Content Strategy Applied took place on January 13th and 14th at the eBay offices in Richmond, London. Hosted by eBay and co-sponsored by Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, the event focused on commercial case studies and practical skills workshops to build on the excellent theory already available.
Presentations are now available to all delegates, but you will need a login and password to access them. Contact us if you attended the conference and haven't yet received details.
Content Strategy Applied 2011 round-up
Content Strategy Applied saw content practitioners from all over the world converging on London for two rainy January days to share case studies and their own experience of content strategy as it actually happens. The programme for CS Applied (or #CSApplied if you’re Twitter-inclined) was light on theory and heavy on practice, with case studies and workshops supplemented open ‘content surgeries’ during which content strategy practitioners fielded questions in small groups over lunch.
Content Strategy Applied's practical focus was unsurprising, really, given that the idea for the conference came from eBay Europe's Head of Content Lucie Hyde's craving for practical know-how, her appetite having been whetted by CS Forum, which took place in Paris in April 2010. As someone implementing content strategy at eBay Europe, Lucie wanted to move the conversation on from ‘why’ and to see how others were practising content strategy. Working with Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, a brand communications agency helping eBay Europe implement their content strategy, a programme featuring keynotes, case studies and workshops from the likes of Kristina Halvorson, Rahel Bailie, eBay, Mozilla, Jamie Oliver Online, and MSN Europe, came together and delivered over two days at eBay's Richmond-Upon-Thames offices.
Keynotes
Rahel Bailie of Intention Design’s keynote ‘If only I had a content strategy’ kicked off proceedings, showing examples of content gone bad. Corporate narcissism – delivering content that starts from what the company wants to say, instead of giving the user what they need – took a well deserved beating, as did misuse of social media. “Social media is not a campaign. It’s a commitment.” Rahel spoke about marketing content being the icing on the content cake, and making sure you get the technical content and product information right first. Staying on the food theme, Rahel also picked on restaurant websites as particularly heinous examples of letting design get in the way of content, instead of enhancing it. (Worth visiting for a snarky take on this is ‘Never said about restaurant websites’.)
Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic – author of the oft-quoted book ‘Content Strategy for the Web’ – spoke about the difficulty of explaining content strategy when it doesn’t yet have a fully agreed definition, in her keynote ‘Do you speak content strategy?’ She offered practical help in the form of metaphors to explain what content strategists do. As Fiona Cullinan, a member of official coverage team at Content Strategy Applied, sums up nicely in her own review: “They included: Wall.E, Pixar’s waste-collecting robot, cleaning up the mess that website owners have created; fixing a Crumbling House by doing a survey and making a budgeted plan to rebuild it properly; and content as a fragile plant needing care within a wider ecosystem of communications.”
Case studies
Nikki Tiedtke, senior content strategist at eBay Europe, told the story of how she turned business seller communications around from being reactive and driven by corporate needs to user-focused, consistent in tone and written in plain language. ‘From chaos to content’, as her case study title put it. No mean feat in a large company like eBay, and even more impressive when you consider that the content has to be localised for several different European markets. Arguably the most important point here was that Nikki and her colleagues spent the majority of their time building relationships across eBay to get the buy-in for their content strategy work.
Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla gave an insight into the localisation of Firefox, which is available in over 40 different languages. The open source ethos of the Mozilla Foundation and the fact that localisation – which is not simply translation – is performed by volunteers means that the challenges he faces are somewhat different to those faced by traditional companies. What was striking about his case study was the emphasis on people management, more so than on technical tools. His advice to anyone looking for the budget to do localisation properly is to ask, “Do you want this product to go global?” In other words, focus on the results of localisation, not the task.
The Jamie Oliver online team of Monisha Saldanha and Danny McCubbin showed how their content strategy addressed a ‘personality brand’, engaging with a community of fans who help to produce a massive amount of content. Jamie Oliver was into social media and community management years before the terms were coined, having had what would be considered old-fashioned tools like forums and blog pretty much from when he started to be in the public eye. Something the Jamie Oliver team have in common with Mozilla is that content localisation is performed by volunteers, so community management is vital.
Finally, two agencies gave their experience of dealing with clients – getting their buy-in or helping them to get buy-in from other departments. Julie Mahoney of LBi shared the content strategy tools she finds most effective, including ‘social media listening audits’, to find out what people are saying about brands or topics to help inform what content to create. Fiona Perks and Kath Ludlow of Bright Stuff Communications ran through the 10 lessons learnt from working with brands on their content, including the perhaps surprising ideas that generosity is dangerous and to beware over-educating users in case they learn enough to go elsewhere.
Workshops
Content Strategy Applied workshops were split into three streams: content strategy 101, localisation, and measuring effectiveness.
Content Strategy 101
Steve Wilson Beales, head of content for MSN Entertainment, led a workshop on how to combine search and editorial. He offered tips and insights into MSN tap into social network buzz to go beyond their vast homepage audience and draw traffic, since search engines now recognise and pick up social media, making them an important part of SEO strategy.
Rahel Bailie’s ‘CS for Product’ workshop focused on choosing the right standards for product specific content, where information has to be consistent across huge projects, with tone of voice and localisation concerns. She stressed the importance of metadata, and the iterative nature of the lifecycle for product content: analyse, collect, manage, publish, start again.
Localisation
Chad Butz of Bourne’s workshop looked at creating an international content strategy framework. He emphasised the need for clients to start to think like a publisher since content strategy demands that businesses change their structure and behaviour. In large companies, one area or department, such as marketing may ‘own’ content but they have to remember that how they represent themselves and the brand online affects the entire business.
Lucie Hyde and Lutz Niederer shared eBay Europe’s approach for building a multi-lingual content strategy, optimised for efficiency and quality. Localisation challenges range from many iterations of same feature to out-of-context translations to US-centric copy. Content standards, such as tone of voice, are crucial since content has to work together across huge projects but eBay are mindful that localisation is about culture, not just language.
Measuring effectiveness
Rob Hinchcliffe, a freelance community management and development consultant, told us how to get over the fear of external (user-generated) content, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. He used Lego as a case study in how to use community management to turn around perceptions of your brand. Brands shouldn't ignore complaints. “Trolls are not born, they are created.” Complainers are products of the environment, so brands should try to respond and move (not control) the conversation.
Angela Boodoo of We Are London shared her research into how to measure the effectiveness of content. Her aim with the research is to raise the reputation and sense of professionalism for content as a practice, through applying objective measures that speak to management wonks who believe that if you can’t measure something you can’t manage it. Angela shared the Content Evaluation Toolkit that she developed during her research, and got her workshop to work through an example taking a nearby pub’s website as the source material. It’s a tribute to Angela that none of her workshop attendees decided to do some on-site research.
Further coverage
Content strategy in 60 tweets is Firehead Ltd’s selection of 60 of the best tips from Content Strategy Applied on Twitter.
Content Strategy Applied in review is Cennydd Bowles’ take on the conference from a user experience (UX) perspective.
Why content strategy is here to stay by Red Lorry Yellow Lorry gives their view on content strategy as a practice.
The Twitter account @CSApplied2011 is worth keeping an eye on, as we’ll share other coverage as it comes in. An archive of the tweets from #CSApplied can be found at http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/csapplied
Photos can be found at our Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/csapplied/pool/
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who attended, spoke at, tweeted and blogged Content Strategy Applied.
Special thanks go to Fiona Cullinan (who you'll find at at http://fionacullinan.com/ and on Twitter @fionacullinan) and Gail Haslam (who you'll find at http://www.content-happy.com/ and on Twitter @gailhaslam) for their sterling efforts on the official @CSApplied2011 Twitter account.
By Kenneth Yau, consultant at Baddit Ltd
