CPU No.2: A visually focused month
The Content Technologist
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and website for content professionals working in the age of algorithms.
BY DEBORAH CARVER –?16 MAR 2023
Content Professionals Update is a newsletter that free subscribers of The Content Technologist receive on the third Thursday of every month.
Paid subscribers receive The Content Technologist in their inbox every Thursday. Want to receive unique insights and proven methodologies from digital content experts that you won't find anywhere else?
Understand your website analytics...even if you were an English major
Our GA4 course redesigned for email delivery!
Web content measurement is challenging—especially if you've made your career as a "words person."
But knowing and understanding your content's performance can help you understand your audience and make your content more successful.
Written and presented by web analytics expert and Content Technologist publisher Deborah Carver, this course aims to demystify web analytics for everyone, whether you've previously learned GA or you're a complete analytics newbie.
The redesigned of Understanding Google Analytics 4 will be delivered via email, so you can learn GA4 in just a few minutes a day, over the course of one month.
Free subscriber FOMO
Here's a rundown of the essays we published for paid members in the past few weeks:
Why content pros should add visual tools to their arsenal
by Vicky Gu
Because "what vision does is find concepts,”?says Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences. “That’s what the brain is doing all day long—trying to understand what we’re looking at.” Given how quickly executives need to digest information to make business-critical decisions, communication methods must evolve to keep up. We’re no longer tied to wordy memos or linear slide decks. We now have more fluid tools that can depict the flow of nonlinear strategy, instantly.
Not every campaign needs a brainstorm of digital Post-It notes, but can you think of at least one this quarter? How might you use the possibilities of the tool to concept more interesting projects? Tell more compelling stories to validate your creative pitches? If all your ideas are straightforward enough that they never outgrow the form they're seeded in (like a doc), then maybe that's a sign to try something new.
Today you’ll learn how to use visual concepting tools across five different strategic use cases:
Or at least you'll try, and maybe fail, but at least you’ll learn how they work best for your needs — whether you're in-house or independently consulting, for B2B or B2C.
Fashioning content strategy for the metaverse
by Jessica Quillin and Bryce Quillin
Like any industry that deprioritizes content, the outcome for fashion was an even bigger mess: content production was passed off to junior staff on siloed teams or managed by external agencies, leading to a cacophonic volume of low-quality content with inconsistent brand messaging across channels.
When the pandemic forced brands across reluctant industries to go digital practically overnight, fashion and luxury brands were faced with a choice: embrace e-commerce or get left behind. Post-pandemic, while some fashion and luxury brands have started to refocus their efforts on rebuilding their physical stores, others adopted a different tack and jumped on the latest tech trend: the metaverse.
But executives quickly realized they had no idea how this trend fit together with other digital tactics, such as e-commerce, social media, and programmatic advertising. And they gradually became more open to conversations about the merits of content strategy to help streamline, centralize, and manage content efforts at scale and to create attenuated, targeted brand messaging across channels.
领英推荐
Whatever competencies fashion and luxury brands lacked during the first wave of the internet era, they are compensating for by being the undeniable first movers in the metaverse. Through this strange, almost illogical move, considering luxury’s initial slow adoption of digital, there are many positive lessons for other industries to learn regarding how to plan and be ready for these future technologies.
Access the full articles and support independent media. The Content Technologist pays its writers and editors fairly for their expertise, adhering to standard consulting rates rather than criminally low freelance writing rates.
Support our writers and editors by upgrading your subscription. You'll get The Content Technologist in your inbox every week, featuring unique content from content professionals you won't find anywhere else.
In case you missed it...
One of the big problems of the internet has always been information hygiene—that is, the way we organize and index our near-infinite supply of data so that we can actually use it. Digital versions of every film in existence or scans of every painting in your museum are no good if they’re not properly categorized.
We have different ways of structuring this data: There are recommender systems (search engines, like Google, that rely on machine learning); keyword matching systems (see Deborah’s piece?here); metadata appended via digital asset management software; the hashtags enterprising social media users voluntarily add to their posts; and databases, like Netflix’s lists of TV shows and movies and their respective?categories.
For tech platforms that allow vast, unregulatable numbers of people to submit information to their databases—think YouTube, Twitter, and Amazon, to name three—this problem has?gotten?much?worse?in the recent past. Both savvy and spammy publishers attempt to optimize (encouraged!) or elbow their way into (risky or illegal!) search results and algorithmic feeds.
Content optimization doesn’t translate in the real world. Nobody from the Picasso estate hangs around the Metropolitan Museum of Art trying to convince curators to categorize Pablo as an impressionist so they can move more branded umbrellas.
Paid content from the archives
Mass-produced iteration vs. collaborative auteurs: The Wahlburgers–First Cow continuum
Depending on the context, Wahlburgers usually refers to either a small chain of hamburger restaurants owned by A-list actor Mark Walhberg's family, or the reality television show about the family's experience running the small chain of hamburger restaurants. A multidisciplinary hodgepodge of cultural engineering, what makes Wahlburgers most notable is its commitment to mid among the spectra of the American family entertainment business: average burgers, generic family business reality TV, and content so mediocre only a satellite TV channel will run it regularly.
While you might rightfully not consider Wahlburgers worth remembering, my phone certainly does. In fact, it knew the word "Wahlburgers" before I could confirm its spelling. By the time I got to the H, my autocorrect filled in the whole word, capital letters and all.
Whoa, I said aloud, channeling?Ted Theodore Logan?or perhaps?Marky Mark playing Dirk Diggler. My phone?knew?Wahlburgers. How did that happen?
Mixology and trust signals: What my server gig taught me about tech marketing
Working at a mixology bar in 2010 was not too far off from selling technology: we were introducing a new concept, based on familiar ideas (it’s a bar with old cocktail recipes), but marketed as new and trending. Every cocktail name became its own buzzword, backed by its own origin story and reputation, comprised of craft liquors, each with a history of its own.
At the cocktail bar, I saw first-hand at a startup how, while reputation and novelty brought people in the door, damn good content both converted them to believers. The drinks were the star of the show, yes, but content was the sales strategy, with every bartender and server fluent in the history and method of every drink we sold. Every season we made flash cards and memorized new recipes. We traded books on the history of rum and knew the differences between jenever and London gin. In our detailed descriptions and nuanced recommendations, we took pride in passing our cocktail acumen to our customers. The amount of cocktail knowledge we gave them would be considered radically transparent; each of them could have gone off to make their own version of their favorite cocktails at home. They’d tell their friends, encouraging them to come visit our bar.
When I work on web content strategies, I encourage clients to put as much detail as possible about their products on their websites, to assume the role that the servers played in helping our customers understand technology. It helps customers understand what the product is, and it helps search engines assign expertise. I’m an advocate toward transparency in process — more detailed content means more opportunities for connection, which ultimately means a bigger market.
Content Pros Update is compiled by Deborah Carver. The Content Technologist is an independent consultancy and resource for content professionals working in the age of algorithms, based in Minneapolis and around the world.