Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic, has done more to raise awareness of Content Strategy than any person in the world of web design. She’s well known for her dynamic, clear presentations about web content at many of the industry’s most celebrated conferences. And now she’s written a book on the subject, Content Strategy for the Web.

(Full disclosure: Kristina Halvorson is a friend and colleague. She quotes me in her book and thanks me in the acknowledgements. I still feel comfortable saying: It’s a great book.)

Halvorson’s book is written in an easy, conversational style. It addresses both the reasoning behind the concepts, and the practical application of the discipline. Its broad approach will make it useful for a wide range of web professionals. Here’s what I think different groups of people will get out of it.

• Project Stakeholders: The book makes a great case for Content Strategy. If you have clients or bosses that are hesitant to invest the time or resources it takes to make sure the project has great content, if they think it can be done at the last minute, or they just want to buy cheap content, have them read Halvorson’s book to understand how much better, smarter, and more effective their content could be with a reasonable amount of time and attention.
• Project Planners/Project Managers: If you’re trying to scope, schedule or assign resources to a project, you’ll gain a much better understanding of what’s needed to make sure that content is ready at the same time as the rest of a web project.
• Web Design Generalists: You may be muddling through with the content part of your projects without any real guidance or methodology. This book describes the tasks that should be performed, provides a wealth of practical tips, and poses the questions that need to be answered at each stage of the design process.
• Web Design Specialists: If your organization is large enough for different people to focus just on IA, visual design, functional requirements or content strategy, there’s a need to identify what each person is going to contribute and who’s responsible for which tasks and deliverables. Whichever role you’re in, Halvorson’s book will show you how content touches all parts of a project. Even if you’re not primarily responsible for the content, it’s valuable to understand how the pieces will come together to make a more successful final product.
• Aspiring Content Strategists: If you’re looking to transition into the field of Content Strategy you’ll learn how your experience maps to the responsibilities of a CS, how to speak the language of the practice, and what skills you need to build to be well rounded in your new role. At 172 pages, the book can’t provide every detail to turn you into a Content Strategy expert, but Halvorson includes references to other resources that will be helpful for diving deeper into specific practices.
• Practicing Content Strategists: If you’re a specialist you’ll learn about aspects of the discipline that you might not practice on a regular basis, and you may reassess your strengths and areas of growth. If you’re a generalist you’ll learn which skills you need to build upon to become fully versed in all areas of the practice.

I’m willing to bet most people will think differently about their web content after reading this book. And I’m certain that everyone who reads it will gain new ways of explaining the practice and value of Content Strategy to other people who aren’t familiar with it.

As an added bonus, if you’re in the New York area, the Content Strategy New York City Meetup Group will be hosting a book launch party for Kristina on Tuesday, November 17^th. Come meet the author and a bunch of local content strategists. If you bring your copy of the book, Kristina will sign it for you (but she won’t be selling copies there, so make sure you get it in advance).

News lovers beware. (Image courtesy of the talented Eleanor Rudge)

The breakdown: Robert Stribley discusses how a recent national tragedy was covered in the Huffington Post through a consolidation of local tweets.  What’s the impact of using these Twitter lists on citizen journalism?  Read on to find out.

“Good lord, is this hen scratch they call tweeting REALLY supposed to keep us informed?” - goodog, Comment posted 06:10 PM on 11/05/2009, The Huffington Post

Late last week unwitting citizens of Fort Hood, Texas suddenly found themselves serving as national correspondents, when the news-aggregation site Huffington Post began livecasting their tweets. HuffPo corralled their tweets via Twitter Lists and presented them within a Twitter widget—both shiny, new features the micro-blogging service had released just days before.  The implementation by the Huffington Post was somewhat shoddy. As of this moment, it’s still running.

Some background: On Thursday, November 5^th, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan began a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood military base that left 13 service men and women dead and 29 injured. In an attempt to tap into local reactions to the event, The Huffington Post set up the Fort Hood List and began streaming the tweets of people whose profiles indicated they lived in the area. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

HuffPo should have considered the impact of posting random tweets simply based upon their geographic location. Instead they let loose with a torrent, and the results, as people quickly noted, weren’t pretty. Don’t get me wrong: There were some poignant and informative tweets. However, many of them weren’t particularly relevant, were inaccurate, or made little sense out of context.

Some examples:

iTraceyRenee: watchin Gucci Mane ft Usher - Spotlight Video

Barbaramagana: Writing blog. hmm what will the topic be!!!

RicoRossi: I’m about to go assist in oral surgery, ill tweet later

sunnylena: @ArmyBarbieGirl do u have children?

One 17-year-old participant mentioned the Fort Hood incident precisely once, before resuming her random, typically sexually explicit tweets. Which are still being posted to HuffPo, as of this moment.

A few issues are at play here. Let’s take a quick look at them.

Security by Obscurity

Ideally, people should be made aware when their tweets are being broadcast in a more prominent venue. Now, arguably, the whole point of Twitter is to disseminate information in a public venue. And, by publishing content to Twitter (and, increasingly, Facebook, too), folks are engaging in a privacy transaction each time wherein they tacitly agree to make their content public. Unless they make their profiles private. For better or worse, people depend on “security by obscurity” where Twitter’s concerned. They realize their tweets are observable (one would hope), but they sometimes depend on their mutterings being lost in the noise. As we all continue living our lives more publicly, we’ll probably adapt and learn that security by obscurity is a myth.

In the meantime, publishing people’s tweets at such a visible level raises some issues. For example, in an internal conversation, Razorfish content strategist Rachel Lovinger suggested that HuffPo did Tweeters an injustice by publishing their tweets out of context:

It makes me wince that the top comment from a local says “Andy Pettitte, Houston misses you!!” I feel embarrassed for the person who said it and is going to be judged as shallow and insensitive, just because she used her Twitter account the way she always uses it, perhaps not aware that she’s now an unfiltered spokesperson for her troubled community.

Curation

How to avoid this context problem? Tweets should be curated, of course, at least automatically by keyword, if not manually. When they published their Twitter list, HuffPo claimed, “we’re capturing all the tweeted updates related to the terrible events at Fort Hood. This search is targeted, filtered, and local.”

Really? Targeted and local? Somewhat. Filtered? Not so much.

The first thing I thought upon seeing the Huffington Post widget was that many of the tweets weren’t remotely relevant. It desperately needed some curation. Of course, Twitter lists aren’t currently set up to do that. Since HuffPo couldn’t do the filtering, they put the onus on us. And why should we take on the cognitive burden of filtering out irrelevant, often inaccurate information? We came looking for signal, not noise.

Accuracy & Authenticity

For a news-oriented site, of course, accuracy should be the weightiest concern of all: by placing those tweets on their site, The Huffington Post amplified some misinformation, a problem more serious journalistic enterprises would be excoriated for.

Some have suggested we shouldn’t expect a high level of accuracy from real-time, citizen journalism. Perhaps. But relying on it is a mistake we’re seeing all too often. A more stringent process for participation certainly would’ve helped in this case.

Maybe we’re entering an age where - more than ever - news needs to be viewed with the admonition Caveat Lector, “Let the Reader Beware!” We should certainly maintain a healthy sense of skepticism when reviewing content, which comes our way. But news practitioners - and aggregators - should also be aware of the damage that the careless use of such information does to their sense of authority.

Unless sensationalism, not authority, is what they’re really aiming for, of course.

Further Reading

Columbia Journalism Review, “Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists”

Paul Carr, TechCrunch, “After Fort Hood, Another Example of How ‘citizen Journalists’ Can’t Handle the Truth”

Matthew Ingram, “Citizen Journalism: I’ll Take It Flaws and All”

Rest in peace Rock, Paper, Scissors. (Images via swirlingthoughts, macfixer, and blockpartypress)

At some point in your life, you’ve probably played Rock, Paper, Scissors. It’s a child’s contest that uses simultaneously cast hand gestures to settle disputes. Perhaps you wondered, even while playing it, about the validity of this model.

In the game, Rock (a fist) beats Scissors (two extended fingers). Ok, that makes sense - you could use a hard, heavy rock to destroy a relatively delicate metal hinge. Scissors cuts Paper (flat hand), which also makes sense - it’s what scissors were designed to do - but not very dramatic. And lastly, Paper… covers Rock. How does this demonstrate dominance on the schoolyard?  “I smashed your scissors” is way more menacing than “I covered your rock. Now you can’t see it!”

This may be a victory, but it’s kind of a hollow one. Which is why I was so excited when a friend taught me the updated version: Cowboy, Ninja, Bear. Win that contest and you’ve really accomplished something - a potentially life threatening battle between dangerous creatures! So, how is it played?

The two players stand back to back. Someone counts to three. On three, both players spin around and face each other, striking their chosen pose:

• Cowboy = both hands mimicking pistols, pointed at your opponent
• Ninja = both hands at about face level, hands flat and poised for a martial arts attack
• Bear = hands up, fingers curled like claws, ready to rip your opponent to shreds

The winner is determined like this: Cowboy shoots Bear, Ninja sneak attacks Cowboy, Bear mauls Ninja. The underlying structure of the game is the same, but the new nomenclature makes the logic more apparent and raises the stakes. Plus, it’s so fun, you might forget what your dispute was about in the first place.

“Hold the future in your hand with Sony.” (Image via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0 )

The Breakdown: What will television look like in 2019? Recently Razorfish has been doing some significant research and thought leadership on a fundamental shift that will take place with television in the years to come.   This future has major implications for technology, content development, distribution, audience measurement models, advertising and personalization.  To get a glimpse into the future, watch Andrew Pimentel deliver his seminar at Cannes Lions 2009 and explore 3 reports by David Friedman which predict where TV will be in 10 years — or perhaps sooner.  Let us know your thoughts below.

In the future, technology enables us to give birth to precious little content babies. (Image via Flickr)

The Breakdown: User-generated content — You are all too familiar with it. It’s where the mob rules. It’s where anything goes, where anyone can post anything, and where the experts and the crazies exist as equals. It’s information overload where expert opinion is often hard to find. There is much at stake for those who can capitalize successfully on the evolution of user-generated content. We asked a panel of UX and Media experts about the future of user-generated content — for good or bad.

Shiv Singh, VP & Global Social Media Lead

User-generated content — or content that we create as regular people influencing, entertaining and informing each other is the most important form of content. It is what we create — our conversations, our thoughts, our opinions and our imagination expressed. The notion of it being considered something risky, dangerous, damaging or a bit too voluminous is looking at user-generated content through the wrong frame. It is time for marketers and individuals alike to realize that everyone else’s content (in all its forms) is the greatest asset that they ever had. The question really is whether the technology is where it should be to allow us to sift through all the user-generated content and figure out what’s important to us as individuals. The problem isn’t with UGC, it is with the filtering, sorting and prioritization and that’s where the technology, the semantic web and also the ability to filter through the lens of a social graph is going to make a big difference.

David Deal, VP of Marketing

Consumers will create more powerful personal brands thanks to our culture of self-idolatry and the proliferation tools that make consumer generated content more slick and professional. We will make our own “American Idols.”

Michael Barnwell, Content Strategy Lead

Allowing user-generated content usually has the goal of enfranchising the user and, indirectly, giving a greater sense of authenticity to the content — two noble goals, surely, although with very mixed results. How can anyone sort through the ton of dross to find commentary that’s in some way useful? It’s probably too late to recall the invite, but there may be a way to salvage the intention. It might be described as UGC light touch, or in other words annotations. A simple ranking of content — one basic example of annotation would be an easily sifted way of letting you know what someone thought about a piece of content, without the noise. Collectively, this kind of user contribution could lead to something resembling real added value, while saving a place for the user’s voice.

Steve Clough, Media Planner

We often talk about social media like it’s reinventing marketing, but the reality is that the fundamental strategies for success in social media and leveraging user-generated content are the same ones that marketers and sales people have been preaching for decades: 1) build relationships, and 2) provide value that fills consumers’ needs/wants. While the means may change slightly, I think the future of social media and UGC will continue to fulfill these fundamental business strategies.

Chris Boese, Information Architect

Now hear the user-generated First Principle of the Internet. First there was the Word, and the Word was the Internet. Users uttered the Internet into existence with their socio-communicative acts from the very beginning.  Non-social interfaces are an anachronism, a horseless carriage phase, like the early days of television when programs looked like filmed radio plays.

I believe the social Internet has always been profoundly destabilizing and politically empowering, and will remain so.  As with the French Revolution, there is an upside and a downside to this kind of grassroots empowerment, but that Cluetrain Manifesto left the station 10 years ago. This is no news flash. Former media monopolies are discovering it very late, to their own detriment. All businesses will face the same grim realities as the newspaper industry if they depend on old models for controlling and restricting commerce to futilely manipulate these empowered and uppity “customers.” Real power has already shifted. Some sectors just didn’t get the memo.

Robert Stribley, Senior Information Architect

There’s a lot of talk about the dark side of social media, as everyone clamors for their 15 minutes of fame - every day. But social media and the increasingly ubiquitous use of user-generated content are also ushering in an era of transparency unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Companies (and individuals) have long espoused transparency, of course, but the economic and viral advantages of tapping and responding to user-generated content are nudging us into arenas of more authentic rather than staged transparency. This open, real-time dialogue not only forces companies to maintain their brand more rigorously, it also demands that they express it more clearly.

Matt Geraghty, Content Strategist

One of the biggest areas for UGC innovation lies in global rights management. Who’s thinking big about the future of copyright? Well, YouTube has launched a service called Content Identification allowing major content partners and rights holders to better identify user-uploaded versions of their videos. With these content management tools, major media companies partnering with YouTube are deciding if they want to block, track, or take steps to reduce infringement. But it’s a two-way street. They can even encourage fans to market or distribute the content for their own benefit. The future of UGC global rights management will lie in solutions that strike a perfect balance between the goals of the copyright holder and that of the user.

Melissa Joulwan, Senior Content Strategist

It’s imperative that clients relinquish a bit of control over their brand voice and buy into the true value of UGC, i.e., arming customers with the mechanisms and information to be brand ambassadors. We recently had a client admit they were thinking about hiring writers to impersonate community members so that the resulting content was of higher quality. This kind of thinking will absolutely doom the future of UGC. An important component of our job as user experience professionals has to be to educate our clients to do UGC right or not at all.

The Breakdown: I was privileged to participate on a panel at a recent ‘Content Strategists of NYC’ meeting tackling the subject of the relationship between content strategy and publishing.  Leading the discussion was Jeff MacIntyre, principal of Predicate, and joining the panel was Ian Alexander, VP of Eat Media and Craig Bromberg, Editor in chief of AOL Real Estate .

How does a content strategist work with a publisher? What is the unique skill set we bring to the table? Are editors really being replaced by content strategists? What are all the necessary tools of editorial strategy? What problems are content strategists going to solve for publishers? For answers and insight to these questions, look no further. Explore the video panel discussion above, courtesy of the UX Workshop.  Most importantly, let us know what you think.  Comments welcome below.

Food for the content strategist’s soul.   (image via Flickr)

The Breakdown: Melissa Joulwan, Senior Content Strategist from Austin, tells us what she’s been reading to keep inspired and maintain her CS edge.

A few months ago, Rachel Lovinger answered the question “What Makes A Content Strategist?”

It got me thinking about the experiences, conversations, and books that shaped my approach to putting the right content in the right places.

I’ve been a writer since my dad hung my first story on his office wall (one-sentence, illustrated in crayon, written at Blue Mountain kindergarten). As content needs have evolved, my thinking has also expanded to embrace interactive content, video, graphics, photography, and social interactions, in addition to the storytelling and wordplay I love.

In no particular order, here’s the list of books that helped me grow from writer to content strategist and are still within arm’s reach for inspiration.

Random House Webster’s Word Menu
What it is:
It’s like a mash-up of a dictionary, a thesaurus, and an almanac, with more than 75,000 entries categorized around 800 subjects. Need to understand electronics terminology? Searching for international synonyms for “house” to describe a conceptual model? The Word Menu can probably help.

Why I like it:
Its relevant for both its content and its structure. For word nerds, it’s an easy-to-use resource to become an instant expert on just about any subject, complete with jargon and related terminology. I once used the Word Menu to pretend to master the language of electronics for a Radio Shack pitch. I schooled the whole team on transducers and circuits; the client was duly impressed. (Ask me about the Data Transducer conceptual model!)

From a structure perspective, it demonstrates the ways people search for and understand information. This single reference acts as a dictionary, thesaurus, reverse dictionary, almanac, and a collection of glossaries, allowing the reader (user) to consume the content from within their individual mental construct.

Rapid Viz
What it is:
It’s a quick-read instruction manual and workbook to help non-drawers share ideas visually. Emphasizing speed and simplicity over technique, it requires only pen and paper and good ideas for the artistically-challenged to hold their own with more visually-oriented thinkers.

Why I like it:
My drawing skills? Mostly nonexistent. But in our work, much of what we do needs to be communicated quickly on a whiteboard with a group that could include designers, illustrators, animators, technologists, account people, and more. The easiest way to make sure everyone is visualizing the same thing is to draw it. Rapid Viz provides a hands-on class in just 150 fun-to-consume pages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is your brand losing its fizzle online?  (image via FFFFOUND)

The breakdown: What is social media’s impact on the brand? Where is the line between a positive vs. negative influencer?  Do Twitter and Facebook really have a tangible benefit to the corporation’s bottom line? We asked a panel of some of our content and social experts their thoughts on leveraging social media to connect with the consumer.

Robert Stribley, Senior Information Architect

Companies who take social media seriously are reaping tremendous benefits for their brand. Coca-Cola, for instance, recently featured a prominent call to action on their homepage to direct visitors to their Facebook page.  Now, they have almost 3.7 million fans on Facebook.  So instead of relying on users’ infrequent visits to Cocacola.com to communicate their brand message, now they can expose a huge audience to it with whatever frequency they like.

Michael Barnwell, Content Strategy Lead

Social Media has the tendency to inspire brands to launch an arms race with their consumers. In the event of negative commentary, brands will feel the need to offset that commentary with ever more charm and assurance. Brands secure in their products and services will resist the urge to rapidly fire back and trust the balance of commentary to work in their favor over time.

David Deal, VP of Marketing

It’s a myth that social media puts “consumers in control.”  Consumers don’t control anything, and we don’t want to, either.  We still want two-way relationships with brands, which means both the consumer and enterprise exert influence.  Social media strengthens that relationship by empowering consumers.  Smart companies are figuring out that by using social, the brand can be empowered, too.

Abbreviated version of this blog post here.

Shiv Singh, VP & Global Social Media Lead

Brands do not have a place on social platforms. People do.

Matt Geraghty, Content Strategist

Opening social media to help build your brand or reinforce corporate goals is not without its risks.  Yet if used in a thoughtful way, there can be enormous benefit to the overall brand impression that traditional marketing could never achieve.  Take a recent post by a new Ford customer where he details the experience of reaching out to Ford via Twitter which in turn would lead to a phone call to him from Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally. How many companies are really looking for this type of transparency?  Hard to say—but now more than ever is the time for bold experimentation.

Dawn Bovasso, Content Strategist

It’s not social media that creates strong relationships with customers — it’s consistent and direct customer service. Look at Zappos, who was known for their exceptional customer service long before social media came along. Social media has only enhanced the reputation they already had, not created or repaired it. Same for someone like Time Warner Cable, who is notorious here in NYC for terrible customer service; I don’t care how much they Twitter if I have to stay at home all day waiting for them and they don’t show up. Having quick and thoughtful responses to social media is great, but it’s secondary to direct customer service.

Rachel Lovinger, Content Strategy Lead

I hardly ever use social media to connect with brands. On Twitter and Facebook, I mostly follow friends, colleagues, celebrities and organizers of events I like to go to. I don’t really even like getting email from companies I’ve bought stuff from. I guess I’m not the kind of person that likes to be poked by brands online. If I want to know about them, I’ll go to their website.

Follow Rachel on Twitter

Some president guy meets a singer dude. (image via Chronophobic)

The breakdown: How does a major announcement by the New York Times to make a massive digital index available to the public change the landscape for reliable content topics and metadata? Rachel Lovinger explores why Wikipedia shouldn’t be our one stop shop when it comes to significant events.

A few months ago the New York Times announced their intention to make their entire index available, in a structured digital format. The Index was first published in bound volumes in 1913 and has grown to include over 500,000 terms that have been used to tag articles going all the way back to 1851. That’s 500,000 significant people, places, things, organizations, and concepts. To be clear, the Index includes the tagged terms, not the articles themselves.

Ok, so that’s a big list of words, but why does it matter? As we move towards a more data-driven digital world, there’s a strong need for online services to have a reliable, accurate, common frame of reference that covers all the major topics, people & things of interest. Let’s say you’re a big fan of the movie Up and you want to subscribe to a service that pulls in any news, media, and conversations about the animated movie. In order to be sure that content is related to the film, and not all the many other uses of the word “up,” automated services will need to use some kind of unique identifier. This can be an alphanumeric code (like an AMG ID, licensed from All Media Guide) or a URL (like http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049413/), but it has to be something that the service and the content providers can both share.

Many experimental projects have tried using Wikipedia as this kind of database of knowledge. In some ways, this makes sense. If you strip out the content of the pages, you’re left with a taxonomy of nearly 3 million page names. This list of terms is well-structured, because of Wikipedia’s use of links and categories, and it covers a huge body of human knowledge.

But one could argue that Wikipedia has an unhealthy emphasis on pop culture and internet memes. How valuable are those 3 million page names when they include a huge number of topics like The Hampster Dance (an animation of rodents dancing), Chrismukkah (a blending of Christmas and Hanukkah, popularized by a TV show called The O.C), Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (a name given to a Swedish child born in 1991), More cowbell (a popular phrase from a Saturday Night Live sketch starring Christopher Walken) and nearly 500 pages devoted to the creatures of Pokémon (a media franchise about battling monsters)? Suppose you mention Elvis, does Wikipedia know if you mean Elvis Presley, Élvis Alves Pereira, the TV miniseries, the album, the film, the TV special, the text editor, the comic strip, the character in the movie Cars, the pinball machine, the helicopter, or the other album?

The New York Times Index would offer the Web of Data another option for a structured, digital, open representation of human knowledge. One that comes from a trusted brand that’s known for its depth and breadth of coverage. Coverage that’s been researched and fact-checked by professionals.