For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

Around 1 p.m. on Monday, I clicked on mediastorm.org for the first time.  I don’t remember how I came across the link or why I clicked on it, but within seconds a pile of drool pooled on the desk below me. Media Storm is a space for journalists to publish stories using still photography, audio, video and voice. The site’s design is minimal, and the content of the pieces speak for themselves, literally, because they are told through the voice of the journalist’s subject.

I watched the first half of “The Marlboro Marine,” by Luis Sinco before lunch. By the end of Monday proper, I had watched videos chronicling life after the Rwandan Genocide, a Fifth Avenue apartment rife with young addicts, black market wildlife trade, people living with AIDS in Africa, American soldiers never coming home from Iraq and life in Cuba in 1976. Each story was compelling and moving, and taught me something I hadn’t known before I watched it.

Almost immediately, I started about thinking about what makes a good story, and what in particular made these stories great. Leafing through On Writing Well, it didn’t take long for William K. Zinsser to say exactly what I was feeling during my Media Storm haze:

“The nonfiction writer’s rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of people to write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle a valuable gift.”

—Wendy Joan

Ps. Tomorrow the Eat Media Team is meeting to discuss, among other things, stories that succeed despite weak or no assistance from visuals (so “The Marlboro Marine” is out).

My pick

Jonathan’s pick

If you were coming to our meeting tomorrow, what story would you bring?

The swine flu outbreak has been hogging the headlines for a couple of days now. A quick survey this morning revealed 15 flu stories on the front page of WashingtonPost.com, nine on the front page of NYTimes.com, 14 on the front page of HuffingtonPost.com and 18 on the front page of DrudgeReport.com.

That is an awful lot of virus-laden porcine content.

And why? Thus far, only a small number of people have died, none of them in the U.S. The swine flu strain that’s behind all the headlines does not appear to be any more virulent than other strains of flu. Yes, swine flu (H1N1) does transmit easily from person to person, unlike the much more virulent bird flu (H5N1) that has been causing unease among epidemiologists for the last several years.

So where does the balance lie between informing and alarming? What are the ethical constraints of the content provider in a public health related situation?

Howard Kurtz, in his Media Notes column in today’s Washington Post, said that simply by virtue of the sheer volume of swine flu coverage, it would be reasonable to infer that there’s a real emergency.

Turn on your TV, hit one of the news networks and it’s “all flu, all the time.”

One commentator noted that the 24-hour news cycle necessitated bludgeoning viewers with the same information over and over. He also noted that scared people tuned in more often and for longer periods of time, so providing “context” for the news—i.e., running a story that goes beyond the headlines and that puts the risk of the swine flu in perspective—stood directly in the way of ratings.

So despite the sell-out that seems to be going on at every major news outlet, ethics still matter for content providers. Ethics matter because trust matters. Sensationalize at your peril. You may get a bump in traffic today, but it won’t be without cost.

—Jonathan

Photo by sarihuella

Last weekend I attended my first major league baseball game. Sitting behind left field, I had to rely on the Jumbotron to see every play in the infield.

Now I know why good seats are so expensive. People are willing to pay big money to watch the game live on the field, not on the giant screen that shows fans in the upper levels screaming and pouring beer over their heads between pitches.

Though not completely uninterested in the game, I spent the better part of my Sunday afternoon at Tropicana Field thinking about the Jumbotron, and that split second that happens before and after you recognize your face up on the big screen.

Which got me to thinking about content. My content. Your content. How will it change when people start paying a bit more attention to it? Or a lot of attention to it?

Will you stay true to yourself, and keep providing the content that attracted more visitors to you in the first place? Or will you cover your face in bright red paint, pump your “We’re number 1” finger in the air and scream until you can scream no more?

Remember, people like you for who you are, not for who you are on the Jumbotron.

—Wendy Joan

There is a lot of talk lately about what is Content Strategy and who owns it. Is it a part of IA/UX? Does it fit under the wing of Content Marketing? Should the SEO/SEM folks be leading this charge? Or, is the call for Content Strategy to be its own practice practical and valuable?

The first yin/yang I’ll address is the one between IA (UX) and Content Strategy.

In some ways this struggle reminds me of the pole-vaulter: There is a 100 or so foot run which is required to gain enough speed to plant the pole, to get over the bar. A great pole-vaulter can’t just be good at arching his/her back to get over the bar; they must also be a powerful runner. In order for (a) IA/UX to be successful (get over the bar) they have to do some of that running = (b) Content Strategy. Conversely, in order for (b) Content Strategy to be successful (get over the bar) they must understand some (a) IA/UX. It isn’t that (a) comes before (b) that is important but rather that (a) needs (b) and (b) needs (a).

FACTS:
-Content Strategy is an emerging field.
-Information Architecture is an established field.
-An Amazon search for “Content Strategy” returns 1,535 hits—not all are relevant.
-An Amazon search for “Information Architecture” returns 15,198 hits—many more are relevant.

As an agency that practices a mixture of both Content Strategy and Information Architecture, I sense that clarifications to the items below would help legitimize/popularize the practice of Content Strategy in the eyes of both clients and related practices.

Deliverables
* What are they for Content Strategy?
* How do they relate-to/crossover-with deliverables for other related practices?

Value
* What is the (perceived) inherent value of Content Strategy?
* Is the value of Content Strategy different when coupled with other services?

Cost
* What are the standard rates for Content Strategy?
* Is content strategy (to varying degrees) being performed more than once by different vendors? How does client avoid having this work done by multiple vendors? (Content Wireframing vs. Design Wireframing.)

Experience
* How does a client differentiate a “copywriter” armed with hot buzzwords from a content strategist?
* What is the required experience and toolset of a professional content strategist?

Intersection
* In cases where there are separate vendors performing: IA/UX, Design, Content Strategy, Development, content creation. (We all know this happens.) How do vendors agree on a language that focuses less on who’s leading the show but more on what is best for the client?
* How much of content strategy is analytic and how much is creative?

CASE STUDY
Recently I had a client request a proposal for a web/print/content project, the project was equal parts: content, strategy, design and development. When I turned in the proposal there was a line item for “Content Strategy”, it included the research/interviews, content inventory, gap analysis, delivery methodology, metadata strategy, editorial calendar, tone and life-cycle of the content.

Here’s the catch. I was asked to remove “Content Strategy” as a line item from the proposal and redistribute the money across the rest of the project. Her reasoning, management wouldn’t understand or see value in “Content Strategy” as a line item with a $ amount attached to it. Now while this could be an isolated case I think it is indicative of a larger issue.

After removing the line item (with trepidation) I contacted some advertising friends. In advertising research and strategy shapes the campaign/creative and is usually a line item with lots of 0′s. One of them said, “Rename the line item Potato Sack Races, as long as they pay you.” Good advice, but advertising is a mature market and even splinter factions like The Barbarian Group and Wexley School for Girls dedicate significant hours to strategy/research before they go off and stick pins in buildings.

On one hand, big deal, move money from line item 4 to line item 5. On another hand it says something about how Content Strategy is viewed and valued. From a client’s perspective “Content Strategy” is a practice with a scope yet to be entirely defined and understood. From a marketing/branding/service offering perspective Content Strategy is a term that has yet to be fully owned by SEO, Content Marketing, Content Strategists or IA/UX’s. And for now maybe that’s ok.

—Ian

What are your thoughts?

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist known for his intricate and elaborate single panels that depicted simple tasks being performed in a complicated, tortuous fashion.

Goldberg may have died in 1970, but our fascination with the types of devices generated by his fertile brain has accelerated in the Internet age. Go to Youtube, type Rube Goldberg in the search box and welcome yourself to time-kill central.

Check out this video that was the result of a content hosted by chocolatier Cadbury as a part of its “Crème That Egg” promotion:

As diverting as these videos are, watching what should be a one-step task divided a hundred times or more, Rube Goldberg should not be your inspiration when you are mapping out the navigation for your website.

You can make it easy or hard for people to get where they want to, depending on what you want them to take away, but the one thing you don’t want them to leave with is a suitcase full of frustration.

Five iron-clad rules for site navigation:

1.    Make it easy for people to contact you. The “Contact Us” link should be on every page. Put it where you want, footer, top nav, wherever, but make sure it’s a logical spot.
2.    Make it easy for people to learn more about you. One of the first things I usually do when I stumble across a new site is see who’s behind it. If there’s no “About Us” page or it’s sparsely populated, my interest plummets. I know the Internet allows anonymity, but it’s not a trust builder.
3.    Site search should be on every page. It’s a gateway into more of your content and allows the visitor a degree of control. It’s a win-win.

4.    Don’t leave people hanging. If you’ve just had them read an inspiring story, many visitors are going to wonder how they can do more. Have a strong call to action that fulfils this need. It made me nuts yesterday when I read a moving story on the New York Times about a family who had a child battling cancer and was struggling to find health insurance and there was no way listed to contact the family or contribute to help them out. I was able to send a message to the article’s author, but got an auto-reply stating that I may not receive a response. Bad New York Times, bad! If you’re going to be too busy to respond to feedback, don’t accept it at all or warn me beforehand. But don’t let me spend my time writing something and then tell me my message went straight to email purgatory. UPDATE 4/21/09—New York Times national correspondent Kevin Sack wrote back and supplied the information I was looking for. Shaming of NYT is hereby retracted. Rule number 4 still stands.
5.    Don’t waste people’s time. See item #4.

You can make it as easy or as hard as possible for people to get what they want on your site. Consider carefully the ramifications of making it too hard. We may sit through a 10-photo slideshow that has each photo on a separate page so you can increase your click count, but waste too much of our time and it’s time for “Adieu.”

— Jonathan

Earlier this month I went to a screening of Winnebago Man at the Sarasota Film Festival. Three weeks later, I still can’t get enough.

The documentary is investigative journalism at its best, coupled with the most delightful subject matter imaginable—viral video stardom. The film’s director, Ben Steinbauer, seeks out viral video legend Jack Rebney, a man who rose his way through miles of cutting room floor tape, swinging his arms and swearing his way into outtake glory. The hilarious Rebney outtakes are from a 1989 Winnebago shoot gone awry: throughout the 1990s videotapes were copied again and again until the pictures blurred and YouTube came along.

YouTube clip that started it all here. Mind yourself, he doesn’t mind his ps and qs.

Jack Rebney in the documentary is as whacky and zany as the outtakes of himself from 20 years earlier. But, all the while, Steinbauer explores the delicate subject of life post-internet video stardom, especially to someone who didn’t want it for himself (remember- when’s the last time a flattering video made it big on YouTube?)

We like documentaries that carefully examine media phenomena. For a list of screenings, check out winnebagoman.com.

I mention the site address not to plug, but to address the only setback of this media-upon-media extravaganza—our dear friend Google. Typing “Winnebago Man” into the Google toolbar takes you directly to the YouTube video of Jack Rebney. Googling “Winnebago Man” the old fashioned way produces the same result. If a Winnebago Man trailer exists, it is lost in the YouTube search result pages. Adding “Ben Steinbauer” or “documentary” narrows the results, but not really. If the Winnebago Man team is listening, get on that!

Everyone else—Winnebago Man or no Winnebago Man—how do we tackle this problem of content on top of content?

-Wendy Joan

This was my first year at the IA Summit, which took place March 18–22 in Memphis, Tenn. Though Eat Media’s primary functions are content strategy, content delivery and content management, we love content and believe it is only as good as it is displayed and presented—making IA pivotal to our success.

In other words, if Gore Vidal wrote a daily column scoring Obama on his every move but it was buried four levels deep in 14pt Comic Sans on Havenworks, we’re guessing no one would read it. (And if they did, we’d be praying their seizure medicine was close at hand.)

You can read all the IA Summit reviews by searching on Twitter for #ias09, #IASummit, #contentstrategy. You can also check out many of the presentations from the event on Slideshare.

Since many of the posts have already reviewed the high/low points of the conference (see JJG’s closing plenary, internal strife over IA/UX/IXDA), I’ve decided to take a different tack with my post-conference review and go uber-macro.

The Power of Questions
Questions strengthen and define knowledge, they make or break a project and they are also great barometers for measuring the success of a conference. Presentations are sometimes eye dropping, other times insightful (occasionally neither) but the questions a presentation raises are often the genesis for bigger ideas, better thinking and greater results. This is an area where I think the IA summit could improve. There were funny moments, Jared Spool’s slides. There were still figuring it all out moments, Cindy Chastain’s “Experience Themes” presentation. And then there were the “you’re not as smart as me presentations” that littered the event.

The dialogue post-presentation, when an audience member makes the long walk up to the stage to engage with the presenter—that’s the good stuff and the even better stuff is the post-presentation dissection, rearrangement and evangelism over coffee and a bran muffin. Certainly there are scheduling issues, getting the next presenter on stage, giving people a break from input, providing time to process the information but there seems to be a drop off there. (Or perhaps an opportunity?) It seems too easy to come to a conference, hold a panelist on high and take them at their word. More so, it seems unfair to the presenter not to challenge them to clarify their hypothesis and see things through a different set of lenses. Yes, we come to hear the “experts” but the experts became “experts” through a combination of skill, dedication and being challenged*—by teachers, employers and peers.

*Challenge in the confrontational sense, which is usually a depicted by impugning ones experience, is pointless. But a challenge of a person’s focus, ideas and perspectives leads to more questions, and even better answers.

Which brings me to Foucault:

“…I am trying to show how a domain can be organized, without flaw, without contradiction, without internal arbitrariness, in which statements, their principle of grouping, the great historical unities that they may form, and the methods that make it possible to describe them are all brought into question.”

The high points and buzz-worthy lines are great, but forward motion requires questions and answers and the admittance there are two types of right at odds: Being right and doing right.

—Ian

I went into a Dunkin’ Donuts Monday morning for the first time in I don’t know how long, and while I was initially annoyed that there was a long line, it gave me a few minutes to take a look around and see what had changed since I’d last been in…

First, and most importantly to me, I was able to see many trays of doughnuts glowing in a big rack behind the counter. And they had some Boston Creams left. Dunkin’ Donuts’ core content was not being neglected.

I looked at the dozen or so tables in the place and noticed something shocking: No one was eating doughnuts. Some people were tucking into breakfast sandwiches. Everyone was drinking coffee. And not just the 50-cents-a-cup black tar you associate with a doughnut shop, but fancy coffee drinks, the kind people pay $4.59 for at Starbucks without batting an eye.

I watched all five people in line in front of me order big, fancy coffees and not one single doughnut. Did I mention there was a six-car wait at the drive through and that all I saw being passed out the window was coffee?

The Dunkin’ Donuts content menu had been expanded, and at least in the very small sample I had (one data point), it appeared to be a resounding success.

The clerk seemed a little stunned when I order two doughnuts and no coffee, but someone else must have been eating them, because the two I had were fresh and delicious, just as I’d remembered.

Not a few blocks away at the nearest Starbucks, the same story was being told, albeit in reverse. The coffee was still headed out the drive-though window and people were still hanging out inside, mooching the bandwidth on the free Wi-Fi, but a quick look at the menu revealed new breakfast sandwiches and, wait for it, doughnuts. I had one of the doughnuts the other day, a cakey lemon-zest flavored ring that while good, was just a little too highbrow to work as a doughnut.

Starbucks had expanded its content offerings too, but success may prove elusive.

What’s interesting is that both Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks decided they could no longer survive as content specialists. Coffee wasn’t enough for Starbucks and doughnuts were not enough for Dunkin’. And it’s not that both brands’ signature products weren’t appealing. They just weren’t enough to sustain growth.

Which brings us to that content inventory you’ve been meaning to do. If  your focus is relatively narrow, are your customers being forced to look for elsewhere to fulfill some of their needs? You may be the recognized expert in your field, but do you need to offer a greater breadth of content to keep your customers happy? If so, choose the direction you expand with care. As both Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds (with the McCafe) have found out, its often easier to offer less expensive luxury goods than it is to go upscale with a humble product like Starbucks tried with its doughnut.

— Jonathan

The virtual world’s approximation of the real world is getting more precise every day. Virtual pets have gone from the crude Tamigochi to the strangely lifeless Aibo and it’s possible to take an online video tour of nearly anywhere on earth, but we have a long way to go before we reach the level of Star Trek’s holodeck, and can actually be immersed in a virtual world.

As I compose this post, I am listening to Birdsong Radio on iTunes, and were I to close my eyes, I might believe I was in a distant, verdant grove, winged creatures darting through green clerestories above me.

But soothing as the chirping, tweeting (Damn you, Twitter, for corrupting that word.) and trilling may be, it leaves out the rest of the senses. I can even set my screensaver to “Tropical Forest” but since I’ve had deep drinks from nature’s wellspring, I’m not fooled. The soft loam beneath my boots, the warm embrace of tropical air, the scent of, well… life, are all missing.

What, you may ask, does this post even tangentially have to do with content?

The following headline came through my news feed yesterday: “Humans may be losers if technological nature replaces the real thing, psychologists warn.” The story, from the online magazine Science Daily, summarized a study from Current Directions in Psychological Science which indicated that not only will humans suffer on many levels from failing to get enough exposure to real nature, but that the natural world, reduced to sound bites and panoramas on computer screens will suffer as humans become more and more detached from the real-life issues that threaten wild spaces.

The rest of this blog post contains a set of instructions that will take you away from this screen, so jot them down on some scrap paper, or better yet, simply commit them to memory.

1.    Stop.

2.    Take your hand off the mouse and slowly back away from the computer.

3.    Go outside.

4.    Start walking away from the noise.

5.    Don’t stop until you reach something that passes for a natural landscape, be it a city park, a beach or the Grand Canyon.

6.    Find a quiet spot.

7.    Sit down.

8.    Be still.

9.    Feed your soul.

10.    Repeat daily.

— Jonathan

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous