Content Strategy for the Web

by Kristina Halvorson

  Normandale originally formed a Web Content Advisory Committee in 2005. Two major problems arose: there were too many differing viewpoints to make quick and effective decisions; and having one committee chair responsible to implement web strategy decisions was unfair to the chair, time-consuming, and caused a bottleneck. As Director of Grant Development, Mary Krugerud remembers, “Our web initiatives moved painfully slowly.”

  Since then, a web governance structure has evolved that has proved to be extremely effective. Instead of just one person leading the charge, the new Web Strategy Committee has a leadership team that includes Mary as well as two other members: Normandale’s Web Architect and the Dean of Marketing and Enrollment. As this year’s committee chair, Mary has 25% of her time allocated to web duties. Mary brings her neutral role on campus, strong negotiating skills, and long history with the organization: ideal qualifications for the Chair.

  The leadership team jokingly refers to their group as “The Triad,” and they’ve had great success working together to keep web projects moving forward. They frequently lead independent workgroups to research new initiatives or other assignments. Best of all? Mary, as the Web Strategy Committee Chair, doesn’t make governance decisions in isolation, so she is neither a bottleneck nor a lightning rod for criticism.

  * * *

  Designing Workflow and Governance Processes

  Having defined and assigned the appropriate roles for all the players, your job is to make sure they all work together as efficiently and productively as possible. To do that, you need a process.

  When people think about the content development process, here’s what they often imagine:

  In reality, content development usually looks a lot more like this:

  Once you realize the complexity of the content lifecycle, sitting down to identify or design your content processes can be pretty daunting. The secret to making content process design manageable is to break it down into smaller chunks. We often break the overall process down into these four areas of focus, each of which contain their own complex sub-processes:

  • Create/source new content

  • Maintain existing content

  • Evaluate content effectiveness

  • Govern strategies, plans, policies, and procedures

  It’s tempting to go down the list, check off these items one by one, and declare your content “officially done.” But, in reality, these activities are part of a continuous lifecycle that repeats and repeats and repeats.

  In the next few sections, we’ll discuss things to consider while designing your process. For each of the four areas of focus, we’ll cover:

  • Common tasks

  • Questions to consider

  • Helpful tools

  Note: Content processes, as discussed in this chapter, are independent of (although sometimes related to) content management system requirements and design. For more information, refer to Bob Boiko’s book, The Content Management Bible, Chapter 33, “Designing Workflow and Staffing Models.”

  Creating and Sourcing Content

  Whether you’re creating a whole new site or adding content to an existing site, there is a lot to do. Here are the most common ways new content is introduced to a website:

  • Original content creation: Content is created in-house or by a vendor specifically for the use of the organization.

  • Curated or aggregated content: Content is sourced from outside the organization and sometimes edited or annotated.

  • Content migration: Content is moved from one content property or platform to another.

  Common tasks

  Often, creating and sourcing content includes the following tasks:

  • Plan

  • Create or source

  • Route

  • Revise

  • Approve (including legal or regulatory)

  • Add metadata

  • Test

  • Publish

  Questions to ask yourself

  While designing this stage of the process, you’ll want to know:

  • Where do requests for new content come from? Who receives them?

  • Which business drivers (such as product launches, financial quarters, holidays, news, events) trigger requests for new content?

  • Are there “emergency” content requests that arise? If so, what are they, why are they considered emergencies, and who can submit them?

  • What information is most helpful to have before content work begins?

  • Who is responsible for drafting/creating/selecting the content?

  • Where do you get source material (for creation) or source content (curation/aggregation)?

  • If content is curated or migrated, what kind of editorial work needs to happen?

  • How are content drafts or selections routed between authors, approvers, and publishers?

  • How are contracts negotiated for curated or aggregated content?

  • What is a realistic timeframe to expect between a content request and publish date?

  • If translation is required, how is it completed? How are translations assigned and approved?

  • How does the content get published? Who does it? Does it have to be formatted in a specific way?

  • Is there a staging environment, or do you just see the final product? Does the staging environment allow for changes or edits?

  Helpful tools

  Some tools that help manage this process include:

  • Editorial calendar: A spreadsheet that captures future topic ideas, and schedules current content for publishing; includes authors, sources, and deadlines. (See “Tool Spotlight” below.)

  • Content requirements checklist: A checklist of preferred content attributes used to determine if existing content or proposed future content is appropriate for your site.

  • Curation/aggregation checklist: A checklist of steps required to select, contract, and publish third-party content.

  • Migration spreadsheet: A spreadsheet that maps content from one channel, property, or process to another.

  Tool spotlight: Editorial calendar

  We’re big fans of editorial calendars, and here’s why: They help keep everyone on task and on the same page, which ultimately saves time, money, and heartache.

  Creating your calendar

  The first step toward a successful editorial calendar is defining why you’re creating it. When you’re defining the purpose for your calendar, be as specific as possible:

  • Improve content quality or relevance.

  • Integrate content across various channels/brands/business units.

  • Fulfill user needs (by profile, lifecycle, or topics of interest).

  • Align content with business goals/campaigns/events.

  • Measure/record content success or value.

  • Keep content creation on a manageable schedule.

  • Allocate resources (human and budgetary) or justify resource needs.

  • Manage all content creation/curation/maintenance activities.

  When identifying purpose, don’t forget to think about:

  • Who is going to use the calendar and why?

  • Are there multiple audiences that require different levels of information?

  • How will it be shared/used?

  • Who is going to maintain the calendar?

  • How often will it be updated/shared?

  • How will you know if the calendar is working?

  Pick and prioritize calendar variables

  Once you know the purpose, you can start choosing what to include on your calendar. There are literally hundreds of content-related variables that could be tracked on an editorial calendar. List all of the variables/data points you think are relevant to your calendar, then rank them in priority order.

  It’s tempting to include every tidbit of information you have, but in this case, less is usually more. Focus your calendar on the top priorities, and consider eliminating the bottom priorities to m
ake your calendar easy to use and maintain.

  For example, let’s say you work for an organization that provides services to elementary school teachers. If you’re creating an editorial calendar for your website, you might consider including the following variables:

  1. Date (e.g., May 14)

  2. Channel (e.g., website, print newsletter, Twitter)

  3. Content element (e.g., home page article, newsletter sidebar, video)

  4. Teacher profiles (e.g., new teacher, kindergarten teacher)

  5. Teachers’ events (e.g., National Teachers Association Convention)

  6. Holidays and seasons (e.g., Christmas, autumn)

  7. Hot topics (e.g., student testing, school security)

  8. Content creator (e.g., web editor, Sue in marketing, third-party provider)

  9. Content workflow step (e.g., schedule interviews, get outline approved, create content)

  10. Budget (e.g., $5,000)

  Depending on your priorities, your calendar will vary. For example, if the purpose of your calendar was to integrate all channels around user hot topics, your calendar might look like this:

  Alternatively, if your calendar was mostly intended to manage resources and budgets, it might look like this:

  Editorial calendars don’t have to be fancy or complicated. Whatever works for you, works.

  Maintaining Content

  Once you deliver content anywhere online—particularly on your website—it’s critically important that you maintain the content over time for accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and audience relevance. In other words, your content needs care and feeding. It won’t take care of itself. Whether you’re updating, archiving, or deleting content, you need a documented process for how maintenance gets done.

  Common tasks

  Often, maintaining content includes the following tasks:

  • Plan

  • Schedule

  • Edit

  • Route

  • Revise

  • Approve (including legal or regulatory)

  • Add metadata

  • Test

  • Publish

  • Retire/delete

  Questions to ask yourself

  While designing this stage of the process, find out:

  • What are the triggers for content review, archiving, or removal?

  • Are there regularly scheduled content updates? How often do they occur?

  • Are there processes in place for on-the-fly updates and changes? When are these possible or acceptable?

  • How are live content errors caught, tracked, and corrected?

  • Who is in charge of performing, approving, and managing updates?

  • What are the steps for publishing changes or edits?

  • Where are source files stored for audio, graphics, video, and Flash-based elements? Who helps maintain these non-text elements?

  • How is content archived or deleted? Manually, or is it an automated process within the CMS?

  • If content is retired, does it need to be kept (for legal or other reasons) for any length of time? If so, where is it stored?

  • What are the SEO implications of deleting or updating pages? Who manages that process?

  Helpful tools

  Some tools that help manage this process include:

  • Content inventory: A spreadsheet to record and track all of your content, including title, author, topic, format, and more. (See Chapter 5, Audit, for examples.)

  • Content maintenance checklist: A list of the criteria used to evaluate and prioritize content for maintenance.

  • Content maintenance log: A CMS report or spreadsheet that provides dates for last update and next scheduled review.

  Evaluating Content

  Web content quality—and, ultimately, your business results and user satisfaction—benefits tremendously from ongoing “health and wellness” checkups: regularly-scheduled evaluations that provide the opportunity to add, improve, fix, or remove content. Checking in on your content consistently will help you see how content performs over time as business and user needs change. It also helps you understand how content activities change due to events like holidays or product launches.

  Try to use a variety of measurement methods. When you use two or more methods, you’ll get more well-rounded results. Some common methods include:

  • Qualitative assessments: Review all of your audit based on specific quality criteria. (See Chapter 5, Audit.)

  • Analytics: Use technology tools to collect data. (See Chapter 6, Analysis.)

  • User research and usability: Ask the users directly what they want, or observe their behavior. (See Chapter 6, Analysis.)

  • External expert review: Ask content experts or industry peers to review/rate content.

  • Internal expert review: Get insights from knowledgeable people inside your organization, such as sales people or customer service reps.

  • Competitive comparison: Measure direct competitors’ content and your content on the same factors and compare. (See Chapter 6, Analysis.)

  • Operational evaluation: Look at the costs (time, money, resources) associated with content creation and maintenance.

  Any evaluation of content is somewhat subjective. Even the data gathered by analytics software needs subjective analysis. The goal of the evaluation is to reduce uncertainty. It provides your team (and your stakeholders) with enough information to make smart decisions about your content.

  Common tasks

  Often, evaluating content includes the following tasks:

  • Define what content will be evaluated

  • Define criteria by which the content will be evaluated

  • Recruit reviewers (internal and external)

  • Design evaluation

  • Conduct evaluation

  • Record results

  • Analyze data

  • Create report

  • Communicate results

  Questions to ask yourself

  While designing this stage of the process, you’ll want to know:

  • What measurement techniques are most appropriate for our organization?

  • Who is involved in the evaluation process?

  • Are there other evaluation activities going on in the organization that you need to be aware of?

  • How often should evaluations happen?

  • Is there a set schedule for evaluations, or are they a reaction to business triggers?

  • How will we track and share our results?

  • Who do we need to share the results with? Do different people need different types of information?

  • How do our results impact the other aspects of the content process (i.e., govern, create, and maintain)?

  Helpful tools

  Some tools that help manage this process include:

  • Qualitative audit spreadsheet and report: Audit findings and data. (See Chapter 5, Audit.)

  • Measurement scorecard: A spreadsheet or similar tool that helps stakeholders understand the results of your measurement findings. (See “Tool Spotlight” below.)

  • Measurement history: An ongoing record of your measurement results (updated after each measurement activity) that provides information about how content performs over time.

  Tool spotlight: Measurement scorecard

  To get a clear picture of your content’s health, you need to compile input from many sources and many different kinds of information. One effective way to do this is with a scorecarding system.

  What is a scorecard?

  A scorecard is a tool that brings together a variety of financial and non-financial metrics in a single, concise report. Score cards let you:

  • Accommodate hundreds of metrics

  • Combine financial results, analytics, user opinions, expert feedback, etc. into one report with quantifiable results

  • Rank metrics by importance

  • Summarize metrics results into clear performance scores that all
members of your team can easily understand

  How does it work?

  To put together a scorecard:

  • Define what you want to measure and why (measurement factors). Measurement factors need to be quantifiable.

  • Identify metrics for each factor. Metrics can be sourced from many places, such as site analytics, expert opinions, or user testing.

  • Assign a target value to each metric. What is the ideal “score” for the metric?

  • Assign a weight to each metric, if desired. Sometimes, it’s necessary to emphasize some metrics when calculating the score.

  • Measure content performance. Record your results in the scorecard.

  • Calculate a score for each factor. Combine the scores for all of the associated metrics to get a total score for the factor.

  • Calculate the total score for all factors.

  Like any measurement tool, scorecards work best when used regularly. Your first scorecard is the “baseline measurement.” After that, each time you use your scorecard, you can see how the scores change and how much progress has been made.

  Here’s an example of what a scorecard might look like:

  Governing Content

  Most of this book has been about creating initial strategies and making sure plans are in place. Once that initial strategy is complete, you can ensure your strategies and plans are actionable and always up to date with governance. Governance will help you create, maintain, and update:

  • Core strategy: The long-term direction of your content. (See Chapter 7, Core.)

  • Authority and ownership policies: The people empowered to make decisions about content and content strategy.