For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

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

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