At Teehan+Lax, we feel that the content components of any user experience are tied closely to the visual design and functionality. Content strategy gives us a set of methodologies for planning content with as much attention as we pay to visual design and functionality. This means determining not only what content should be part of each user experience, but how that content will be created, delivered and managed, and what people, processes and technology need to be in place to make that happen.

But my elevator pitch might not get across what content strategy brings to a project. I’ve been finding that what’s more useful is to talk about what can happen if you don’t have it — in other words, the actual problems content strategy solves. Here are three common ones:

1. A design that you can’t make the most of

Have you ever undertaken a large scale design effort, but after hand-off it was difficult to implement? Maybe the design relied upon images of a certain quality and quantity being produced and published on a regular basis, and you didn’t have the staffing or technology in place to make that happen. Or a 3rd party API that was supposed to incorporate a data feed into your site didn’t seem to work with your existing content management system. In most cases, these problems show up as you’re trying to implement and launch your project, leaving you wondering why you weren’t aware of a problem sooner.

Content strategy makes sure that all the moving parts are in place for content to be created or acquired, published, and managed. If the technology or resources aren’t there, we figure out how to get them. And if a proposed design demands content that’s way beyond what you can produce, we work with the UX designers to make adjustments and deliver a system that you can support and maintain.

2. Content that is tied to its containers

Sometimes content get developed in great detail as part of a UX design without a plan for how it will live outside that design. One example that’s becoming more and more common happens with efforts to create experiences for multiple screens (most commonly adding a mobile experience to an existing desktop one). Content often gets produced and published with just one experience in mind, and it isn’t structured for cross-platform use, so you have to re-create and re-plan the content for mobile or tablet experiences.

The problem? Your content is tied to the ‘container’ you’ve initially published it in — in many cases the pages and sections of your website. And while content strategy isn’t going to save you from doing some content planning for those hypothetical future projects, it can help you to publish content that is structured and organized effectively for re-use. As a bonus, adding this data to your content will mean it works much better with intelligent RSS feeds and search algorithms, making your content more accessible, flexible and findable. These qualities are becoming increasingly important as users access content not only on different devices, but through feeds and readers that take that content outside of its original context.

3. Great design. Not so great content.

This happens all the time: content isn’t planned and developed alongside the UX strategy and design process. Your project launches and it looks fantastic — until users start reading, viewing or navigating, and discover that content is irrelevant, of poor quality, or simply just not meeting their needs. This can happen in the case of a site re-design when no analysis of the existing content is carried out. It also happens with new platforms, where no one really ‘owns’ the content and assumptions are made that it will fall into place once the design is complete.

UX designers have enough to manage without making content planning part of their work. And clients — if they haven’t got a designated person or team actively planning your content — won’t be focusing their energy on content, when main responsibility might be technical implementation, marketing or project management.

Without someone advocating for your content, it can fall through the cracks with huge gaps and poor quality going unnoticed until it’s too late, resulting in a mad scramble to fix it with little time or resources.

Content strategy alleviates this problem by paying attention to your content from the very start, beginning with an inventory and audit of your existing content, analyzing it against competitors and best practices, and mapping it to your users’ needs. This process starts during the strategy phase of your project, and continues alongside design and development.

In doing this, we figure out the best way for your digital content to help you achieve your business goals and meet your users’ needs; we also make its production, publication and management more efficient, strategic and productive.

Creating personas is something that I find interesting and rewarding — combining third party research and data with primary interview subjects and intuition is a delicate balance. On one hand, you want your personas’ value to be obvious and grounded in fact. On the other hand, you want to create a compelling narrative that doesn’t slip into stereotype and that is nuanced enough to be real.

But something tricky happens when you try to conceive of multiple personas interacting with the same interface on their respective journeys. Meeting needs and anticipating behaviour in triplicate can become a juggling act and designing an emotional interface can be even more difficult. How do you separate who you’re communicating with and when?

What is umwelt?

I stumbled across the concept of umwelt while reading on my holiday. Isn’t that always the way? You’re trying to escape into a book that has absolutely nothing to do with your daily life and instead you accidentally find a new way to frame a difficult task you’ve left behind. In my case, it was while reading John Vaillant’s book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival that I first read about a century-old theory developed by Estonian physiologist Jakob von Uexküll.

Von Uexküll uses the German word umwelt to describe the unique perceptual world of different living beings. Vaillant borrows the concept to examine how tigers and humans interact in some of Eastern Russia’s most remote communities. Both the tiger and the human occupy the same umgebung, or objective world. But inside of that physical space, the two species notice and pay attention to different things or signs that are vital to their survival. Their subjective realities are completely different and as such, they may respond to the same stimuli differently. What is important or significant to the tiger may not even be perceptible to the human.

There is a long, established history between the two species and rules for interacting with each other and respecting each other’s needs and power. Vaillant’s book looks at what happens when that understanding disappears between them. But I digress.

What does this have to do with personas and emotional interface design?

As soon as I read about the idea I thought about how I might apply it to the project I was working on – could it apply somehow to how we use personas?

Maybe.

I started by thinking about how different personas might perceive the same place, or umgebung in the context of a digital environment.

One person might scan a page to find the Store Locator or a phone number. Another person might be in the same space to check in with their community to see what they think about a new product. The functionality available to each user is the same, but what they sense, need and anticipate is what makes them different.

I can imagine, once defined, trying to map the umwelts of different personas to specific pages or use cases. Maybe by creating screen-specific heat maps that correspond to different personas’ awareness levels, needs and emotional resonance, we can further avoid designing all things for all people. Instead, we can use the umwelt concept to examine the primary needs of each persona in specific states and focus on those.

For interface designers, this kind of metaphor might be too vague to be useful. I’m not suggesting that I’ve discovered something revolutionary or that it’s fully fleshed out as a tool. It’s just that, particularly for someone like myself, in a strategic role without a lot of boxes and arrows – I like the concept as a lens. Who are these people in relation to the interface? Where do they overlap? How do they intersect? Can we meet the needs and emotional expectations of some of these people in the same way?

The difficulty still remains defining the right personas and doing so in a valid and believable way. Because really, how do you begin to understand someone else’s umwelt, especially if it is significantly different than your own?

That, as they say, is another story.

What does the evolution of mobile mean for the discipline of content strategy?

Last week I joined the masses of content strategists, editors, marketers, and developers who met in Chicago for WebContent 2011: Going Mobile. In a variety of ways, all of the presenters asked the question ‘what does the shift to mobile mean for working with content?’ – and attempted to answer it through discussions of user testing, social media marketing, message architecture, SEO, and the strategy and design process. Slides from most of the presentations are now available.

Even with sessions covering this variety of topics, a few big themes emerged, and over the past week I’ve thinking about three main takeaways for content strategy. They’re not exclusive to mobile, but really reflect the growing need for user experiences to travel across platforms, and for content to go where it’s needed.

Context

This was definitely the big one, as mobile is making it clear that we need to understand and plan for a variety of different user contexts. Comscore’s Mark Donovan was the first to bring this point up, asking how, when, why and where content is being consumed, and what other data is it being combined or mashed up with. In other words, with mobile, time, place, attention level, and the presence of other content sources create very different contexts through which users are accessing your content. While this has always been true, mobile has expanded the scope of possible contexts.

Robert Rose made context the main point of his presentation as well, looking at how ‘context aware everything’ shapes the kinds of experiences we can offer. Looking beyond time and place, he asked us to consider social and augmented reality, contextually-based security, management and delivery and personalized search results.

In her presentation on structuring editorial and messaging for mobile, Margot Bloomstein made the point that users expect content and functionality to be specific to their particular situation at any given moment. She suggested that maintaining your brand and experience demands content strategy that ensures a clear ‘message architecture’ (a hierarchy of communication goals) that carries across contexts, and supports navigating between them.

Erin Scime and Jessica L’Esperance from HUGE talked about the differences between a web and mobile strategy for a major hotel chain. One major difference is telling multiple stories (web) vs. telling a single, focused story at a given moment (mobile). To make this happen, along with the functionality, the editorial structure had to change significantly. For example, for the mobile site, content that encouraged booking was prioritized, and the language became less marketing, more instructional.

Flexibility

In order to migrate to mobile, content needs to become more flexible (it can’t be tied to ‘pages’, for starters). For this transformation to happen, the ways in which we produce and manage content need to change.

What does this mean? Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton attacked this question head-on, emphasizing that content needs to be structured with flexibility in mind, i.e. structured for use and re-use across platforms.

They warned against merely thinking of creating a ‘mobile version’ of your site or content, quoting Responsive Web Design author Ethan Marcotte: “Fragmenting our content across different ‘device-optimized’ experiences is a losing proposition, or at least an unsustainable one” – and pointing out that while responsive design solves at the design level, we need to do the same thing with content.

How to do this? Build for flexibility, not the latest trend. Separate of content from form and make content semantic. Transition to a content API. All of this helps build flexibility into your content so you can create once, publish everywhere.

Agility & cooperation

Maybe it goes without saying that content strategists need to work closely with designers to create effective mobile experiences. This is true for all platforms, but on mobile, the boundaries between content, design and functionality get blurry, while tighter, more focused mobile experiences demand that they be seamlessly integrated.

Erin Scime and Jessica L’Esperance highlighted the close working relationship between the content strategists, designers and developers on their projects, and talked about shifting from a reliance on documentation to continuous communication. On their hotel project, Jessica, the designer was focused on user goals and tasks, features and functionality, and navigation and flow. Erin, the content strategist was focused on the content experience, business case, and content production and distribution.

Giving the example of designing the hotel chain’s mobile booking system, Jessica worked to optimize the booking flow while Erin prioritized content that would encourage booking. Clearly, this process had to happen in a highly collaborative work style. They kept their team for this project “lean and mean” and reminded us that “Mobile moves fast. Collaboration is essential.”

A fourth thing: active content

I’d like to add a fourth thing to this list of mobile content considerations—something that seemed to be missing at WebContent 2011, at least as a major area of focus.

What is different about mobile content? It’s easy to point out things like small screen sizes, different input modalities, and its consumption in an ever-growing number of contexts… but what is changing about the content itself?

One of the biggest shifts we’re starting to see is that mobile content is aspiring to become active. Both in substance and form, we now need to pay special attention to the ways in which users actively engage with, rather than passively consume content. In other words, content is finally, truly becoming something that’s interactive.

This is an opportunity and a challenge for content creators – to create content that inspires people to take action, to actually do stuff out in the world; and content, moreover, that is responsive to the actions they take. Recipes have a natural niche here. A number of sites and mobile apps are onto this, and they allow users to create shopping lists, and break recipes down into navigable steps. Some go further in making content active, allowing users to comment, modify, add photos, or favorite recipes. Content becomes a living thing that changes from one moment to the next.

Not all content is as obviously and neatly actionable as recipes are. But, knowing that users have become more active in their intentions around content gives us new things to consider as we produce content for mobile platforms and beyond. A major challenge for content strategy will be how to meet an active consumer who wants to take action, and how to make content that is truly suitable for the interactive medium.

Even with the ‘why’ defined, the ‘how’ of content strategy is a source of confusion. Whether it’s questions about processes, deliverables, how content strategy fits into ux design, or where the content strategist’s job ends and the IA’s begins, exactly how to do content strategy seems to be up for debate.

Part of the problem in defining methodology is that content is such a small, generic-sounding label for the big, diverse, unruly, ever-changing universe of digital stuff we consume. To complicate things further, what stuff we can call content seems to be up for debate (there have even been backlashes against the word ‘content’ itself).

But instead of arguing about what is and isn’t content, could it be more helpful — in order to better come up with the ‘how’ of content strategy — to start instead by looking at how to work with particular types of content? Think of content as falling into one of these four major groups: informational, branded, user-generated, and systemic. The lines between them aren’t always completely clear, but each type tends to bring up a unique set of goals and challenges, and desired outcomes.

Informational content

This is probably first thing people think of when they hear the word ‘content.’ Informational content includes much of the text we consume: articles, corporate and product information, blog posts, FAQ, and so on. Anything that can be put into a copy deck or is is part of your standard publishing calendar usually fits into this category. Informational content is more than text-based though, and can include video and photo based content, as well as microcopy, which you’ll find on forms, buttons, and as contextual help.

Reduced to its essence, the goal of informational content is to meet one of your users’ most obvious needs — to give them the information they’re looking for. Relevance, clarity and consistency are crucial. To make that happen, one of the biggest challenges is in managing production flow and lifecycle. You need to understand who the authors, approvers and editors are; how content gets from ideation to publication; where it gets published (on your site, to an app, social media channels?) and when — does it change hourly, daily, weekly? And finally, how it will be managed and governed.

The advantage of working with informational content is that a number of tools and processes have become the norm, and offer great starting points: stakeholder interviews, user research, content audits, briefs, and workflow diagrams can all be incredibly useful for analyzing and planning informational content. In some cases these methods can be applied to other content types, but on their own they won’t be adequate to rise to the challenges posed by our other content types: branded content, UGC and functional content.

Branded content

Rather than strictly informing, branded content builds connections with users on an emotional level. Its goal is to build and support brand messages, persuade people, tell stories, and encourage engagement.

This type of content is quickly becoming as ubiquitous as editorial content, with content marketing and the concept of brands as publishers gaining momentum.

A big challenge for branded content is that since it’s often part of a focused, short-lived campaign, as well as being connected with a larger brand story, its lifecycle needs to be very tightly managed. Audits and inventories may be less relevant here, and brand guidelines and content partnerships need to be considered. Managing the lifecycle within these guidelines and relationships while publishing to multiple channels is a huge challenge here, as is finding the most effective way to measure success.

User generated content

Whether it’s through social media, commenting, or more intensive uses of UGC, having content produced by your audience is an effective way to build engagement and loyalty with content, and as a result it has become key to many content marketing strategies. Since real users are contributing content, UGC is often seen to bring both authenticity to brands and engagement to the audience, benefitting from things people are already doing online. In many cases, UGC is being produced in alongside (often in response to) informational or branded content.

It also poses very specific challenges. UGC is unpredictable, can pose copyright/rights management issues, and can’t be expected to follow the same editorial or brand standards as your other content. Filtering, sorting, prioritizing and moderating are crucial for planning and managing this type of content. The editorial calendar that works for informational content just doesn’t apply here, but having a solid set of curation and moderation policies probably will.

Systemic content

Coming from data sources, systemic content includes data, metadata, and also structured content -– content that’s been broken down and classified using xml or another system. This is where you’ll find content that describes content, making it findable, helping it flow to the right places, supporting SEO and even setting it free from the constraints of platform by giving it structure and extensibility, allowing for reuse. It is often available through an api, and helps publishers to identify, organize, and publish content in ways that are meaningful to users.

If systemic content is broken, if won’t work. It doesn’t tell a story or directly answer a user need, although it does support content that does exactly that. A consistently updated inventory, a testing plan, and a solid metadata schema are some of the tools that will help analyse and manage systemic content.

I’ve really just touched upon these different content types, and in the future I’d like to think through each of them in greater depth. But considering them separately is a way to start planning how you will approach a content project. On any site or platform, the content ecosystem is going to be made up of one or more of these content types. By delving more deeply into the each of these types and clearly defining what outcomes you want from each of them, the ‘how’ of content strategy –- processes, tools, and roles should be involved, for example — starts to become more clear.

Having spent many years directing design of NYTimes.com, he saw the Web evolve from a landscape of hypertext to one that’s much more interactive and engaging. In many ways, Vinh led the way with his work at The Times and they’ve since become widely regarded as an innovating leader amongst competing publications in a market that, frankly, is struggling to keep its head above water.

With his talk, “Digital Killed the Art Director Star”, Vinh outlined the industry’s journey from a state where new content was published once or several times a day, week or month in newspapers and magazines to one that demands continuous, nearly real-time updates. He argued that this rate of publishing couldn’t sustain a highly art directed treatment and is the reason why we now see sites that have adopted a fairly rigid, templatized structure whose design is content-agnostic, akin to the standard blog layout we’re all familiar with today (Vinh just a few days ago released an update to his for-pay WordPress theme, Basic Maths). Today, nearly every news publication’s online site is powered by a fairly robust content management system that sits underneath just a few dozen or so templates that can contain accomodate whatever content they’re provided.

Dustin Curtis, with his highly art directed articles, might disagree, but then, looking at the irregular rate at which he publishes content, Vinh’s argument seems to still hold true. Social media even further dilutes any existing art direction, says Vinh, as content is shared and aggregated, you’re no longer looking at the design of the New York Times, but the headline designed by Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and a pared down version of the article in Instapaper, among many others.

“Digital publishing and art direction are fundamentally incompatible.”

—

Khoi Vinh

Is art direction in the digital publishing space dead? One could certainly argue that some of the magazine and newspaper iPad apps such as Wired, Popular Science and co. are examples to the contrary. Vinh says we’re in a bubble where publishers are trying to bring their old way of thinking to a new platform, and having used some of these apps, I’m inclined to agree. Wired’s iPad team has been boasting about beautiful, high-resolution graphics on the iPad available in portrait and landscape orientations, but this comes at a high cost to the user, who are burdened with apps that are hundreds of Megabytes in size and incompatible with the device’s native copy/paste and other sharing functions.

So where does that leave art directors and publishers in the digital space? Vinh suggests that user experience and interaction design are the logical successors to art direction, and that we look back to its roots to figure out what art direction brought to the table in the first place: helping content creators tell their stories. There’s no use fighting aggregation services and social media; They’ll both continue to evolve and become more sophisticated.

Vinh cited Flipboard (and by extension, our own forthcoming app, TweetMag) as an app that’s at the forefront of digital publishing templatization. Most aggregators don’t go much further than presenting content as the traditional River of News that we’ve been accustomed to. These next generation of apps will likely allow for some pretty sophisticated features like intelligent article layouts, facial recognition for image placement, type and orientation sensitivity. Not only will these automated features provide a great reading experience to the user, but they’ll also reduce costs to publishers who are willing to focus on their content.

While the role of art direction in digital publishing still remain uncertain, one thing is clear: publishers’ loss of design control is a golden opportunity for interactive designers, developers and device manufacturers.

Update: Some good discussion in the comments – I don’t think art direction and interaction design are mutually exclusive in every instance, but in the digital publishing space (the subject of this post), that seems to be where things are headed.

Consider the chart above, with a tweet at the low-end of the scale and a highly art directed digital spread on the right end. A tweet requires less time to create and is of a lower fidelity than the spread, but I’d also suggest it requires more thinking in terms of interaction design than art direction. The line is certainly a little fuzzy where interaction design or art direction are the focus of the application, but at the pace of production in the digital publishing space, it’s hard to argue that sophisticated art direction is very sustainable.

Last week Forrester released a report advising most marketers wait to use location-based social networks (LBSN) as only 4% of the US population is currently using platforms such as Foursquare (the current market leader), and that the networks skew heavily male. They advise that brands that target young males experiment with the services and other brands adopt a “wait and see” approach.

I couldn’t disagree more. Here are my 5 reasons why it’s smart to start experimenting now.

1. First Movers.

There’s something to be said for getting a head start on your competition in the digital space. Brands like Starbucks, Dell, Pepsi, and Nike have all taken advantage of the emerging channels and reaped the rewards of building a strong early foundation with consumers.

While you should not rush into a new tool without understanding your strategic goals and how it integrates with your business objectives, experimenting with emerging technologies that are opt-in and potentially have a direct customer impact is smart.

When Facebook opened their gates to the general population in 2006 they had a small user base of university students. Four years later they are a behemoth. Twitter adoption rates have been increasing exponentially year over year since their launch in 2007 and the tool is now considered a “must use” for social business. Considering Foursquare launched about a year ago, can we expect to see the same type of growth curve as the early adopters begin to influence the early majority? (see “Crossing the Chasm” adoption curve)

2. Google. Facebook. Oh My.

Location-based services are not limited to the current apps we have been hearing about. Facebook has expressed they will add a location-based offering soon, Twitter has added “Tweet with your location” to their service, and the biggest news is that Google is adding a Places API to their eco-system, as well as adding LB data extensions to their mobile advertising product.

LBSN will become mainstream sooner rather than later, and it will be the big players, not the niche networks that will drive the adoption. Testing and learning now, before it becomes ubiquitous should be something on every marketers radar.

3. Data and utility.

There is an enormous amount of insightful and actionable data that can be gleaned about your customers and prospects from mobile & LBSNs. Eventually this data could be used to inform inventory control, staffing levels, consumer tastes and trends, etc. The data can also be used in loyalty programs, to identify influencers, test new products, and as real-time service focus groups.

Companies already testing the waters include:

Nike with True City; Starbucks with their Foursquare offers; The Pepsi mobile branded app; and the City of Chicago with their Tourism campaign.

4. Sales, Coupons, Offers, and more.

Part of the Forrester analysis identified that mobile couponing is widely successful with the users currently using the services, which is interesting as the base is primarily young males, not the average coupon-consuming demographic. Gone are the days of clipping coupons in the Sunday paper, now you can serve relevant offers and drive foot traffic and purchase directly to a mobile device. These offers are opt-in, and contextually relevant, not SMS spam. Testing offers, tips, and messaging via mobile should be on every retailers plan for the next year.

Of course one size doesn’t fit all and ensuring that your product or service fits within the make-up of the demographic, depending on service (existing or branded), is a must.

5. Mobile usage.

Of course mobile, and specifically smartphone, usage is soaring year over year. Ignoring mobile at this point is like ignoring the Internet in 2002 because broadband wasn’t prevalent yet.

Bottom line for marketers:

Experiment. See what fits, what your customers are looking for, and where you can add value. Don’t wait until it becomes mainstream, because that will be sooner than you think and you’ll be playing catch-up.

photo credit: john weiss via Flickr

It all started with the insight and a deep understanding of the market and the consumer.

The objective, as Leigh rightly points out, was to re-position and re-invigorate the brand.  To do this the team needed to understand the competitive landscape, the perspective consumers had of the brand, and the territory they had to play in. The market was saturated with female unfriendly AXE advertising, and as women are the primary consumers for male scent gifts, turning that into an advantage would have been mandatory for Old Spice.

With that as the starting point the Old Spice team (with a receptive client) decided to do the obvious: appeal to women without alienating men.

Old Spice cast the perfect actor for the new positioning. A former NFL player, a nice guy, and someone who wasn’t so perfect that men would feel threatened. Genius casting. Based on, I imagine, a perfect casting brief.

The next step was to create a seriously funny commercial that turned all the cliche’s of advertising and film on their heads. “Look at your man, now back at me”. “It’s now diamonds”. “I’m on a horse”. They made a commercial that was frankly better than 90% of the TV shows it appeared alongside. I first heard of it because my partner was watching TV and told me I had to see it. So what did I do? I went to YouTube and there it was. Word of mouth at it’s finest, but it would have been dead in the water if the team hadn’t thought to seed it online first.

They let that roll and roll it did. Everyone who saw the commercial started sharing it, and a character was born.

Now what to do with the follow up? The character was a success both online and offline and while they could continue to let it ride as a TV spot, the proof was there that they could take advantage of how much the spot resonated with the folks online.

The plan was to create a new TV spot, let that simmer for a bit and then pounce. The social media marketers did their homework and decided what the right outlets were to start spreading the character. The fact they took on 4Chan and won speaks volumes about how integrated and on the ball they were. While everyone talks about how they took over Twitter in a day, they really started seeding the campaign before that. They laid the groundwork. And it paid off. Big time.

It came on my radar with @jakrose tweeting that he’d received a video reply early Tuesday morning. “Fry it up and eat it down JakRose. Fry it up and eat it down.” The network effect took over and for the next two days it was all I cared about that was happening online. The social team did a brilliant job monitoring responses and working with the creatives to write compelling copy. They didn’t just target celebrities and “influencers” but responded to comments, Diggs, tweets and blog posts that they felt fit with the character as a whole. They were obviously fully immersed in the language and cadence of the social web because their video responses contained references only a geek would love (or get). They respected all the unwritten rules of the culture and tailored their responses to match the brand, and the mediums they were using.

They embraced the mash-ups and promoted them. They let the community roll with it. They poked fun at themselves (Old Spice responding to @isiahmustafa) And they set a time limit. Any longer than 2 days and it would have become tired. Any shorter and it would have been disappointing. The mash-ups continue to roll in, with the most recent being Mel Gibson calling the Old Spice Guy.

It was brilliance that came from the initial insights and work they did a couple of years ago. And deep understanding of how the social web works.

The challenge will be what they do next and if it moves the needle at the top of the purchase funnel (awareness & consideration). But I have faith, and am looking forward to every moment of it!

[Update August 13, 2010] W+K just released their case-study of the campaign: Old Spice is now the #1 brand of body wash for men, with sales increasing 107% in the last month alone.

A common theme we keep hearing is: who and where are people who want to communicate with us, and whom we should be listening to and focusing our content development on?

As part of the process we’ve developed for formulating a solid and sustainable social strategy for brands, we typically start with developing a Digital/Social Persona to help guide the engagement and communications strategy. While Personas are common in advertising and UX circles, they are relatively unique within social media as most practitioners will just tell you to “start listening”. While this is absolutely key to understanding and getting involved, it doesn’t provide a roadmap for long-term planning and engagement.

A persona doesn’t replace interacting directly with your customers, however it does give brands an understanding of how their customers are using digital media in all its forms, how they are interacting and engaging with complementary brands, the types of content that resonate with them, and a sense of where the brand “fits” (or could fit) within their online life. It also clearly demonstrates where it falls down, or neglects an important aspect.

In our experience, having this information, backed by thorough data and research, immediately illustrates where traditional communications fall short and why they should invest in 1-to-1 interaction and content development to remain relevant. It also begins to start the process of thinking about what true integration and touchpoints mean on a larger level.

We have a system we use to develop these personas with both qualitative and quantitative research, and with each iteration or new project find new ways to get to know the “persona” of the composite individual we’re modeling. I have a firm belief that with the amount of data we are collectively collecting in the digital realm helping companies make sense of it all and truly understand who their customers and prospects are will become both easier and more difficult. :)

For my social media friends out there – what types of practices do you use to help your clients get to know their customer?

photo credit: Cesar R. via Flickr

Content Strategy has recently emerged as “the next big thing” for digital designers and marketers. More than ever, businesses and brands are seeking to provide utility to customers, prospects and partners in the digital channel. At the same time, the proliferation of the mobile web and social media are redefining how we access, consume and engage with content online. As a result, there’s been a collective awakening to the importance of defining, designing, delivering and maintaining compelling content on the web.

Content strategy often requires a systems approach, emphasizing the structural whole as well as the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy or standard way to express this organizational structure. We can outline the high-level goals of the content strategy, and we can enumerate the necessary constituent parts (the content itself, people, processes, resources, etc.) But we don’t have a good way to document and describe how these parts relate to each other and the overall goals of the system.

The Content Flow Diagram (CFD) is a modelling technique designed to fill this gap.

Download CFD Omnigraffle Stencil Here

Basic Elements

CFDs can help us visualize and think about a strategic content system’s macrostructure. There are 5 basic elements:

• Entities (box) — the content itself, e.g. articles, media, collections
• Actors (stick figure) – e.g. users, content producers, editors
• Processes (circle) – e.g. publish, approve, rate and review
• Resources (document) – e.g. ontologies, attribute sets, guidelines
• Connectors (solid and dotted line) – directed paths and references

The primary structure of the CFD is the flow, consisting of a subject (usually an actor), a process, and an object (usually an entity), connected by a path. Here is an example of a typical flow:

Notice that in this case the process Create references Guidelines as a resource. This convention is helpful because it shows who will be using a given resource and for what purposes.

When a flow maps one entity onto another (i.e. there isn’t an actor involved), the process encapsulates a functional requirement for the underlying system:

It is often useful to show how resources are generated and maintained. This is achieved by designating a resource as the object of a flow:

Additional Elements

Although the five basic elements outlined above are sufficient to describe a wide range of strategic content systems, there are a few additional elements that can give us even more descriptive power.

• Goals (cloud) help us capture the underlying motivation and intent of the various actors involved. By including goals, we state our assumptions about strategic rationales behind the flows captured in the CFD.
• Portals (trapezoid) indicate what channels, platforms and points of entry actors use to access and manipulate content.
• Systems (cube) are essentially non-human actors. Content strategies often incorporate various proprietary and vendor-based solutions to facilitate community, search, data-flow and processing functions, etc. Incorporating these into the CFD helps us capture functional requirements for these systems and understand how they fit into to a larger operational strategy.
• External links (bracket) indicate where organizational boundaries lie and allow us to embed external resources and entities.
• Areas (rounded rectangle) show contextual groupings of flows. These groupings help readers parse more complex CFDs and understand the contextual domains that exist within the overall strategic content system.

It is also possible to layer on other dimensions of information through visual cues like colour, shading, line weight, etc. For example, one might use colour to indicate update frequency—e.g. evergreen content vs. responses to social media events that occur regularly.

Here is a more comprehensive example showing one possible (and fairly basic) content strategy for enabling online customer support (click to view larger version):

Click to view larger version

Conclusions

Content flow diagrams help us apply systems thinking to our content strategies by standardizing notation and making things visual and concrete. This modelling technique can be used casually—as in sketching ideas out on a whiteboard—or as a formal mode of documentation.

Content strategists should try to make their CFDs as intuitive and simple as possible, in order to promote collaboration. However, the CFD is a network diagram that can very easily grow in complexity. Therefore, it is often wise to break the overall system into logical pieces and model these separately, noting external connections where appropriate. Additionally, we can keep CFDs simple and purposeful by focusing on three primary questions:

• where does the content come from, and how does it lives and flow through the system?
• what are strategic resources necessary for and how will they be used?
• what are the major operational dependencies and responsibilities?

The CFD is one tool among many within the broader practice of content strategy. For example, one might conduct research, define high-level goals, generate resources such as templates, guidelines, policies etc. before or along-side the CFD. That said, the fact that content strategy is so multifaceted and multidisciplinary makes a systems-focused tool like CFDs even more necessary and helpful.

I hope that others find our contribution to this topic helpful and look forward to further improving and refining this technique.