Surviving content shock

Last week I gave a talk about ‘overcoming content shock’ for Techmap’s regular meet up in London. 

It’s something I think about all the time.

How do we stop feeling overwhelmed by demand, stakeholders, data, learning and frustration? 

Knowledge plays a huge role in managing the feeling of being overwhelmed because it helps us:

• Prioritise demand
• Push back on stakeholders 
• See the story behind the data; customers/users/people instead of numbers/statistics
• Collaborate more which means we learn a little about a lot
• Feel empathy with disciplines for smoother projects

Here are the key things I talked about…

1. Shock of the new

I noticed a huge change in content, communications and community around 1995 when I started talking to people in online forums. It was around 2000, when I was a director at a PR agency, when it began to change client work.

We were moving from traditional content distribution (press releases by post) to online content and real-time feedback. The audience’s reactions informed content in a way that we’d never seen before. We’d gone from broadcast to engage.

At the time I was a consultant news editor for the Department of Work and Pensions and the European Social Fund (ESF). They needed to communicate policy changes, share success stories and increase project outcomes (more people in employment) for ESF-funded projects. Broadcasting wasn’t working and they wanted to get two-way feedback going.

We launched an enewsletter and website which had a listening ear symbol at the end of each story with an email address to encourage project managers to email in their questions, stories and feedback. This was answered personally and swiftly by the ESF team. 

It sounds laughable now, but it was the beginning of what we now call ‘engagement’, the ask, listen and change cycle.

2. Client need > user need

We’re facing a content revolution . We’re moving away from writing by committee (hallelujah!), longwinded approvals processes and publish and forget cycles. Instead we’re looking at a content process which is never finished and constantly evolving.

The new cycle - publish > test > feedback > iterate> publish> repeat - is not just for web development. It’s the future of agile content production - the sane way of dealing changing user needs.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is ripping up traditional models of production for its digital services. Their motto is “digital by default” and they believe striving for perfect is futile. Their influence is worldwide and across all sectors. Have a look at their service design manual.

Revolution is painful and messy. Clients are struggling to move from the safe zone of ‘published perfection’ to the risky unknown. It’s our job to educate and convince them to make the leap.

In the last few months, I’ve found this diagram can help when clients want to reuse material or create assumption-based content. It puts user need at the centre of content creation and helps push back client or stakeholder needs.

It’s our job to think like the users, ask the questions they might have and answer them with logical, easy-to-find content which doesn’t need a jargon buster to understand.

3. Knowing me, knowing you

Since 2000, the biggest change we’ve seen is around data. It was expensive to get close to the user 15 years ago. It involved specialist agencies, telephone surveys and mega reports, which clients simply didn’t want to pay for very often, if at all.

I remember creating copy for websites, intranets and CD Roms (*shudder*) without having to analyse data sets.

Now we can get data for free or cheaply and it’s our starting point for content strategy. We want to understand who we’re trying to target, their motivations and how they connect to us.

The downside is we’re drowning in data and we can forget that the numbers and statistics are real people. Personas help us build a story for each user group and they are vital for matching content to the audience segment.

To get closer to users, brands such as Tesco and LUSH, have set up agencies outside of the corporate structure to use data to design better services online.

4. Sowing the seed

Content distribution is also shifting and social media is the new postal service. Yet social media constantly changes the rules and we’re trying to keep up. Organic reach is dead, platforms are flooded with content and it’s harder than ever to get noticed. We need budget to really make the most of these platforms, but clients have yet to ramp up their digital spend adequately.

There’s also a rigid focus on reaching the perfect core audience via social and a fear of wasting spend on non-core. We need to help clients feel confident in casting their social net wide, so they make the most of people’s broad, personal networks.

Think about ALS and the ice bucket challenge. How many of those people were directly following or interested in ALS? Not many. Yet millions of people completed the challenge. Only a small proportion donated to the cause but it illustrates how a non-core audience worked with the core audience to spread the message through critical mass.

Critical mass is making money for entrepreneurs. Social Chain has set up comedy and parody accounts and attracted large followings - around 209 million. They can now get hashtags trending on Twitter just through sheer follower volume and are working with major brands.

This diagram shows how we reach core users through the different channels (nope, I am NOT calling it a funnel). Social is the biggest fishing net, followed by online ads. The next layer is those who’ve opted to hear from us using our databases for email and direct marketing. Key messages blasted out on social/ads/direct marketing are reinforced by earned media, the reviews/endorsements. All this activity gets us up the mountain to our perfect core audience. You can see we’ve had to use non-core to get to them.

5. Sharing personas

The change in content distribution means it’s important to think through why someone would share something.

Sharing involves complex motivation triggers.The image above shows research by the New York Times into the personas of sharing. It shows that the desire to share goes way beyond offers of a prize or money. Increasingly people want to be directly involved with brands. 

In 2012, I was at SNCF and responsible for increasing InterRail ticket sales using a social campaign with a small budget. By getting Facebook fans to design a mystery tour for a journalist, voting on destinations, they were far more engaged in the campaign which was reflected in a sales uplift. 

Advocacy and community play important roles in content strategy. If you ask for help from others to spread your messages, then you have to offer rewards. Giving your most active users a recognisable elevated status, such as a badge or title, is a tried and tested way of rewarding interaction. These are things money can’t buy and have to be earned, which makes them attractive. 

One Direction, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber have amassed enormous communities by rewarding fan content marketing. Today’s official fan forums or apps swap engagement for coins or similar, this earned community status can be exchanged for exclusives. This strategy creates an army of authentic content producers who respond to official content in real-time. It’s powerful when you see it in action and worth far more than any advertising.

6. Collaboration

With data overload and a constantly changing content landscape, it’s important to say goodbye to bad ideas. It’s quite a hard thing to do, as we’re programmed to think our own ideas are good or the best. But you’re the biggest hindrance on a project if you can’t recognise when something isn’t working out.

Working in a multi disciplinary team with a broad range of skills helps you identify bad ideas more quickly than if you work in silo. You need people to challenge your ideas, question your thought processes, improve on your creativity and help you understand when you’re heading down a dead end.

Working closely with other disciplines - design, digital strategy, analysts, UX, project managers - grows knowledge. My entire approach to work in the last year has changed as a result of working with and being challenged by UX superdude, Mike Jongbloet.

Instead of hiding that I am a generalist, I’ve come to understand that there is a huge advantage in being one and having knowledge about a wide range of disciplines. It makes you empathetic, useful and collaborative on projects. 

In fact growing knowledge is the key. Being a lifelong learner, remaining curious, ditching the bad and sharing what you know are the only ways to survive content shock.

The slides

I met some great people at Techmap, including the other speakers, Doug Kessler and Gareth Case. B2B content ace, Doug spoke about the importance of writing about what you know and what’s interesting to users, as well as giving the audience emotion. Gareth introduced the wonder of Turtl - one of the coolest things I’ve seen recently. There’s a great write up here or you can see the slides below. 

Why not check out my other blog post here?