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

Is it ever OK to lie with your content?

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

Content wants to be free.

We all want free content.

But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is you. And me.

What are we willing to pay to get our content for free? What costs are we willing to pay beyond the monetary?

How much of our privacy are we willing to have invaded to get the information and convenience we desire free of charge?

How good does the content need to be in order for us to part with our hard-earned bucks? I was certainly willing to pay for New York Times opinion articles when the Times Select program was in place, but apparently, there were not enough people like me as the program was discontinued.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is one of the few major content providers to charge for content, but it’s not content I’m willing to pay for. However, when an iPhone app recently appeared that allowed free access to WSJ content, I was all over it. Rupert Murdoch is, apparently, quite upset at the existence of the app, but the technology does not exist to charge iPhone users, yet.

Many sites exact a non-monetary toll, requiring you to create an account that collects personal data that, theoretically, can be used to market products to you. These sites do assume that you are faithful in reproducing your biographical information. I am not. I have signed up for many a site as Phil McCracken, Hugh Jass or Jacques Strappe. Age 104. Etc. (While this makes me feel better, I doubt this small-time deviancy really affects the value of the database.)

But there’s other information about yourself online that you can’t hide from the marketers.

If you have a Gmail account, as I do, you already agree to let Google read your email. Why do you think the ads you see are uncannily related to the content of the message you are reading?

Troubling? Yes. Worth giving up the convenience of my FREE Gmail account? Not yet.

(As an aside, it’s really wonderful when contextual advertising fails spectacularly. See this great juxtoposition between a swine flu story, an advertisement for White Castle’s new pulled pork sandwiches, and the cover of The Jerusalem Post. Kosher? No. Funny. Yes.)
Contextual advertising is just one of the tools the advertisers have to get their meat hooks into us when we’re partaking of the free content.

On a logical level, and this is coming from a former newspaperman, I know that there is a cost to producing content. I know that top-notch, unique content costs even more. For years, I readily paid a nominal fee every day to have that content delivered to my doorstep, but the internet changed the content landscape in a fundamental way.

(Interestingly, I pay more each day for internet service than I ever paid for a newspaper subscription; ironically, none of the money I pay my ISP goes to the content creators. It’s like if my newspaper subscription money just stayed with the paper carrier and never went to the New York Times.)

So I am conflicted. I know that advertising pays for content, but I am used to getting my content for free on the internet and there is a part of me that will do what it takes to make sure I don’t have to pay, monetarily or otherwise. However, there is exceptional content out there that I have paid for in the past and would pay for again rather than go without (Sunday just isn’t Sunday without The Times, printed or not.).

And I have resigned myself to the fact that Google reading my Gmail is probably just the beginning of the future of advertising that’s directed solely at me based on where I have been browsing and what I have been writing. Behavioral targeting is the next step, but that’s another post.

— Jonathan

Photo by Fagerjord

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

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 entire Eat Media team is happy and humbled by this. Being recognized as “good people” is about as good as good gets. Thanks Joey.

Here is Gary Vaynerchuk’s call for “good people” on Good People Day
—Ian

It’s Monday, a new episode of 24 is on tonight, and rather than think about all the meetings and conference calls that lie ahead this week, let’s step into alternate reality for a minute and imagine we could all run our online content departments like our favorite anti-hero.

What would Jack do?

Before we start shooting tardy online producers in the knee, let’s step back and ask an important question: what are the two most important aspects of Jack’s personality that make him a successful counterterrorism agent?

• Creative, out-of-the-box thinking.
• Focus on the end goal.

These two things apply to content management as well.

Go down the hall—or more likely, down in the basement—where your content team is ensconced in front of their flat-screens. Look around the room. This is your last and only line of defense against dull, uninspired content.

Do these people have the room they need to operate? And if that space exists, is the room filled with the right kind of free-thinking anarchists who make the best content editors?

For example: Jack is always looking for “assets” — agency-speak for anyone or anything that can help with the mission at hand. Is your web crew doing the same thing for your content? Are you making the best use of video? Podcasts? Interactive features? Games? Your producers may not have license to steal cars at gunpoint and fake convenience store holdups to keep a mission alive, but you know they all have crazy ideas that they’d like to try—ideas that can’t wait for focus groups and approval from legal.

Take another look at that web team. What are their rules of engagement? Is their end goal just keeping your website running or are they empowered to make it sing? It may be a little dangerous to give them a lot of freedom, but with the right people in place—free-thinking anarchists really are a good idea—your content will shine, engage, and best of all, win acolytes.

— Jonathan

Seriously.

Because as one of the sources in the Today Show segment said, “I just wanted to learn a little bit about a world that seems to be still asking for content.”

–Britta