Content Strategy

Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits

Rahel Anne Bailie, Noz Urbina

• Publisher: XML Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781457182549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Tecnología de la información

If you've been asked to get funding for a content strategy initiative and need to build a compelling business case, if you've been approached by your staff to implement a content strategy and want to know the business benefits, or if you've been asked to sponsor a content strategy project and don't know what one is, this book is for you. Rahel Anne Bailie and Noz Urbina come from distinctly different backgrounds, but they share a deep understanding of how to help your organization build a content strategy.

Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits is the first content strategy book that focuses on project managers, department heads, and other decision makers who need to know about content strategy. It provides practical advice on how to sell, create, implement, and maintain a content strategy, including case studies that show both successful and not so successful efforts.

Inside the Book

• Introduction to Content Strategy
• Why Content Strategy and Why Now
• The Value and ROI of Content
• Content Under the Hood
• Developing a Content Strategy
• Glossary, Bibliography, and Index

Part IV. Content Under the Hood

This section of the book looks more deeply into content and how to turn it into a valuable corporate asset. At first glance, this section might appear to be too technical for many in our audience, but our experience has shown that to make informed decisions, you must know something about the technical side of content strategy.

We know our audience comes from varied backgrounds, but we have found that many who do not have a technical background still want to know about these concepts. In fact, we’ve been asked to run workshops for directors, developers, and technical and project leads to explain these concepts.

As a final reassurance, early reviewers of this book told us we’ve done a good job of shedding light on concepts that were vague or overwhelming. We address the following topics:

• Breaking content out of silos and format lock-in, and readying it for reuse.
• Using adaptive content and responsive design.
• Labeling content semantically to future-proof your content.

However, if the technicalities of content really bore you to tears, read Chapter 15, What Exactly Is Content? and Chapter 19, Making Content User-centric Using Modular Building Blocks, and then enlist the technical people on your team to synthesize the rest and tell you if there’s anything you need to go back and read.

Chapter 15. What Exactly Is Content?

	I have a t-shirt that sports a message about content strategy marked-up using XML tags. I wore it when I went to visit my accountant and his database administrator wife. When I arrived, they both studied the t-shirt intently for a minute. The database administrator’s reaction was, “yep, you wrote valid code.” Her husband’s reaction was, “tell me about content strategy.” I realized there are two types of people: those who read the tags, and those who read the content between the tags. Until recently, it’s been the tag-readers who have been running the industry.
	--Rahel Bailie

In a technology-enabled world, content is “the stuff” inside the container. Content means all the text, graphics, audio files, video files, metadata, and a whole bunch of other information that is part of the wayfinding exercise, but not actually the driver behind the wayfinding. Technically, all of this material is still “content” because it is “contained” by the deliverable, whether that deliverable is a website, app, brochure, guidebook or some other container.

Copy and Content

However, much of the content used in wayfinding is not what the end user – the content consumer – is looking for. In other words, a reader who wants to find an article on photographic techniques may use the navigation bar on a website to find the article, and that navigation bar may be critical to get to the article, but the navigation bar is not the end goal, and the reader derives no meaning about photographic techniques from the menu item. What the reader wants – and for purposes of this example, we will confine ourselves to text – is copy. Copy is the message. It’s what content consumers read; it conveys meaning.

To create copy, writers need to understand some basic elements, starting with the notion of “genre.” Genres are a way to classify works into groups that share common characteristics. For example, two popular genres of novels are murder mysteries and romance novels. The common aspects of each genre – a body, a detective, suspicious characters for murder mysteries; a couple, a courtship, a happy ending for romance novels – cue users to understand what to expect when they pick up a book.

There are two basic genres of copy used in business.

Persuasive

Persuasive copy tries to convince users to do a certain thing or think in a certain way. The most common characteristic is the call to action. Persuasive copy has a built-in message meant to convert a “looker” into a “buyer.” It is the written equivalent of “buy now” text or a link to click. Persuasive copy includes messages like an invitation to register for a free account, receive a white paper, or contact your local politician.

Writers who create persuasive copy need to know what the appropriate rhythm is for what they are creating. They should know how much copy readers will tolerate before they lose interest and potentially miss the call to action. When presented with an unfocused block of writing, the first question should be: “What is the call to action here?” And the next question should be: “How do you see the conversion happening?”

Within the genre of persuasive copy, there are sub-genres such as news releases, marketing-oriented product overviews, and ads. While not the most exciting of genres, we’ll use news releases as an example here because they belong to an established genre. Later we will use them to illustrate the difference between copy and content.

A typical news release begins with the line, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, followed by a release date and location. The writing follows the “pyramid” style:

• The most important content is contained in the first sentence.
• The middle section elaborates on the summary and includes the call to action.
• The end contains “boilerplate” – company description and contact information.

The call to action in the middle section should be subtle. A typical news release reports on some upcoming event, product release, or initiative with information on how to answer the call to action – where to buy tickets, when the product will become available, or how to get involved. It’s all about the editorial qualities leading to a “conversion,” where the content consumer goes from just consuming content to taking the action called for in the copy.

In the public sector, conversion means a change in behavior or attitude; for example, supporting a new initiative or voting for a particular candidate. In the private sector, conversion means taking a step toward a purchase.

Enabling

Enabling copy helps you complete a process or task. It explains “how to” – from setting up a piece of equipment to registering for an account to paying your taxes to ordering a passport. It’s also the text within a software application that describes menu items, the knowledge-base files that demonstrate how something works, or the training materials that help customers use your products or services.

Within this genre, too, we have many sub-genres. The most recognizable genre is the procedure. This has a well-defined structure, or “schema”, to use the industry term. This structure includes: a heading, a contextual introduction, numbered steps, and a conclusion that explains the success or failure state. Each numbered step begins with an active verb and uses a technique that writers refer to as the “given-new contract,”^[42] and when appropriate, is followed by a feedback statement to demonstrate the expected result. It’s all about guiding users to the desired outcome.

Writers, whether they write enabling material or persuasive material, apply a combination of training, experience, and skill as they create copy. Their training is what gives professional writers their strong understanding of their craft. But that craft is creating messages. This is copy because it pays attention to the message.

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^[42] The given-new contract is a writing technique used in learning material to connect new material to that already stated. This technique is explained in “The Given/New Contract and Cohesion: Some Suggestions for Classroom Practice”[Thompson, 1985].

Turning Copy into Content

If copy is the message, then what makes copy into content? At the risk of oversimplification: semantics turns copy into content. The topic of semantics will be discussed in more detail later in the book, but for the moment, we’ll define semantics as giving content extra meaning by attaching metadata. Metadata allows computers to sort, filter, and combine content based.

In a day when virtually all content gets processed by some sort of technology, the union of editorial structure – that is, the structure that allows people to understand what to do with copy – and semantic structure – the structure that allows computers to understand what to do with copy – is the combination that creates content.

A basic example of marrying editorial and semantic structures is using a stylesheet when creating a document in a word processor. A stylesheet lets you apply the right styles and structural information to headings, subheadings, various list types, and so on. Why is this important? Once you save your document as a PDF, this information allows a Table of Contents to be created that links to the appropriate headings, and an index to be generated with entries that link to the right pages. It also allows headers and footers to be automatically generated with the appropriate heading names, and major sections to start automatically on odd-numbered pages.

When content is created in a semantically structured format – that is, with structure that allows other systems to understand and programmatically process the content – then it’s possible to leverage that content to get better value from it. Although our example used news releases, the important point is how to get the best use from whatever content you create. In other words, no matter what the message is, it needs to be created, stored, and prepared for use in a modern content system. How it is stored will be critical to putting some technopower behind yo...