The last time I was at SXSW, it was year 2000. I convinced my ad agency bosses that as a copywriter on the Dell account, it was imperative that they send me AND my art director partner (the extraordinary Enrique Mosqueda) out to Austin to investigate all this interactive hoopla.

To put things in perspective, these were the days when we were making ads for PC’s that played music (replace your stereo!) and “Workstations” with “RDRAM technology, dual processor capability and a 133MHz front side bus.” (I can assure you no one in our company had the faintest idea what a front side bus was.)

At SXSW that year, there was a panel on something revolutionary called a Weblog. Epinions.com had just come out of preview mode. And panelists spoke of a future where Broadband would make it possible “to watch videos on our Palm Pilots and beam them to friends.”

And there was a group of cool kids who called themselves Content Strategists. These were the copywriters of the future, it seemed—the ones who would still have jobs in the foreseeable future. They lived in San Francisco, slept in late, worked from home or cafes, were incredibly well spoken and making tons of money. Some of them had blue hair. All of them wore jeans. (I have torn apart our office to no avail in search of my business card from 2001 with the title of “Content Strategist” printed in a glamorous shade of black. Enrique even jazzed it up with ironic lo-fi black square dots. No doubt it is in an old coin purse with expired credit cards, chinese fortunes and cute boys’ phone numbers pre-husband.)

Back in NY, agency folks from junior AE’s to group directors started jumping ship, trading the agency’s pristine environment of glass, leather and steel, where fresh flowers sat on reception desks of the agency’s 15 floors, for poorly ventilated one-room startups stuffed with desks, computers, bean bag chairs and boxes full of dotcom t-shirts. They traded print ads and press checks for banners and HTML, which they learned from Webmonkey cheat sheets.

Back then, we weren’t sure who would be left standing once the glitter inside the Silicon Alley snow globe settled. But we copywriters were adding “content strategist” to our business cards just in case. Even if we had no idea what it meant to be a “content strategist.”

Here we are 10 years later. I’m a partner of a content agency, which means I’ll be footing my own bill to SXSW 2010 (goodbye Driskill, hello Sheraton). Ian will be speaking about web content. And everyone will be talking about the iPad and its promise to bring our favorite magazines back from the dead. Looking forward to 2020, when all of next week’s excited chatter will seem just as archaic as that “front side bus.”

—Britta

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

Click the X icon in player for full screen or click here for full preso

—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

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

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