Finding Your Web Content Balance

Finding your web content balanceLisa Maria Martin | Cause Camp | April 4, 2014

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How’s your website doing?

Too much stuff?

Overlooked pages?

Inconsistent messages?

Outdated formats?

Total and utter chaos?

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Content strategy can help.

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What is content?

Content is all your stuff.

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Content

FunctionalityDesign

(swellwebsites)

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What is strategy?

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Strategy is thinking through what it would take to achieve what you want & assessing whether it’s realistic to try.

- Roger L. Martin

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So what iscontent strategy?

It’s a framework

for developing useful, usable

web content.

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How do we do that?

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1. Blood

4. Cake

2. Sweat3. Tears

Gratuitous cake photo.

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Create an engaged & sustainable strategy

by considering three factors:

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1. Purpose2. People3. Process

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Purpose1

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You have apurpose.

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Your audience has a purpose.

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Your content needs a purpose.

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Purposeful content

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Purposeful contentsupports what you

want& what they want

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Purposeful contentprovides context

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Purposeful contentdrives action

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You can tell a lot about an organization from

its homepage.

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Content should help others support

your mission.

Bottom line:

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People2

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You cannot undertake a large content program

without having a significant impact on your

people and processes. - Kristina Halvorson

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Your content strategy must take your people

into account.

1. Your content needs shepherds.

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What are the roles?

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Who writes?

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Who edits?

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Who reviews?

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Who uploads?

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Who archives?

Who is responsible?

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The answer cannot be “no one.”

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The answer cannot be “everyone.”

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Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock,

and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine

years lease of a garden, and he will turn it into a

desert.- Arthur Young

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Lack of specific ownership will derail

you.

2. Your shepherds need support.

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You can only have the content that your

team can maintain.

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Otherwise you get

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Otherwise you getabandoned channels

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Otherwise you getinefficient maintenance

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Otherwise you getvery stressed out

Do not bite off more than you can chew.

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Choose quality over quantity.

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Fit content plans to your

team’s size, budget, & workload.

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If it doesn’t work for the people who do the work, it doesn’t work.

Bottom line:

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Process3

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Plan

Create

Publish

Maintain

Analyze The

Content Lifecycle

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Plan

Create

Publish

Maintain

Analyze

Use this

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Plan

Create

Publish

Maintain

Analyze To think

through this

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What do you have to do to move content through the cycle?

Start with your purpose.

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•What are your goals?•Who is your site for?•What do they need?

Take stock.

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•What can you use?•What’s weighing you down?•What’s missing?

Look at your workflow.

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•Who is involved?•Where are the bottlenecks?•Where do you need to flex?

Launch is just the start.

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•What will you measure?•How will you measure?•What will you change?

Keep going.

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Websites are not “set it and forget it.”

Websites need care and feeding.

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Plan for every phase of the content cycle.

Bottom line:

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Voila! Balanced content.

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Right?

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That’s the ideal scenario.

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But things aren’t always ideal.

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If you can’t overhaul your entire website,

what can you do?

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Start where you are. Use what you have.

Do what you can.- Arthur Ashe

Recognize your limitations.

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(That’s how you’ll flourish.)

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What can you do within your constraints?

1) Break it into pieces.

2) Determine your priorities.

3) Fix just one thing.

4) Stay balanced.

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Plan content that ties back to your purpose.

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Plan content that you can maintain.

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Plan content for launch and beyond.

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Questions?

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Resources

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Content Strategy for the Web

Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach

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Content Strategy at Work

Margot Bloomstein

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Content Everywhere

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

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Thank you!