer, more measurable results together than if they are separate. There will be less inter-dependency confusion within the practices, client’s business goals will be better supported and analytics will be more practical.

Without content, the web would be a search box and a check out cart. (Both the search box and the check out cart have been successfully monetized.) But all the stuff in between (content) requires fewer experts with broader skill sets, not more experts with more finite expertise (which requires longer integration and usually much more duct tape).

Signed,

Eat Media, “Pointing out the elephant in the room since 2003”

—Ian  @eatmedia