We’ve got plenary session speakers to bracket the workshops. The morning speakers are meant to energize and provoke you, while the end-of-day speakers are meant to give you pause without putting extra stress on your brain.

Who’s on first?

In case you missed that reference to the famous Abbott and Costello comedy routine, we have a speaker roster that is sure to make you sit up and think.

Robert Rose comes from a content marketing background, and will be delivering the opening plenary session on a topic with a technical bent. (And be honest here, you thought the words “technical” and “content marketing” would never co-exist in the same sentence.) Why Content Marketers Need Content Strategists takes a look at the quickly-growing world of delivering content to multiple channels, with new emphasis on mobile, and will give you a new appreciation for the technical-track workshops.

PG Bartlett comes from a technical background of content optimization software, and will be delivering a topic with an editorial bent. Natural Language vs Corporate Speak is a whole new take on content quality, with an automation twist, in an age where corporate speak is both infuriating and expected, and where it acts like a pernicious weed – hiding among large bodies of content that make it hard to eradicate.

Next post: What’s on second?

Understanding Your Audience’s Content Needs - Laura Creekmore

From Inventory to Insight to Action – Paula Land

Content Strategy for Social Software – Selma Zafar

Personalization, Customer Journey, Omni-channel: a how-to approach - Kevin Nichols

Future-Proofing Your Content – Sarah Beckley

Content Typing and Modelling – Rahel Bailie

Global Content Strategy: So Much More than Translation – Dr. James Romano

Realizing the Full Potential of Taxonomies – Dr. Branka Kosovac

Kevin Nichols - Optimizing Content Strategy Deliverables: Content Inventory and Audit

Kyle Wiens – Why the World Needs Fixers

Noz Urbina – Leveraging Your Business Assets with Multi-Channel Publishing

Sarah Beckley – The Content Matrix: Quantitative and Qualitative Metrics to Power Business Decisions

Tosca Fasso – Worth a Thousand Words: Visualizing Audit Finding for the C-Suite

If you need handouts from the presenters, you can ask us or contact the presenter directly. (In some cases, we’ve been sent files; in other cases, the presenter has posted them on their own site.)

Deane Barker - Issues with Content Migration

Derek Olson – A Seven Step Mobile Strategy for Business

Joe Gollner – The Accidental Content Strategist

Linda Morone - eBooks for Business

Robert Rose - Web Engagement Management – What To Know Before You Get Hitched

User testing is an essential part of our process at Foraker Labs. Over the years, however, I’ve encountered a lot of confusion about what it actually is.

Folks who work in marketing typically lump user testing in with focus groups and other market research. On the engineering side, a lot of software developers think it is the same thing as quality assurance testing. Designers are convinced that user testing is nothing short of a global conspiracy bent on increasing font sizes to the point of tackiness.

Sometimes a client will scoff at the notion of spending money “fixing what you should have gotten right the first time.” When I hear this line, I often talk about the automotive industry. The engineers at Audi are really good at what they do, but they’d never build a brand new car and put it in the showroom without crash-testing it, driving it for tens of thousands of miles, and then fine-tuning its performance and ergonomics based on the data and feedback. Those engineers are not incompetent because they “didn’t get it right the first time.” On the contrary, they are highly competent because they iterate their work based on user feedback. Commercial web and mobile software is every bit as complex as automotive design.

Software designers, developers, and stakeholders working together on a project cannot possibly design the most optimal user experience without involving real users. Project team members will effortlessly glide through tasks that would trip up a real user (that is, those that are not deeply familiar with the project). This is where user testing comes in.

User testing sessions involve one participant, a computer or mobile device, and a facilitator who provides the participant with tasks to complete. The session typically lasts about an hour, and may involve up to 15 separate tasks. The facilitator provides the task description to the user in written form (so they can refer back to it easily), and then lets the user attempt to complete the task with no intervention. An example of a simple task might be: “Please sign up for this website’s email newsletter.”

It is enormously helpful to record video and audio of the user and capture what is happening on-screen. There are several products available that do this, and they typically superimpose the video of the user’s face on top of the capture of the on-screen activity. In this way, the researcher can observe frowns, smiles, flushing associated with stress—and just about anything else—in the context of what’s happening on the screen.

In my experience, there are two primary benefits of this kind of screen recording. The first is to have a record of what happened, so if the user ends up in some bizarre place on a website while you happened to be taking notes, you can go back later and figure out what they did (without asking “Whoa! How’d the heck did you get there?!”) The second benefit is the “highlights” video. Even the most stubborn stakeholder can be convinced to shelve a dumb idea after watching 10 people in a row vent their frustration in a (hopefully profanity-laced) diatribe.

Market research and quality assurance testing are essential components of software design and development, but should never be confused with user testing.

If you’ve never run a user study, now’s the time to start! There are a number of great resources out there, including:

How-to guides:

• Steve Krug’s excellent book, Don’t Make me Think
• Jakob Nielsen’s website and newsletter
• Usabilityfirst.com

Tools of the trade:

• Windows-based screen recording software, Morae
• Mac OSX-based screen recording software: Silverback
• iOS-based screen recording software: UX Recorder

Workshop: Extending Your Content Reach through eBooks and Apps
Oct  th, 1:15-3;45 PM

Workshop leaderss: Charles Cooper, The Rockley Group; Linda Morone, Data Conversion Laboratory; Derek Olson, Foraker

The  promise that Apple’s iBooks 2 for iPad will reinvent the textbook will likely not deliver the expected revolution in education. iBooks are sleeker, smarter, and equipped with a seemingly endless amount of innovative features – animation, full screen photos, videos – but the revolution is already at hand, and fortunately for the students of tomorrow, it isn’t iBooks.

Schools and students are jumping on the iBooks bandwagon, with almost 350,000 textbooks sold within the first three days. But while iBooks is  inventive, the improvements are evolutionary. Reinventing is a long way from revolutionizing.

By definition, revolutionary ideas throw out an old standard instead of merely reinventing it. But the essence of a textbook remains: a linear, monolithic body of knowledge - iBooks digitizes textbooks, mixing in some rich media, simple quizzes, a nifty note-tracking system, and search. It’s more functional than print, but no revolution.

Contrast this with Khan Academy, an online video library that is taking the educational world by storm. The goal: provide a world-class, free education to anyone, in any place, at any time.

Khan Academy launched out of founder Salman Khan’s converted closet, and has proven as effective as it is unorthodox. It’s a school without walls, without curricula, and without textbooks.

Students are flocking to the academy, which has delivered more than 115 million lessons to students around the world via short video segments taught by “Sal” himself. While the presentation is engaging, its real impact stems from its ability to organize information into a truly individual experience where students can choose their own learning adventures.

While textbooks are part of the problem, they are not the problem. It is education itself that is broken. Khan’s model works because he teaches the way he wished he’d been taught.

The prevailing system breaks the world’s knowledge into linear sections and static formulas. But the way students think isn’t linear—it’s associative. They jump from concept to concept, with their brains naturally latching onto the next most interesting idea. The path to knowledge is best approached organically, not prescriptively. Any linear, chapter-based textbook format,  even one as sophisticated as iBooks, is an anachronism.

Sir Ken Robinson, well known for his famous series of TED lectures on education, is critical of mere education reform. Instead, Robinson advocates that we stop doing things that we have always done, just because we have always done it, and look at revolution instead of evolution.

Visionaries like Khan and Robinson have demonstrated an effective education system. It treats students like individuals, not brains in which to pour disconnected pages of information. Education will be organic, associative, and explorative. It’s distinctly un-bookish, which means it is also distinctly un-iBookish.

Apple’s iBooks promises that all those “gorgeous” features will make students excited to learn about the solar system. But Apple already has an app for that - Star Walk for iPad, an educational astronomy app that  promotes learning, not segmented into parts and bound between covers, even if they are virtual covers. Like the Khan Academy, it is education unbound; that’s real revolution.

Sal Khan and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia are empowering millions to learn without using a single textbook. They are promoting this learning revolution through self-service and knowledge portals, which lets users pursue the topics that most intrigue them. This sort of divergent thinking about education is the wave of the future, and more organizations should embrace a format that really facilitates long-term learning.

My company’s technical documentation software, Dozuki, is designed to teach people to do the things they want to do, when they want to do it. With iFixit (which runs on Dozuki), we don’t walk people through an entire repair curriculum before we teach them how to fix an iPod. We provide just enough information at the point of need, and give inspired individuals a path to learn more.

Here’s the real key to effective education: Give people the most intuitive, direct path to understanding what they really want. That approach has helped us teach 15 million amateurs to fix complex electronics, and it’s how Salman Khan is systematically revolutionizing education.

Textbooks are a broken form of knowledge acquisition, and it’s not because they’re made of paper. iBooks could have been so much more. Perhaps some day it will be.

Session: Re-imagining the Book and Why the World Needs Fixers
Oct 10th, 8:00-9:00 AM

Session presenters: Kyle Wiens, CEO, iFixit, interviewed by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

If your client has unstructured content, you’re probably spending a lot of time with Excel. Why? We have yet to find anything better for organizing, tracking, and managing large buckets of mushy content. If you had told me ten years ago that I would spend years of my life getting to know Excel intimately, I would have laughed at you.

Joe Gollner recently wrote about accidentally becoming a content strategist, and while I am one of the few who intentionally became one (a story for another day), I did accidentally became an expert in the content matrix and, by extension, Excel.

Once I officially became a content strategist, I found myself buried deep in Excel all day, every day to make sense of the content I was now in charge of. When Scott Abel calls himself a “content wrangler,” he’s not kidding. I explored the features of Excel as a form of self-preservation and a determination to win the battle with my client’s content. Over the years, I’ve learned a few things worth sharing.

The difficulty is that you may find yourself reinventing the wheel for every matrix. And even when I say “matrix,” I could mean one of dozen different types. I’ve worked with spreadsheets that range from one containing every word of copy for an auto quote application you’ve used that clocked in at 60 plus columns and 3,000 plus rows, to what was essentially a site map that we used for traffic management.

In between are a variety of spreadsheets that serve many purposes –tracking, creating, migrating, counting, auditing, but ultimately only have one thing in common: they contain information about content for a website.

What I have found is that there is a methodology to creating a matrix that can travel without throughout the life of a project and serve multiple audiences. Having a consistent process for the creation and refinement, as well as a number of templates to choose from, is an essential toolkit for every hard core content strategist.

The methodology I use and some examples are detailed in a presentation I gave at the Intelligent Content Conference this winter. The Content Strategy Workshop I’m giving will help you overcome any fears you may have about getting your hands dirty in Excel. It’s actually full of functions and formulas that can be used on words. But that’s only part of the matrix.

In the workshop, we’ll discuss the guts of a matrix, how to know what to put into it and how to get what you need out of it. You’ll learn how to make Excel bend to your will and take the matrix creation heavy lifting off of your shoulders. In the meantime, take a look at the matrices you’ve been using and think about what you like and don’t like about them. Bring your questions and problems. I can’t wait!

Workshop: The Content Matrix: Quantitative and Qualitative Metrics to Power Business Decisions
Oct 10th, 9:15-11:45 AM

Workshop leader: Sarah Beckley
Senior Content Strategist, Razorfish

Content Strategy Workshops will soon be announcing its schedule of events for 2013. Our first content strategy event of the new year will take place January 23, 2013 at PayPal headquarters in San Jose, CA.

Assessment. Discovery.  Strategy. Analysis. The initial phase in a digital and/or interactive project is entitled differently depending on whom you ask.  But essentially, the same activities occur regardless of what it is called.  On a typical project during Discovery phase, the project team will:

• uncover the current-state landscape of the digital experience;
• review competitive and best-in-class models for similar digital experiences;
• uncover the technology architecture and technical constraints;
• define (if it is not already known) the audience and its behaviors (how it engages with the brand);
• define business requirements and goals; and,
• from all this information produce a series of deliverables to capture gaps, issues, requirements, constraints and future-state objectives.

In short, the work completed in this phase will either ensure success or failure for the future-state content experience.

But take heed, the world is changing.  Discovery phase for even a Web project is not just about Web anymore—although I’ve always argued for a larger enterprise snapshot—or how value propositions should be written. This work must look at optimizing content across channels, creating portable content experiences and giving users control over the content with which they interact. The discovery phase must also survey the entire customer journey– not just drilling down a sales funnel–but content experiences required to support existing customer. Also, if we aver that content is a business asset, the discovery phase should help determine which success factors (KPIs) are necessary to evaluate the internal and external performance of the content solution. Recent legislation to protect consumers from intrusive, non-transparent data mining practices should weigh into this effort. And obviously, the assessment of the delivery of the content cannot be divorced from an assessment of its message.

A lot to consider here?  Well yes.  An audit and inventory is not just a spreadsheet and an audit report is not just a PowerPoint presentation. Due diligence and an appreciation of detail is required.

The “Strategy” in Content Strategy

For content strategy, I argue that the discovery phase is the most important phase of work—the piece that puts ‘strategy’ into content strategy—because during this time, the content strategist figures out the current-state content ecosystem and experience and defines how the future should look.  My elevator speech for content strategy has always defined it as: how to get the right content to the right user at the right time. As Global Lead for Content Strategy at SapientNitro, my team has a very strong belief in this definition of content strategy. Thus, when we conduct a discovery phase, we figure out the following:

• what is the right type(s) of content for the future state–E.g. define the future-state content experience;
• the best content lifecycle(s) to deliver it;
• any contextual must-haves–E.g.: personalization/business rules for content delivery– including time, place or manner, as well as the device it should be delivered to; and
• any operational mechanisms (governance rules/standards) to future-proof a quality content experience.

Content inventories, audits, stakeholder interviews all culminate into a series of future-state recommendations and a roadmap.

Deliverables and Work-streams

Inventory – Captures content within the scope of the current state; measures the volume and scope of content to be considered.  But a content strategist should not just complete an inventory to figure out how much content there is–although that is one of the reasons—we should also do it to figure out how content is labeled, organized, structured, what is important and not important and to help us decide what the future-state content experience should include.

Audit – Measures the effectiveness of the content ecosystem, including any gaps, issues or missing opportunities. We conduct the audit, which is not just about whether content is messaged correctly or effectively, to figure out what are the strengths, gaps, opportunities and untapped areas (e.g.: Mobile, multichannel) to consider.  A robust audit should never just be a qualitative assessment of the content on a Web or mobile site rolled up into a spreadsheet. It is a comprehensive exercise that looks at the end-to-end content lifecycle (how content is acquired, created, managed, published, etc.), standards and mechanisms to ensure governance, content structure and taxonomies, metadata and xml, the content itself, and competitive models.  In some cases, heuristic analysis may also be used. Normally, there is more than one deliverable that comes from this work, including a content audit spreadsheet, capturing details about the content experience on a platform or site; workflows or content lifecycle diagrams with gaps and issues analysis; and, competitive models, etc.

Stakeholder Interviews – These are used as a tool to uncover findings in the audit and inventory and to define a ‘wish list’ for the future state.  This effort is a piece of the overall discovery phase and includes a series of stakeholder interviews with those who touch, work with, or benefit from the content being considered.

Audit Report with Future State Roadmap/Recommendations – An audit report with future state recommendations is the output of this effort. If a future-state roadmap cannot be gleaned from the work occurring during the audit, then the audit is not successful in uncovering everything it should.

How to Get it Right

Workshop participants will receive content inventory, audit, and stakeholder interview protocol templates that they can take back into their workplaces and put to use immediately.

To do a Discovery phase correctly, the output of a content strategist’s work must include all of the traditional content assessment findings but also account for:

• increasing understanding of businesses that content is a quantifiable asset;
• emerging technologies in an ever-expanding multichannel digital universe;
• impressing need of contextual and relevant content to the consumer;
• appreciating the fact that metrics and measurements are an important input to the overall content lifecycle;
• growing need for user control of content; and,
• overwhelming need for organizations to get their heads around all of the content they possess and produce—to understand how to optimize and economize internally and externally upon what is that they do possess and where they need to make significant investments for the future.

In its simplest form, the work a content strategist does in the discovery phase needs to frame what needs to be a part of the future-state content experience, the delivery of it, and the governance to ensure its success.

Workshop:  Optimizing Content Strategy Deliverables: Content Inventory and Audit
Oct 9th, 2:15-4:45 PM

Workshop leader: Kevin Nichols, Director of Content Strategy
SapientNitro

Here is a scenario in which you may find yourself one of these days: you are on a project, doing some content strategy work, and someone higher up the corporate food chain will say, “Of course we’ll be needing that content in a mobile app, and we still have some demographics that need print, and there’s the materials that goes in the box with the product…”  Or you might be a staffer maintaining a site at a time when the company has a surge of  financial success. Management now wants to invest and deliver “like the big boys,” which means consistent content experiences on the device and format of customer choice.

In either case, you might have started work on “a website”, but ended up staring down the barrel of not only several regional sites and microsites, but content for native apps and various print formats.  Everything needs to be on message, on brand, and accurate, across the board, all the time.

The scenarios above have played out in many organizations – some of them household names.  Content designed for one channel and format doesn’t easily translate to other channels if you don’t set up the strategy and process for it from the beginning.  Some teams find themselves with a recurring workflow step where developers or writers copy and paste code and content between systems for every update and demographic.

A more likely scenario occurs every day: print is stubbornly sticking around, and manufacturers are churning out an ever-increasing number of device profiles and methods of consuming and interacting with content.  Considering the work required to deliver great content to one deliverable, when you multiply the number of outputs, sometimes into the hundreds and even thousands, an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.

That’s the day you don’t want to look back and say “Why didn’t I design for this up front?  Why didn’t I go to that workshop when I had the chance?”

This session on multi-channel publishing – the industry way of talking about create-once, publish-anywhere content – looks at how designing content structures, choosing storage methods, and leveraging automation properly can make or break modern content strategy. Architecture and process built for the future will scale and translate across channels; others won’t. You’ll work through the fundamentals of future-proofing your content strategy, and how to explain to management that yes, you do need to do it this way to avoid getting caught out or overtaken by the competition.

Make your job strategy to invest in getting up to speed now, so you can avoid the outlay for stress counselling and therapy later. See you in my workshop?

Workshop: Leveraging Your Content Assets with Multichannel Publishing
Oct 9th, 2:15 – 4:45 PM

Workshop leader: Noz Urbina
Senior Consultant, Trainer, and Presales Manager, Mekon