New Media

Content strategy. You keep using those words.

October 10, 2016 By Helen 7 Comments

Globe and Books — Image courtesy of Surachai at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

[Originally published September 10, 2014] Content strategy has been a darling term — even a buzzphrase — of several converging fields of late, and as someone with an editorial background whose role danced across those fields in recent years, I’ve been watching curiously to see whether anyone could actually land on a good explanation of content strategy. The main problem with settling on a definition has been that many of the folks weighing in on it have been from marketing or technical writing, and focusing heavily on the audit/architecture components or the outcome/analytics components without really examining *strategy.*

But to my mind, overall content strategy is kinda like dealing with books–and I’m drawing a bit from my background as a former managing online editor, a library volunteer who contemplated getting an MLS and a retail bookstore manager for a chain that got blindsided by this whole internet thing and no longer exists.

Inventory and architecture are important if your focus is on being the librarian. Outcome and analytics are the primary focus of the bookseller. Neither will have anything to work with without decent writers and editors doing the creation, curation, and QA.

And the content strategist? The publisher. This is a person who can take stock of overall trends and knowledge of the marketplace, identify gaps between existing stuff and needed stuff, retire hackneyed and predictable pieces to the “reject” pile, and manage the workflow, the output, the talent needed to produce, market and organize the information.

It’s an imperfect metaphor, really. So is just about everything else I’ve seen about content strategy, but when you’re trying to get your arms around the concept it’s helpful to understand that there is a difference between architecture, analytics, and production. And all of these things are involved in the implementation of content strategy but none of them IS content strategy.

It’s this simple, folks. I’ve said it for years about every social media platform. Start with your goals. What do you want to achieve with your stakeholders? Once you know that, it’s about understanding the needed messaging on all channels to accomplish it, what to leverage where, how to do so effectively, and how to measure the effort and adjust as need be. Print, email, web, social, mobile. And whatever the next thing is.

Facebook Users: Are You Being Served?

March 31, 2014 By Helen 13 Comments

There’s been a lot of chatter of late regarding changes Facebook continues to make to its algorithm for serving content to its users. But most of that chatter has been focused on page admins–things you can do to try and get around FB’s ongoing attempts to goad brands into paying for their content to get distributed, regardless of each brand’s potential budget for doing so. This pay-to-play system seems to me an attempt to make the companies that profit from their presence on FB shell out some “rent” for doing so, and that isn’t totally unfair. But what of the websites, blogs, fan pages and nonprofits that do NOT profit from their presence on FB? And what of you, the users who actually want their content?

Today, FB muddied the page admin waters further by telling us that you’re not necessarily even seeing our posts even if FB is “serving” them to you. So all we know is how many times FB throws our posts into your feeds, and by golly, the numbers tell us it’s not very often–whether it’s how it’s served or how it’s seen. Honestly, the marketing folks will spend hours and hours researching how to game these feeds to reach you more frequently, but ultimately, *you* have opted in to our updates and as such it’s up to *you* to customize your FB use to better see us, if you really want to see us. (And we hope you do.)

So, without further ado, here are three ways you can make sure you’re seeing page posts while using Facebook:

1. Use the Page Feed

The pages feed icon

The page feed generates a real-time feed of pages you’re a fan of. By real-time, I mean the kind of feed that puts things in order based more on recent comments than on recent posts, an ongoing problem wherein Facebook thinks it knows what you want better than you do. Oh, wait, I am digressing. But if your “recent activity” feed is full of your friends’ posts, the pages feed will give you the closest approximation of the same feed but with page content instead of friend’s content.

It’s easy to access and save: Look for the orange flag in the left-hand navigation of your Facebook page, or just access your Facebook page feed directly.

2. Use Interest Lists

Interest pages generate a specialized feed with content that you specify. They are different from Friend lists in that you can actually set them up in a way that others can access them. That said, I prefer to create my own. I recently was offered a job in an area I don’t know all that well, so I started seeking out pages in that area to like so I could learn more about it.

Facebook remembers that you’ve bundled posts together this way and will at times let you know that there are new posts in the list.

Add a page to a list by accessing the dropdown menu at “Liked.” Choose “Add to Interest Lists,” and you will get a picklist of existing lists or the option to create a new list.

When creating a new list, you’ll be prompted to add other pages to the list–or people you follow, or friends. Basically, suppose you are into yoga. You can add yoga pages, yoga experts you follow, and friends whose FB focus is primarily yoga to your yoga list and have a topical stream dedicated to information about yoga.

favoriteslist — Adding a list to favorites from the left-hand navigation

Once you create a list, you’ll want to be able to come back to it easily. There are two ways to do this. The first way: Create a bookmark file in your browser and save links to lists you want to access from one click. The other way: Add the list to “favorites” and it will always appear in the left-hand navigation of your Facebook page.

Then, when you load your FB list, you’ll be presented with an easy to scroll-through feed of topically-related page content!

3. Turn notifications on

For those pages that have can’t miss content–your favorite news sites or magazines, that college you’re dying to attend, the blog you want to see every post from but can’t remember to check now that Google Reader is dead–whatever the case: You can turn on notifications for your absolute favorite pages. Of course, this assumes you have notifications turned on in the first place, but nothing makes me happier than seeing a notification pop up that the rarely-updated association page I want updates from has finally posted info on an upcoming conference I want to attend. It’s a post I’d miss in the grand scale of noise on FB, but I don’t want to miss it and I definitely don’t want to rely on Facebook to “serve” it to me.

Does anyone actually prefer sponsored content to being able to curate your own experience? I certainly don’t. Feel free to share your own techniques for better Facebook content consumption in comments!

A rewrite: What about Generation X?

March 28, 2008 By Helen 4 Comments

I originally had this published at The Episcopal Cafe last fall, but I have a lot of new readers coming in from the blogosphere who aren’t of my faith persuasion, and, sensitive to their range of spiritual beliefs, I’ve recast it for the secular audience.

I was talking to a friend about the challenges we face by virtue of being born after 1970–well, of being gen-xers in general, and being caught between the “Boomers” and the “Millennials,” and how this affects us in our professional and vocational lives. It came up last week on an email group, and I passed it along to several of my friends who are doing their part, in my humble opinion, to attract people like me to organizations that share a concern that their membership may be overly grey-haired.

Not to put too fine a point on my own grey hair, mind.

On Sept. 20, that group, which I can loosely describe as a group of 20/30-something peers approaching spirituality with a bit of a noncomformist edge, met over margaritas to discuss, as one friend put it, “the theological / ecclesiological / missiological / tequiliological implications” of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; indeed, the Harry Potter series as a whole. Decidedly not what my parents would call a church, by any stretch of the imagination, but it suits me better to “practice” than to “worship.” And I got to thinking about it: why was this something I could be so down with, especially knowing that somewhere out there, another focus group was emerging to study my generation. Yawn.

The more I see things with top-down architectures being applied to us youngish people, the more I realize it doesn’t work. I’ve seen great ideas committee-ed to death all because people older and wiser than me must control every outcome of every plan of every initiative. And the more input I got from friends of mine, the more I realized:

Your invitation to me to participate doesn’t mean much if you don’t let my input—and leadership—count. And that’s what I’m hearing from frustrated 30-somethings who want to take on leadership positions but still get flak for being slackers, which we really are not anymore and we’d like some credit. I originally wrote this about being a member of the Episcopal Church, but it’s true of many other organizations. I worked at a financial services magazine that refused every pitch I made about Gen-X prospects because we’re not buyers. I work for an association that’s trying to figure out how to attract people under 40 because we’re not joiners. One friend of mine added to the conversation that she’d like to see “‘young adult’ stricken from the cultural lexicon–for reasons that resonate with me: mortgage, career, family. Heck, my son is almost 15, and pretty soon I’ll be the young adult parent of a young adult.

So, if we’re not young adults anymore, and nowhere near middle aged (if 50 is new the 30, we’re actually teenagers), what are we? How do you address the wide demographic of a narrow slice of the population that’s holding an awful lot of cards and generating absolutely no buzz? Sure, skip us. Move on to the millennials.

Here’s my take on things, though. Generation X is the bridge between the Boomers and the Millenials. We were raised with enough technology that we’re conversant in the ways that today’s teenagers interact on social networks. But we also know how to dial a phone. We’re all wired in varying ways, but each succeeding generation is increasingly plugged in. Let me put it another way. Historically, many immigrants have come to America speaking only their native language. Their children, however, speak both languages fluently. But I know many cases where the grandchildren don’t speak anything but English, and the middle generation must help the bookending generations understand one another–literally. So what happens if you skip the middle generation?

Here’s an example I ran across recently. Blogs are a publishing platform that were adopted quickly by compulsive writers with varying degrees of web-savvy. I’ve had so many that it’s a wonder I can populate them all with random Helen/Gallycat brain noise on a regular basis, so I wax and wane with all of them. They’re a great way to distribute content, to self-publish (no, really, I’m more prolific than Stephen King!), to bypass censorious editors, to think aloud, to take the podium, to brainstorm in community. So of course, many organizations, seeing the value of being able to share content with one another, decided to barrel full speed ahead with a blog. Occasionally, some would enlist me to help get the blog off the ground, since I know the technology. One, in particular, was group that was looking forward to getting some ideas out there.

But they didn’t listen to my input on certain key issues that ultimately doomed the blog. The problem was that every post had to be approved by a committee. I felt like Cassandra, trying to explain to them why it would inhibit participation on the blog. It died a few months later, neglected and forgotten.

So how is this an example of why we, Gen X, are the translators? We are well equipped to understand social media, which is going to be the communications medium of choice for today’s young people. How is this changing the face of communications? My connections in the news media say it’s as revolutionary as Gutenberg and the moveable type printing press. Ignore this opinion at your peril. Blogs are just a part of what that next generation is coming online with. We can speak their language. We can speak the Boomers’, too, though. Did I mention my teenage son? Yes? What about my aging parents? How’s your retirement portfolio?

So anyway, back to the matter at hand. Don’t skip Generation X. We’ve seen it more than once. We’ve heard you ask how to reach us, and seen you form committees hoping to find the magic pill that will get us back in to your idea of an organization. To be honest, you might not. At least, not through the means you’ve traditionally reached out to people. In the new world, you don’t just program and broadcast; you invite, share and participate. I understand that it’s difficult to turn a ship around, and for an organization of any size to embrace change quickly is a frightening prospect. But by the time you bust out your magnifying glass and whittle down to the details of the new media environment and position yourselves in the emerging economy and get all that together in a strategic plan for the new millennium that started when folks my age actually WERE still under 30…

It’s not enough to study us. Listen to us, yes, hire us, absolutely. But most importantly—

Join us.

The original, published Oct. 9, 2007, is here.

Writing for social media

October 4, 2007 By Helen 1 Comment

Because I come from a journalism background, I approach content management as a journalist. Not like a journalist, mind, but as one. And that’s a good thing, because part of my job is helping old-school journalists learn social media frames. But they have habits deeply ingrained, and trying to coach them into new media techniques is like herding cats. Now, I’m sure I’m not the first person to talk about these items, but it’s hard to find stuff on generating content in the socialmediasphere, and what sets it apart from traditional news writing–both online and print–for the organization that’s got both feet stuck firmly in Pulitzer world when all they want nowadays is a Webby.

So, without further ado, here are Helen’s handy tips for generating social media content.

Share, share, share. I’ve found that there are two categories of share:
- The “Hey, I found this, and it’s really cool” share (:found). This is when you’ve found a link that is absolutely so cool/useful/interesting/funny that you have to give it to all your friends. Viral marketing totally depends on the “I found this, and it’s really cool” share. Social bookmarking and tagging are aggregators of this kind of content.
- The “Hey, I wrote this, and it’s interesting enough to me that I want to share it with you” share (:writ). Being a compulsive writer, I do a fair amount of this. Most corporate blogging (of the nonPR-fed variety) is made of this type of content, and quite a bit of “citizen journalism” gets created this way. Transmission of this type of content is facilitated by :found.
Most social media outlets aren’t all one or the other but on a spectrum, depending on how the user engages the platform. For instance, del.icio.us allows you to add comments to a link to give the link context. Blogs provide both ends of the spectrum, allowing armchair pundits to write essays about each other’s essays and content editors to pick and choose :found stuff for quick links. Twitter wants your content but limits you to short bursts of text, as does Facebook’s “status” update.
Comment boxes do not a blog make. The read/write functionality is there, but if you post a 700 word article from your publication and bury a comment box at the bottom of it, you’re less likely to get comments. Rather, keep that content elsewhere on your site–a webzine, perhaps? Use the blog to tease readers over to that content in one of these or similar ways:
- An interactive table of contents, with links to the stories and 30-word teaser decks to help readers choose what to click to. This can be a mirror of your email newsletter, but worked this way it becomes a “pull” rather than a “push.”
- An introductory paragraph from the author of the article, providing context for the story before linking to it. After all, authors always have a story about the story. “This article was hard to write because the subject had gone deep underground. But we finally were able to reach Puxatawney Phil, and you can see the results here.”
- The three most important paragraphs from the top of the article, usually the first three paragraphs, with a “click for more” link underneath it. Great way to digest news articles.
- Your own introduction, explaining why you like the article. Compare this to the editor-in-chief’s page in a regular magazine, where they give shout-outs to articles in the month. “Don’t miss Pepe Le Pew’s heartbreaking tale of love and loss on Page 94!”
Use first and second person. You want to engage the reader, so go ahead and speak to him or her directly and encourage the reader to answer. For instance, this is a new blog of mine with an initial readership of zero. How am I attracting readers? By going out and introducing myself. That’s first person. How am I engaging readers? By talking to you. Hi, there, you. That’s second person. Hey, you in the third row, I’m talking to you! Are you listening to me? I suppose that’s encouraging you to answer, but… no.
More encouraging would be for me to ask you a question that leads to you writing your own top 5 points for creating social media content. It’s not just blog posts, either. Today I was tasked with rewriting our mission statement to fit in that little block of text on Second Life for “Group Charter.” I did this by recasting it into second person.
Determine what content you’re already generating that can be leveraged in social media. As an organization, you probably have plenty of content channels that you didn’t even know you could leverage. (Leverage is an obnoxious word, but using it causes CEO faces to light up.) Are you doing training functions that could be podcasted or webinar-ated? Are you passing around links to colleagues that you could blog to your members? Is there syndicated material on, say, a sister organization’s website that you can capture through a webfeed?
Learn to let go. Part of generating content is getting more content from your users. And that means you’ll probably get some oddball typoese on your site. That might mean that u needs 2 bkum flooent n lolcat & sms just to make sure nothing inappropriate crosses your site (er, need to become fluent in “LOLcat” and text message shorthand). Today, I sat through an amazing webinar about all the potential in social media for publications. The pressing concern? “What will we do when the comments don’t meet our style specifications?” Oh, the horror!
Well, here’s one thing I do know. Two, actually. 1. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. This is known as Godwin’s Law. There’s a corollary that I’m not sure has been made quite as explicit, but another truth is that 2. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability that someone will invoke one’s lack of spelling or grammatical talent approaches one. (It usually results in Godwin’s Law being invoked, anyway, because the person so invoked will usually respond with “Grammer Nazi.” Sic.) It’s rather like the debate over serial commas. Don’t sweat it. Create clear terms of service and reserve the right to edit that really egregious misspelling of “public,” but your readers are smart enough to know that user content is… just that. User content. And they really didn’t come to get graded on their participation.

Well, anyways, off I go contributing content. I have no idea whether it’s useful or not, but I suppose at some point someone will find it and tell me that I’m completely borked for writing this when it’s been done ten times over better elsewhere and link link link for examples. I left things out, too, like write short bits and if it gets longer than 600 words or so, you better have bullets and subheads breaking up the text. But honestly, I’m keeping these notes down for the benefit of the presentations I know I’m going to have to give. And in the spirit of social media, I’m all about the share, share share.

New Media

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