For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

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

Too many articles and blogs (ours included) have set out to define Content Strategy, called it King, whitewashed it as “content marketing/SEO.” Some have hyped it with agendas and sales pitches, others with heartfelt enthusiasm for the buzzword d’jour.

The more I think about Content Strategy, the more I see it centered in and around project scope. As budgets tighten, content measurability logic matures and ROI has a smaller and smaller proof of concept window. Defining a robust scope for CS-related projects is paramount for all involved.

For the Client

At the simplest level, scope defines what the vendor is going to accomplish for price of the contract.

In my experience, there are four client attitudes about scope:

• Those who see the value in digging to the root of the problem and do have the budget
• Those who see the value in digging to the root of the problem but don’t have the budget
• Those who don’t see the value in digging to the root of the problem
• Those who don’t see the value in digging to the root of the problem because they don’t have a budget

And there are two strategies clients administer for scope definition:

• The formal RFP process (Scope is brought to the table as part of RFP)
• The relationship process (Client comes to table with loose scope and the practitioner digs deeper)

For the Vendor

Scope defines what the vendor is and isn’t responsible for.

I’ve spoken with some other agencies and this is what I hear about scope:

• Clients with  the bigger budget get the better end-product
• There is cheap, good and fast—pick two
• I’ll work with you as much as I can, but at the end of the day we all need to make money
• There are no problems, only opportunities, but opportunities cost money to investigate

On the vendor side, there are two methods of scope definition and estimation.

• Plan for the worst and price accordingly
• Price reasonably and define what is and isn’t included, and carefully outline rates for out of scope work

The problem with these methods of thinking about scope (for both parties) is that the balance between the “best solution” and the “appropriate price” are at odds. The RFP is often not broad enough to get to the heart of the problem. And the vendor can only solve what he/she has access to, both politically and financially. So what usually happens is the client will cut what doesn’t seem relevant, fit the budget, or have a clear ROI. And the vendor will reduce services/deliverables to maintain profitability.

Scope Management

Scope Management, a content strategists’ most powerful tool, is often as much about Change Management (a.k.a. getting everyone to agree that there is an elephant in the room) as much as it is about Content Strategy. Proper Scope Management empowers the vendor to perform the difficult, time-intensive work and empowers the client to tackle real change at the root level. A project may be RFP’ed for a new website on an existing infrastructure—while the answer may lie in a CMS assessment that is outside that scope. Scope is not about padding the bill, it is about finding the best solution and implementing it.

Content Strategy is the tool that unearths and assembles the puzzle pieces spread across legacy systems, marketing agendas, newsletters, content, code, DB’s and design.* CS will grow in proportion to the depth it digs, both across other practices and intra-project. The marriage of Scope Management and Content Strategy requires content strategists to push for the deeper digging and clients to be open to a little more work for a much greater return.

*Not all the puzzles pieces are listed. And there is no picture on the box.

—Ian

Twitter me @eatmedia